Living The Best Life

By: Maralene Strom
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:41:47
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The more I live the more I realize how much our society seems to revolve around what we can accumulate. Our media is full of rapid-fire commercials, sound bytes, and infomercials that urge us to get, to buy, to see, and to get better at accumulating more.

Now I’m not against marketing, since professionally I do marketing for others. However, the way our lives are impacted by the barrage of inducements to accumulate often leaves us with a sense that life is meant to be lived to gain. It leaves one with the feeling that to live the best life is by accumulating more things.

This morning I was viewing New Morning on the Hallmark station. One segment focused on a woman who does folk art. Two events motivated her towards engaging in this gift of talent she had not used before.

First, her mother had died. The emptiness was fierce in her heart. One day she walked into a store and, almost as if guided wandered into the crafts and sewing department. There she saw the embroidery section, which reminded her of her mother’s love of the craft.

She listened to a faint calling buried deep in her heart, and began her own craft of folk art with lace, paint, and embroidery creating pictures on cloth that tell the stories of African American history. Stories passed down by generations in her own family. Her own mother’s silhouette is often the faces of her stories.

Then 9-11 exploded on the scene. Her husband was on the 47th floor of one of the towers. He came home that night exhausted, and with the heartbreaking news that their 30-year-old son, who was a minister, had perished that day. His mother’s heart ripped from her soul.

The remarkable ending of this story, was she found her vocation and her heart widening arising from the ashes of her grief. She had a dream to live in the country and her dream came true as her husband, and she found a 23-acre farm in an Amish community.

Here she expanded her folk art selling them from a small white building on their property. She gives 90% of her proceeds towards a scholarship set up in the name of her son and to charity. Her son’s prayer for her was that she would discover a “creative miracle.” She has. She said, “It’s not about what you get—It’s about what you give, you get back.”

How often have the dreams to do something special with a talent given by the Creator been buried thinking some day we’ll have the time to paint, or create a business, write a book, or learn to play an instrument.

Debbie Ford, a bestselling author, has a simple book out called “The Best Year of Your Life, Dream It. Plan It. Live It”. The message is simple. Start living your life each day with an intention that it will be the best day of your life.

She observes that living the best day, which accumulates into the best year, is taking an inventory of your life and discovering whether you are doing what you really have the desire to do. Or, are you laying your talents and meaningful desires aside.

However, laying aside our talents until we have time may never come. There are steps we can take to begin to build that dream. The returns you cannot even imagine.

The first step is to begin. Start with gratitude for this day. Lay the plan. Learn. Create. To build upon each step and it will move toward the mission in our life.

I often think about my grandmother. She went to college, in her mid-fifties to become a second-grade teacher during the late 1950’s when only the young were on college campuses. She was living her dream to teach and nothing stopped her.

Ford’s companion book, “The Right Questions”, says that often we fail to ask the right questions to receiving what we really want out of life. Consider one of the key questions to live your best life, “Will this choice propel me towards an inspiring future or will it keep me stuck in the past.”

This question addresses whether you are doing what others expected of you, or are you listening to the force within your heart. Happiness in our life does not come from outside of ourselves rather it comes from within.

Think about this wisdom from Tecumseh, Shawnee warrior and statesmen:

“So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.

Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours.

Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.

Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people.

Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.

Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place.

Show respect to all people and grovel to none.

When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living.

If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself.

Abuse no one and nothing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.

When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.

Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.”

Live your best life this year each day. Life is short. We have numbered days. Dig the talents buried to expose and grow them. Contribute your best to those around you and yourself. We only have this one lifetime to live our best life.

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