A few years ago website building was all about flash and glitter and so on. (Though I have to say, I never subscribed much to the glitter. It was always annoying as heck.) Nowadays with the influx of smart phones and tablet computers, it’s about going back to the clean and sleek.
So I am sticking with clean and sleek here. I kind of like this new theme; it’s clean but has a subtle design behind it. I liked my previous all-white one, too. Poolie, I know you visit via iPhone – is this version still legible for you, or is the all-white the only way to go? Anyone else arriving by tablet or phone, I’d like to hear from you too!
I started putting words to paper last night again. There is a great deal of new-agey stuff out there that promises you the moon, without benefit of the space suit or astronaut training. “Ask and you shall receive” is all well and good, even Biblical. Trouble is that so many gurus skip the part about times when the answer is, “No.” There are plenty of those times, simply because what we ask is not the right thing for us, or perhaps the right thing at the wrong time.
My entry into the foray is tentatively titled Need vs. Greed. I suspect that will be a chapter instead of the whole book. The fulfillment of your dreams is a bit different from your average vending machine. It’s not like we put prayers and intentions like coins into a slot, push a button and out pops a tiara and the keys to the castle.
I did get a tiara once (thank you, Miss Hiss!) and it was a lovely, sweet surprise. I still have it, tucked away into a velvet-lined drawer. It comes out when my granddaughter is here to enjoy its sparkle.
The castle wasn’t included, nor expected, nor needed.
And therein lies the biggest problem with a lot of the wish-fulfillment crap to hit the bookshelves: there is no line drawn between want and need.
Unless you are a professional photographer, you don’t need a $35K camera. You don’t need a mansion in Beverly Hills, nor the bazillion-dollar lottery jackpot you so desperately want. You don’t need $140-a-square-foot Brazilian hardwood flooring with diamond pavé counter tops. That’s not to say you can never have them, it merely means you don’t need them, which is something altogether different.
We need a roof over our collective heads, food and clothing, and the basic utilities – water, electricity, phone and Internet. I include phone and Internet because in our current world climate those are no longer optional. That’s doubly true if I am to work from home, which in my life is gradually slipping over the line from “want” to “need”. I might be able to get around it if I can score a motorized wheelchair. Even that may turn out to be a stopgap measure. If I am meant to continue working away from home, I will need that motorized chair, because the cane and walker are gradually becoming insufficient.
I don’t need a big-screen TV. Ironically, I have one, a 60-inch HDTV sitting on my son’s bedroom floor because nobody has a vehicle big enough to transport it. I didn’t buy it; it was given to me and yes, it works. It would be nice to have it here and watch it. The vehicle to transport it isn’t a true need, though, because the TV itself falls under the category of luxury, rather than necessity.
Go ahead and ask for the moon; asking isn’t a sin. Not only that, but you just might get it, albeit in a slightly different form than you ask. I have asked more than once to win the lottery, and guess what? I won $2 here and there, $5 a couple of times and once I even won $40 on one ticket. The Universe heard and answered in the affirmative. I got what I asked for, a winning lottery ticket. It just didn’t happen a ticket that was worth a few cool million.
The flipside of that is asking the Universe to help you fulfill the destiny it handed you in the first place. For that you have an obligation. Sometimes it’s as simple as asking for the capacity to believe in yourself. From my perspective, it’s vastly simpler to believe in an all-powerful being than it is to believe I possess the ability to steer my own destiny. Maybe it’s time to stop blaming God/Goddess/the Universe and start taking the reins to my own life, ya think?