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| Marion McDaniel Lodge No. 56 Tuscon, Arizona |
"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes to us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday."
~John Wayne
"I hold it within my power to do things differently today than I did yesterday."
~Benjamin Franklin
"You create your own universe as you go along."
~Winston Churchill
The great promise of the New Year is this idea that each year we have an opportunity to start over again, with a clean slate, and do things differently than we did in the year previous. But what we often miss is the idea that we have that same opportunity each day. That we hold it within our power each moment to begin to build our own world the way we want it to be, and that there are no limitations to what we might do.
But New Year's Eve seems to be the only day when most people even consider the idea that they have that power within them. That in the stream of life, we can either choose to paddle our own canoe and pick our own direction, or be content to drift in the current. That is isn't the fickle finger of fate that determines the course of your life--that we make our own luck, and we pick our own path. But it is a lesson that is soon lost until the next December 31st, because it's so much easier to drift, than to paddle. So much easier to make excuses for an unfulfilled life than accept the fact that we are where we are in life because of the choices we've made along the way, and if we truly want change, all we have to do is make different choices. And next thing you know, we're looking at that blank slate before us again, so full of promise and potential, and so little changed from the previous year.
Ask yourself this question as you look at beginning the new year--are you going to drift this year, or are you going to paddle?
~TEC
Todd, unfortunately, that quotation from Churchill is taken out of context. Here's the original, from My Early Life:
ReplyDelete"Some of my cousins who had the great advantage of University education used to tease me with arguments to prove that nothing has any existence except what we think of it. The whole creation is but a dream; all phenomena are imaginary. You create your own universe as you go along. The stronger your imagination, the more variegated your universe. When you leave off dreaming, the universe ceases to exist. These amusing mental acrobatics are all right to play with. They are perfectly harmless and perfectly useless. I warn my younger readers only to treat them as a game. The metaphysicians will have the last word and defy you to disprove their absurd propositions."
Thanks for the correction.
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