Cissa Fleming

Looking for a quote

A friend  sent me an email asking me to help her to find something very peculiar: she wanted a quote with a “powerful message of hope, love, inspiration, and prosperity.”

Wow! I confess the first quote that came to my mind was “Jesus Saves.” But I knew it was not exactly what she was looking for…

Internet knows everything, is that right? The first website that resulted from the google search said  ”What a powerful artist. … His message of hope and being the miracle we all want in our lives is … talents to impart a message of hope, love, inspiration, and joy to others. … ”

It was an article about Michael Jackson in a website from a Spiritual and Personal Development Community. Actually, very interesting website, I  bookmarked it!

Well, when we have a challenging  jigsaw-puzzle the first thing we do is to split all the pieces in smaller groups – based on the picture details, or colors, or shapes, or any other similarities.) Actually this method applies to every complex problem: divide and conquer is very used in computer science.  The idea is break down the complex problem into smaller, solvable little problems. 

Bellow are some of the quotes I found in my research:

• “Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.”    –Roger Miller
• “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.” — Helen Keller
• “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”  – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.”  – Woody Allen
• “Dance like nobody’s watching; love like you’ve never been hurt. Sing like nobody’s listening; live like it’s heaven on earth” –  Mark Twain  (!!!)
• “If we all did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves.”  – Thomas Edison 
• “The purpose of our lives is to be happy.” — Dalai Lama
• “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, either way you are right” — Henry Ford
• “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” -- Elmer Letterman 
• “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”  – Antoine de Saint-Exupery 
• “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience. ” — Rajph Waldo Emerson 
• “Every wall is a door.”  – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” — Winston Churchill
• “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.” – Winston Churchill
• “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” — Helen Keller
• “Knowledge is love and light and vision.” – Helen Keller

For more quotes, see  Stephen’s Quotations Database

It makes me smile…

I believe that everybody should have a list of memories that make themselves smile. It can be a person, a situation, a picture, a thought, an incident, a pet, a drink, a place, a taste, a music, a smell, …. anything! 

Then, when you are feeling blue, give a look at your list. It is a fantastic therapy! 

Here are some items of my list, starting with what the pictures I used on this website menu are showing:  

• watch the skyline of Atlanta, 
• learn new things in books and collections, 
• have lunch with friends, 
• laugh with that  3 wonderful ladies, 
• play with our cats, 
• watch the weird DragonCon parade, 
• visit Rio de Janeiro.

And also:

• feel all the love I have for my husband,
• admire the beauty of  the flowers in the Spring and the leaves in the Fall,
• watch old Monty Python movies,
• remember Elton John, Billy Joel, Carol King, Phil Collins, Tom Jobim, Paul McCartney, Caetano Veloso, and other great concerts I had seen,
• remember our wedding party, and how people were there,
• concerts at Chastain Park,
• dinners with my girlfriends,
• eat chocolate cake in the car, parked in a driveway, in a rainy day,
• feel the sun,
• see dogs fetching/swimming/running in the park,
• “hunting” covered bridges/water falls/halloween decorations,
• Cirque du Soleil presentations;
• enjoy the applications on my iPhone,
• eat popcorn while watching the summer rain from the porch,
• take a nap in a hammock,
• sail,
• be hugged by my husband,
• watch the cats play with each other,
• eat brownie with hot chocolate melted over vanilla ice cream and decorated with nuts and a cherry on maraschino…

hummm…. good idea!  

I am grateful to my mother-in-law…

… for my husband, that she brought to the world and raised with love and intelligence, giving him the support to be the great man that he is; 

… for the good times (and food!) we had together in the Mondays Family & Friends dinners at  her house;

… for Princess, that was originally her cat;

… for the Good HouseKeeping magazines that she subscribed;

… for all the trips and events that we shared together;

… for the fantastic woman, mother, and friend that she had always been. 

I miss her.  

Life

“Life lives, life dies. Life laughs, life cries. Life gives up and life tries.
But life looks different through everyone’s eyes.”

Cute! But one of my favorite quotes about life is from Henry Ford, that said:

“Life is a series of experiences, each of which makes us bigger, even though it is hard to realize this.“

And I would like to complement it with “every experience has a end”. Happily!
(Or unhappily, considering what we call “good experiences.”)

But all experiences end. The trick is: how can we get the time pass quickly during the ones we are not enjoying, and have the most fun possible for the ones we are?

It reminds me of that joke about Albert Einstein’s relativity theory. What does it seem to a guy if he has an old lady sitting in his lap for one minute,  compared with a beautiful girl sitting in his lap for an hour?  In the first case one minute seems like an hour, in the second case one hour seems like a minute…

I believe there is always at least one aspect in our lives that is doing well; I try to focus on it, and get some energy from enjoying it. If it is hard to find it, I ask a friend to point it to me. People not involved in the drama can see the whole picture much better! 

Of course I am writing this to myself, for those times that I am “down”. I use some texts like this to remind myself, as I also use some pictures. One of them is this one I am using on my website header for the subject Life. We all had several minutes of laughing and fun with that unexpected scenario: three toilets aligned in the driveway of a house.  When the owner of the house heard us (and joined us for the pictures and good times), she explained that the house was under remodeling, and the three toilets were waiting for the trash company.  

Were the ladies worried about “what people would say?”  No. They just enjoyed the moment. They forgot about the arthritis and bad vision and high blood pressure and their late husbands and just enjoyed themselves, enjoyed life.  

Life is beautiful!

Smart woman!

This happened to my mother-in-law, nearly forty years ago. When she and her two kids came back to the car, she realized that she had locked the keys inside the car.

Well, she looked for a pay phone, called her husband at his office one hour away, and after he complained, he agreed to meet her with the spare keys.

Ten minutes after the phone call, she realized the passenger door was unlocked. But her husband was already on his way… there was no way to contact him (remember, that’s was a time where cell phones did not exist yet!).

She had no hesitation: she immediately locked the passenger door and threatened the kids to never talk about it to anybody, especially their father!

I am not sure how many years later she told him the truth… but I am sure both of them laughed a lot!

Sad because you lost something?

Every time I feel sad because I missed (or lost!) something, I remember what happened to a friend of mine.

They were driving from Atlanta to Orlando on vacation, in a big rental van: mother, husband, kids, nephews.

They stopped at a small gas station in “the middle of nowhere” for gas and bathroom break.
When she was helping her 2 years old daughter to xxxx, the car keys, that were in her shirt pocket, felt on the toilet. The toilet had automatic flushing system…

Yes, my friend lost the rental van keys in a toilet, 3 hours away from any other rental place office, with 4 kids, an old lady, and a hysterical husband screaming at her. And everything, including her purse, was locked inside the van.

When we put it in perspective, why were we sad?

Magazines

 
One of the innumerable great things that I learned with a friend of mine was how to get rid of old magazines without the feeling that you are missing good articles.

She told me “rip off the pages with the articles/information you consider important, and trash the rest of the magazine!”.,

Simple idea, as all great ideas! Brilliant!  

The issue now is to have pages and pages of old magazines that need to be organized…  

My idea is to keep in my blog these articles/information I enjoy reading on magazines. At least it will be easier to search/find them!!

Recombobulation

The first time I heard this word was about the  ”recombobulation area” at the international airport in Milwaukee. The idea is simple: have some chairs where people can wear back their shoes, pack their laptops, and get together to keep their trips after pass the security x-ray. 

Now the word is on the urban dictionary:

“1. To put something back the way it was, or into proper working order 
2. To gather one’s thoughts or composure”

or “The need to breathe for a second after becoming discombobulated; the act of self-gathering after a moment of discombobulation. (Note–One can not recombobulate without first being discombobulated.)”

We could schedule a recombobulation time every day, just to sit down, have a deep breath, remember who we are and where we are going, feel reenergized, and then go on…  Also known as “meditation”!  :-)