Mom showed me the words I should live by

Battle Creek Enquirer - January 4, 2014

For my 33rd birthday in 1986 I gave my mother, then 70, a blank journal and asked if she would give me the gift of putting on paper, the words of wisdom that guided her life. They could be her original thoughts or the writings of others that had inspired her. The source was not as important as the content.

It was only a year before her death in December 2009 that she gave the journal back to me, along with others she had kept over many years. Her journals were not places in which she vented frustrations or documented perceived shortcomings in herself and others, but where she recorded the events of each day that had made it worth living. As her health declined in her late 80s, however, she wrote more often of not wishing to be a burden to her family. The difficulties that a failing body presented were a burden, but Mom herself was not. There is a distinct difference.

Many of us set New Year’s Resolutions, most of which sooner or later fall by the wayside. Such was not the case for Mom. As 2014 begins, I am especially drawn to words she had carefully copied on three tiny sheets of notepaper and tucked inside the journal I had given her. Titled, “Resolutions,” the words came from the late Lloyd Shearer, a columnist for Parade Magazine for 33 years.

Resolutions

• No one will ever get out of this world alive. Resolve therefore to maintain a reasonable sense of values.
• Take care of yourself. Good health is everyone’s major source of wealth. Without it, happiness is almost impossible. • Resolve to be cheerful and helpful. People will repay you in kind.
• Avoid angry, abusive persons. They are generally vengeful. • Avoid zealots. They are generally humorless.
• Resolve to listen more and talk less. No one ever learns anything by talking. • Be wary of giving advice. Wise men don’t need it and fools won’t need it.
• Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the wrong. Some time in time you will have been all of these. (variously attributed to other writers)
• Do not equate money with success. There are many successful money-makers who are miserable failures as human beings. What counts most about success is how a person achieves it.

As I think about my mother and her life, it gives me encouragement and reassurance to know that she did her best to live by these resolutions and by many other words of wisdom. Actions truly do speak louder, much louder, than words.

With 2014 unfolding, I am concerned about what lies ahead for our global community, nation, individual communities, neighborhoods, and for me, the smallest factor, yet still part of the equation. With that thought in mind, there is one more entry from Mom’s journal that we would all do well to commit to action. It is an excerpt from the 1913 poem, “Myself,” by Edgar A. Guest.

I have to live with myself and so,
I want to be fit for myself to know.
I want to be able as the days go by.
Always to look myself straight in the eye.
I don’t want to stand with setting sun,
And hate myself for the things I’ve done.
I can never hide myself from me
I see what others may never see.
I know what others may never know.
I can never fool myself and so…
Whatever happens I want to be
Self respecting and conscience free.

Thank you Lloyd Shearer. Thank you Edgar Guest. And most of all, thank you Mom

Jan Corey Arnett©2014