Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
- Theodore Roosevelt
- Theodore Roosevelt
I was speaking with someone about their child today who is quite bright, but the child has absolutely no ambition in life.
The child was offered a 15 dollar per hour job and was not interested, any more than making excuses in why they couldn't or wouldn't be interested in such a job.
In frustration, the parent was telling the story to a neighbor who said, "Yeah my daughter is the same way, she just does not have any interest in amounting to anything."
I have always had an admiration for Theodore Roosevelt's "strenuous life", because like Mr. Roosevelt I suffered from life threatening illness but kept putting one foot forward and not giving up.
I remember my Grandmother being so ill she was crawling on the floor, but she never went to a doctor in those very long ago years, but she just kept on working because one had to survive or just die. She survived as an ornery old woman, but like all of my people not one of them ever gave up, and, even in times that I heard death's door open, by faith I lived because there was no other alternative as I have a God given mission to accomplish for His glory.
I do not want to make this sound like I looked forward to hard physical labor. I like all children, well children who actually have a life, and not the couch kittens now who play video games all night and smoke dope, suffered a great deal from child labor. As I type this God is healing a very sore nerve damage in various places in my spine due to old work habits as a child in lifting 100 pounds per hand, trudging through knee deep snow, and as the body never forgets, my current projects of setting wooden posts in the ground has my back screaming to wake me up at night.
The cure is to ignore it and work the pain out the next day as I refuse medications that will affect my body elsewhere and I will be healed in God eventually.
There is a great deal of joy in Roosevelts strenuous life as when one accomplishes something, it is the most satisfying thing in the world that this world offers. To work hard, to enjoy the money or more ease of life from that work, is a wonderful thing. Digging holes, setting posts, tamping them in solid, building straight fences are satisfying endeavors, as much as baking ones own bread, making ones own cheese, growing ones own potatoes in straight rows, building ones own sheds without cutting ones fingers off, welding straight beads that hold in metal, fixing engines, making motors run.........there are so many things from wiring circuits to blading a road which exhaust the heart but stirs the soul to an independence that "all I need is God, because I know how to do all".
I remember an old stand mixer I picked up which was not cooperating in working. I tracked down a set of beaters from a collector in California, and then took the mixer to the shop which cost me 10 dollars to tell me it couldn't be fixed by the ditz running the shop.
In my typical mode, I got pissed off, opened the mixer up and fixed the thing and it works to this day.
I do not take "NO" for an answer in anything unless I want "NO" to be the answer. I have found most people are weak and vassilate to one's superior will (as long as one knows what they are talking about). I remember an internet project from the early days of the net in which I had company after company and person after person tell me NO NO NO.
I kept on until I spoke with Prodigy who told me yes that what I was developing could be done.
If you believe in something in life, go with your heart and do it. Certainly, one has to keep their common sense about them in judging at some point in the trying is actually not ever going to work.........so it is then time to cut and take the best situation out of it, but unless one ventures anything you are not going to be Columbus discovering America.
One of the greatest disappointments in my early years was everything I was doing had nothing accomplished in the fields. I had to design an entire line of backpacking equipment from alcohol stoves to shelters, because nothing fit my needs. It was a wonderful adventure in the dynamics of the things I learned in discovering so many principles of physics that if I had just sat like most people when told "NO", I would not possess the knowledge.
There is something immensely eye opening to be designing a little aluminum soda can stove running on alcohol, but by God's accident (I have allot of God inspired accidents where inventions come along from other ideas.) I happened to design a little stand for the pans to sit on.
I still smile at seeing my little stove turn into literally an afterburner before my eyes with pure blue flames eating oxygen in perfect combustion, changing a small fuel source fire into an inferno as large as a chef's stove.
Sort of like those huge old 454 Oldsmobiles with 4 barrel carberators cruising down American interstates at 90 miles per hour in the 70's and getting 27 miles per gallon. Gee, that is better gas mileage than numbers of quality Obama cars get now with all their computers.
See if people tap into the memories of those who know those things, they do not fall prey to the nonsense of little Obama coups being the answer.
That is what power looks like and is.
It saddens me in this world of today that so many older Americans just give up on retirement and just stagnate as much as these children do these days. Others think that working in some job is their daily life and nothing else matters as that is all they can be.
People don't have to be weak like Barack Obama and be in the White House to "be someone". People can just be who they are in God's unique creation and go out and experience life as one huge adventure.
If you listen to pain in your body to keep you from doing things, then you are not enjoying the pain for all of it's meaning in numbers of times how good it feels really to actually being in pain........as you are actually feeling something in life instead of feeling nothing like most children and adults do.
One of the greatest gifts Jackie Kennedy gave her son John was sending him out to ranch for a tour where he had to be around real men, real hardship, real painful work and away from the Teddy whoredoms. Sure John John never quit unzipping his zipper, but he was a class act for the things he did try in seeing Rush Limbaugh as a force to be with instead of deal with.
There is just a loveliness in the rural areas of manure, thumping one's finger with a hammer, getting kicked, learning that you are not in control...........that the weather is in control, that you have to set your clock to animals with minds not of their own and that things actually live and die........and the world does not stop, because nothing stops in life.
I would have all people enjoy the discovery of who they are and to do things that interest them, even if they fail. God is perfect, but His world is one perfect imperfection that in random chaos starts blending into order.
I would that people would live the life God gave them to the fullest, not in self indulgence, but indulging themselves to be greater Spiritual beings in finding things that delight them.
My brother and I often enough discuss the worst of times in our past which were many. We always end up laughing and conclude, "You know if we hadn't been forced into that screwed up stituation and had to find a way out..........it just wouldn't have been any fun at all".
While I do not condone breaking the law, I will close with a story of a Montanan I heard of a number of years ago.
They were hunting in the Bob and he had an elk license. So he was climbing through some devil's club and happened upon a moose, which he promptly shot, climbed out of that hole from hell and announced his accomplishment to his hunting companions.
They looked at him, chewed his butt up oneside and down the other.
He just grinned at them and said, "I wouldn't have done it if it would have been easy".
Yes, he shot that moose for the pure reason it was going to be a hell of a job packing it out along with the danger of being caught. It that moose was along the road, he never would have looked at it.
It was the pain, it was the suffering, it was the misery, which would bring days of aches, but each night sweet sleep in accomplishing something with friends he could trust which was his appeal.
That guy is most likely 6 foot under now, but how much he could have taught people now about life if people knew what life was really all about.
As my favorite mind once said, "The living is what is hard. It's the dying which is easy".
People should stop dying easy and start living hard, because that is where the living is in the hardships.
agtG
The child was offered a 15 dollar per hour job and was not interested, any more than making excuses in why they couldn't or wouldn't be interested in such a job.
In frustration, the parent was telling the story to a neighbor who said, "Yeah my daughter is the same way, she just does not have any interest in amounting to anything."
I have always had an admiration for Theodore Roosevelt's "strenuous life", because like Mr. Roosevelt I suffered from life threatening illness but kept putting one foot forward and not giving up.
I remember my Grandmother being so ill she was crawling on the floor, but she never went to a doctor in those very long ago years, but she just kept on working because one had to survive or just die. She survived as an ornery old woman, but like all of my people not one of them ever gave up, and, even in times that I heard death's door open, by faith I lived because there was no other alternative as I have a God given mission to accomplish for His glory.
I do not want to make this sound like I looked forward to hard physical labor. I like all children, well children who actually have a life, and not the couch kittens now who play video games all night and smoke dope, suffered a great deal from child labor. As I type this God is healing a very sore nerve damage in various places in my spine due to old work habits as a child in lifting 100 pounds per hand, trudging through knee deep snow, and as the body never forgets, my current projects of setting wooden posts in the ground has my back screaming to wake me up at night.
The cure is to ignore it and work the pain out the next day as I refuse medications that will affect my body elsewhere and I will be healed in God eventually.
There is a great deal of joy in Roosevelts strenuous life as when one accomplishes something, it is the most satisfying thing in the world that this world offers. To work hard, to enjoy the money or more ease of life from that work, is a wonderful thing. Digging holes, setting posts, tamping them in solid, building straight fences are satisfying endeavors, as much as baking ones own bread, making ones own cheese, growing ones own potatoes in straight rows, building ones own sheds without cutting ones fingers off, welding straight beads that hold in metal, fixing engines, making motors run.........there are so many things from wiring circuits to blading a road which exhaust the heart but stirs the soul to an independence that "all I need is God, because I know how to do all".
I remember an old stand mixer I picked up which was not cooperating in working. I tracked down a set of beaters from a collector in California, and then took the mixer to the shop which cost me 10 dollars to tell me it couldn't be fixed by the ditz running the shop.
In my typical mode, I got pissed off, opened the mixer up and fixed the thing and it works to this day.
I do not take "NO" for an answer in anything unless I want "NO" to be the answer. I have found most people are weak and vassilate to one's superior will (as long as one knows what they are talking about). I remember an internet project from the early days of the net in which I had company after company and person after person tell me NO NO NO.
I kept on until I spoke with Prodigy who told me yes that what I was developing could be done.
If you believe in something in life, go with your heart and do it. Certainly, one has to keep their common sense about them in judging at some point in the trying is actually not ever going to work.........so it is then time to cut and take the best situation out of it, but unless one ventures anything you are not going to be Columbus discovering America.
One of the greatest disappointments in my early years was everything I was doing had nothing accomplished in the fields. I had to design an entire line of backpacking equipment from alcohol stoves to shelters, because nothing fit my needs. It was a wonderful adventure in the dynamics of the things I learned in discovering so many principles of physics that if I had just sat like most people when told "NO", I would not possess the knowledge.
There is something immensely eye opening to be designing a little aluminum soda can stove running on alcohol, but by God's accident (I have allot of God inspired accidents where inventions come along from other ideas.) I happened to design a little stand for the pans to sit on.
I still smile at seeing my little stove turn into literally an afterburner before my eyes with pure blue flames eating oxygen in perfect combustion, changing a small fuel source fire into an inferno as large as a chef's stove.
Sort of like those huge old 454 Oldsmobiles with 4 barrel carberators cruising down American interstates at 90 miles per hour in the 70's and getting 27 miles per gallon. Gee, that is better gas mileage than numbers of quality Obama cars get now with all their computers.
See if people tap into the memories of those who know those things, they do not fall prey to the nonsense of little Obama coups being the answer.
That is what power looks like and is.
It saddens me in this world of today that so many older Americans just give up on retirement and just stagnate as much as these children do these days. Others think that working in some job is their daily life and nothing else matters as that is all they can be.
People don't have to be weak like Barack Obama and be in the White House to "be someone". People can just be who they are in God's unique creation and go out and experience life as one huge adventure.
If you listen to pain in your body to keep you from doing things, then you are not enjoying the pain for all of it's meaning in numbers of times how good it feels really to actually being in pain........as you are actually feeling something in life instead of feeling nothing like most children and adults do.
One of the greatest gifts Jackie Kennedy gave her son John was sending him out to ranch for a tour where he had to be around real men, real hardship, real painful work and away from the Teddy whoredoms. Sure John John never quit unzipping his zipper, but he was a class act for the things he did try in seeing Rush Limbaugh as a force to be with instead of deal with.
There is just a loveliness in the rural areas of manure, thumping one's finger with a hammer, getting kicked, learning that you are not in control...........that the weather is in control, that you have to set your clock to animals with minds not of their own and that things actually live and die........and the world does not stop, because nothing stops in life.
I would have all people enjoy the discovery of who they are and to do things that interest them, even if they fail. God is perfect, but His world is one perfect imperfection that in random chaos starts blending into order.
I would that people would live the life God gave them to the fullest, not in self indulgence, but indulging themselves to be greater Spiritual beings in finding things that delight them.
My brother and I often enough discuss the worst of times in our past which were many. We always end up laughing and conclude, "You know if we hadn't been forced into that screwed up stituation and had to find a way out..........it just wouldn't have been any fun at all".
While I do not condone breaking the law, I will close with a story of a Montanan I heard of a number of years ago.
They were hunting in the Bob and he had an elk license. So he was climbing through some devil's club and happened upon a moose, which he promptly shot, climbed out of that hole from hell and announced his accomplishment to his hunting companions.
They looked at him, chewed his butt up oneside and down the other.
He just grinned at them and said, "I wouldn't have done it if it would have been easy".
Yes, he shot that moose for the pure reason it was going to be a hell of a job packing it out along with the danger of being caught. It that moose was along the road, he never would have looked at it.
It was the pain, it was the suffering, it was the misery, which would bring days of aches, but each night sweet sleep in accomplishing something with friends he could trust which was his appeal.
That guy is most likely 6 foot under now, but how much he could have taught people now about life if people knew what life was really all about.
As my favorite mind once said, "The living is what is hard. It's the dying which is easy".
People should stop dying easy and start living hard, because that is where the living is in the hardships.
agtG
