I’m reading Joan Crawford’s autobiography “My Way of Life” and it’s excellent. It was published in 1971 and I’m learning a lot.
Joan Crawford is someone who had a vision and went after it. She didn’t let anything slow her down, and she was always cheerful. She felt that if you are going to be in the world, you should always be at your best. You should always put on a smile. You should always be helpful. You should not gossip.
Here’s Joan:
“With a little organization a woman can excel as wife, homemaker, mother, career woman, and gracious hostess, be lovely to look at and to be with – and still have time left over to be a good friend to a lot of people. And a HAPPY friend. Of course, we all have our problems. But I don’t inflict mine on my friends. At least I try not to.
“How many people call you saying, “Oh, I woke up so tired this morning … I had such a terrible weekend … the day’s awful outside.” Being cheerful on the phone is part of giving. Sure we all have our problems, but why inflict them on our friends? I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the people who call up with a cheery, happy voice – and keep it that way.”
“People with problems seem to find the telephone irresistible. When they’re happy they just don’t think about sharing it with other people.”
Ha. Isn’t she incredible? I love it. How these books drop into my life is a complete mystery to me. It’s like God ships them in from Heaven specifically for me. I mean, what other explanation is possible that I’m reading a 1971 autobiography of Joan Crawford??
It looked interesting on the library shelf. It gave me a chuckle and thrill when I randomly opened a page … and that a good enough reason for me to read a book.
I like this part also:
“I do desperately regret not having had a formal education. I tried to make it at Stephens College in Missouri, but I was completely unprepared, and when midterms exams loomed up I ran away. I knew I wouldn’t be able to answer a single question. In the short time I was there, though, I made one of the dearest and most valuable friends I’ve ever had – the president of the college, Daddy Wood. He understood why I had to leave, but before I left he gave me 3 rules for living that may have helped me more than four years of classics would have done.
They’re very precious to me:
1. Never quit a job until you finish it.
2. The world isn’t interested in your problems. When your problems are the greatest, let your laughter be the merriest.
3. If you can find you can do a job, let it alone, because you’re bigger than the job already, and that means you will shrink down to its size. If the job is impossible, you may never get it accomplished, but you’ll grow in trying to accomplish it.
I love rule #3 the best. If you find you can do a job, let it alone. That’s so great. Go for the big problems that are impossible.
Good advice.
Stretch your mind a little.
“You don’t have to work at being in the high vibration that is natural to you, because it is natural to you. But you do have to stop holding the thoughts that cause you to lower your vibration. It’s a matter of no longer giving your attention to things that don’t allow your cork to float or don’t allow you to vibrate in harmony with who you really are.”
- Abraham-Hicks
I am totally in love with E.B. White. I’m reading “Elements of Style” by William Strunk and E.B. White. I’m also reading “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser. These were college books of mine, that I totally forgot about. They are classics, not only about writing … but life in general.
This is E.B. White.
William Zinsser is amazing.
He writes:
On Simplicity:
“Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous thrills and meaningless jargon. The answer to clear writing is a clear head. The answer is to clear our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear writing: one can’t exist without the other. It is impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English.”
On Style:
“First, then, learn to hammer in the nails, and if what you build is sturdy and serviceable, take satisfaction in its plain strength.”
“But you will be impatient to find a “style” – to embellish the plain words so that readers will recognize you as someone special. You will reach for gaudy similes and tinseled adjectives, as if “style” were something you could buy at a style store and drape onto your words in bright decorator colors. Resist this shopping expedition: there is no style store.
“Style is organic to the person doing the writing, as much a part of him as his hair, or, if he is bald, his lack of it. Trying to add style is like adding a toupee. At first glance the formerly bald man looks young and even handsome. But at second glance – and with a toupee there is always a second glance – he doesn’t look quite right. The problem is not that he doesn’t look well groomed; he does, and we can only admire the wigmaker’s almost perfect skill. The point is that he doesn’t look like himself.
“This is the problem of the writer who sets out deliberately to garnish his prose. You lose whatever it is that makes you unique. The reader will usually notice if you are putting on airs. He wants the person who is talking to him to sound genuine. Therefore a fundamental rule is: be yourself.”
“No rule, however, is harder to follow. It requires the writer to do two things which by his metabolism are impossible. He must relax and he must have confidence.
“Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for possible hernia, and, as for confidence, he is a bundle of anxieties.
“What can be done to put the writer out of these miseries? Unfortunately, no cure has yet been found. I can only offer the consoling thought that you are not alone. Some days will go better than others; some will go so badly that you will despair of ever writing again. We have all had many of these days and will have many more.”
Isn’t this great? I love this book. So simple: just be yourself.
There is another nice section in this book that says you actually need to HEAR the sentences, because they are not words on a page but sounds. You hear a sentence, and that’s how you write. I do this constantly. I hear myself talking to myself, and my fingers simply transcribe the conversation. It’s not channeling, but it’s me listening to myself talking to myself and writing down what’s being said.
On The Audience:
“Soon after you confront this matter of preserving your identity (in recognizing your style), another question will occur to you: “Who am I writing for?”
“It’s a fundamental question and it has a fundamental answer: you are writing for yourself. Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience – every reader is a different person. Don’t try to guess what sort of things editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they’re always looking for something new.”
“Don’t worry about whether the reader will “get it” if you indulge a sudden impulse for humor or nonsense. If it amuses you in the act of writing, put it in. You are writing primarily to entertain yourself, and if you go about it with confidence you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for.”
That’s William Zinsser. On Writing Well.
It’s exactly why I find this blog to be such a joy – i write to amuse myself.
It’s all for me.
I find that most people do not do well with “This is the first and last day” kind of teaching. It gives them the liberty to be careless. It makes them eat whatever they want, do whatever they want, say whatever they want … but without commitment or dedication. It doesn’t really give them time to think about what they really want.
It produces a kind of “fuck it” mentality.
The fact is TODAY IS ALL YOU HAVE.
The fact is THIS MOMENT IS ALL THERE IS.
But, no matter.
Let’s get practical and have some fun.
Let’s go deep into the core of your thought system.
What if you had six months to live?
Try to have fun with this exercise. Don’t think about lack of money or your job, and don’t make excuses like you’ve used up all your vacation time. Just go for it. Have fun.
If you had six months to live, what would you do?
Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you what I’d do.
I like my horoscope today because it goes along with something I was saying yesterday:”Your thinking takes a philosophical turn today and you may decide that it’s time to re-evaluate your goals or ambitions for the next few years. It’s all positive, so face it with an open heart.”
I was teaching A Course in Miracles on Paltalk yesterday, and I asked everyone listening to go get a sheet of paper and a pen.
I asked them to date the sheet of paper – so if you are doing this now, go get a sheet of paper and date it November 12, 2007 – and I asked them to write down:
TODAY IS A NEW BEGINNING
SETTING THE GOAL
I asked everyone to take some time during the day to write down 5 things you wish for, desire, want to be. 5 Things you want to have, be or do.
You don’t want to get to the end of your life and find there are regrets. You want to become fully alive, and to GO FOR IT. Stop waiting for the time to be right, or for circumstances to improve, or to settle for what is thrown to you like scraps to a dog.
The point of this exercise is to move you into action, from being a spectator to being an active participant in your own transformation.
You need to know where you are going, in order to get there. You need a map. You need to set the goal. You need to know what direction you are heading, otherwise you will just float along aimlessly waiting for a “miracle” to happen to you. But what “miracle” could happen to you, if you don’t even know what you want????
WHAT DO YOU WANT?
Many people, once they find a spiritual path, get a little lazy in the concepts. They think they are “above” doing things now because they are “holy.” They spend their time meditating, or listening to other spiritual teachers, or teaching their spiritual ideas. Their whole life is suddenly about helping other people “wake up.”
I am laughing how everyone has a blog nowadays, and how everyone is a self-help teacher, and believe me … it does not escape my attention that I have written a book that falls into this category … along with a blog, a clip on youtube, and my own MySpace.
haha.
I cannot believe how many spiritual teachers are out there now, all with advice on how you can improve your life.
It is a little overwhelming to see the sheer number of bloggers. I think it’s also funny see how much time they spend on DESIGN and APPEARANCE, but there is NO real content. We used to make our bodies look good to make people like us – pretty packaging with nothing inside – and now we make our blogs look good to make people like us, but there is nothing inside. No real content.
Also annoying is the overload on links. In order to be a successful blog nowadays you need tons of links. You need tons of friends. You scratch their back and they will scratch yours. Blah. So I click on links on beautifully designed blogs, which lead me to other BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED blogs with tons of links, but again … with very little interesting content. So I click on the links on that blog … HOPING TO FIND SOMETHING WITH A LITTLE SUBSTANCE … and I could spend all day long clicking on links.
It’s gotten a little ridiculous.
I’ve realized the best place for real substance is in my own mind. If I want fresh content or to read something interesting, I realize I have to write it myself.
(or I e-mail my friend Evan, who is pure inspiration and his writing flies off the charts – 5 STARS – but he doesn’t have a blog, so I have to e-mail him direct to read his stuff).
I don’t care about how to make this a more succesful blog. When I see “delicious” or “digg-it” on a site, I know the site was thrown together to draw traffic, and not necessarily because there is a “GREAT NEED” to write.
I need to write.
If I wasn’t here on this blog on the computer, I’d be sitting over there on the couch with my pen and journal. I need to write, like an athlete needs to move his muscles. I really don’t care how many people show up here. I don’t want advertisers. I don’t want links I don’t care about.
I don’t care about being successful.
I simply want to be an inspiration – to myself and to you who is reading this.
In Field of Dreams, there is a great line “if you build it, they will come.”
It was a baseball field!!! not something fancy. Not something based on what was hip and cool. Not the latest fad. Not some big technological advanced spectacular thing that the world had never seen.
It was a baseball field out in the middle of nowhere.
And if you have seen the movie (you should!), you realize he built it thinking it was for other people to come, but in the end it was only for him.
He built a baseball field, because HE needed to build it, because the spirit was moving him to do it. He didn’t really have a choice in the matter.
He wasn’t thinking how to be successful. He was simply out there building a damn baseball field like Noah building an ark.
Do you see?
That’s the value of the sheet of paper and pen today. You stop being spiritual. You look squarely at what desires, wishes and needs you have in your own mind. Be honest. You can say “oh, I am above wanting things in the world” and “there is no world” … but I am finding there is a whole lot more energy in CREATION. Of actually allowing your mind to be totally present.
There is no energy in trying to be ethereal.
So, today is the new beginning. Draw yourself a map. Have fun with this list. It’s okay to write things like “I want the peace of God” and “I want to be happy” but also put some worldly things on that list too. Okay? Shoot for the stars. If you want to write a book, or travel to Europe, or live in a big house, or win an Academy Award … just put that down there, okay?
The other reason you need to re-evaluate your goals is because everything is changing all the time. The last time you wrote down a list of things you want … that was a totally different time. You have changed. Your priorities have changed. Most likely you have accomplished some of your prior goals.
So today, we are erasing all our old ideas. Coming squarely into the present moment. Forgetting all of our failures. Forgetting all of our mistakes, and we are letting ourselves SHOOT FOR THE STARS.
Have fun.
ps: my list is gooooooood. I put it off till last night, but it’s really good. It’s got me all excited and fired up.
