Love Train

Image by Orangeadnan via Flickr

The Beatles had it right…”All you need is Love” !  I will admit that I didn’t know what this meant back in the 60’s when I was in grade school but I finally understand that “Love” really is all you need to accomplish anything you want in your life.  1967 was the famous Summer of Love and I was definitely in love, with a 1967 Red Mustang , to this day that is my dream car and was the first time I “loved something”.  Love was always a difficult word to define, understand, experience or use but over time I finally get it.

Love isn’t something that just happens, I don’t think love is something that happens to you, I believe Love is something you create.  Love is a choice, it is a decision you make in your life but once you understand it’s power and use it the right way it can deliver anything and everything you could ever imagine.  One thing I still don’t quite understand is accepting Love from others.  It is one thing to Love someone or something or some activity it is another thing to feel the Love someone else.  I am not sure I can define or describe that kind of Love, I am not saying that people like my family don’t Love me, but I am not sure feeling the Love of someone else for you is the same as Loving that person and giving them your Love.  You see Love isn’t about being loved, it is about Loving someone or something.

Let me explain where I am going with this and why I feel like I finally “Get it”.   I have embarked on a new career in a field I absolutely, positively Love.  My new career is selling Cinema Ads, the kind that run on the screen before the main movie starts.  My job involves going door to door, cold calling on businesses of all sizes most of which have “No Solicitors” signs posted on their doors.  There was a time in my life that this would have scared the hell out of me and I can honestly say it would still scare the hell out of me if I didn’t Love my product, Love my company and Love my prospects, yes I said Love my prospects !.   I have spent the last few weeks knocking on at least 20 doors a day and with only a couple of exceptions, everyone has greeted me kindly and only once was I told I should have read the sign on the door about soliciting.  I truly believe that since I have come to understand the true meaning of Love, it has served me well.  I know that if I didn’t go into each business I call on thinking I was going to Love the people and Love handling their advertising, I wouldn’t have been greeted so kindly.  I also know that Loving my job, every part of my job, makes everything go better, I know that without this Love for my career, I wouldn’t be as happy as I am sitting in this hotel by myself tonight.

Love can serve you in many ways.  One of the things I am working very hard on is using Love in every portion of my life no matter what the situation is.  When my son or daughter call me  in the middle of an important meeting with an urgent message which turns out to be they need money to buy gas to go some place fun, I pause and think what Love means in this situation, does it mean be kind or get angry for the interruption ?  it always, means to be kind.  To me that is the definition of “tough love“, deciding to be kind when it is really tough to be kind.  When I am in a tough situation and trying to negotiate with a mortgage company, a creditor or anyone that isn’t exactly trying to be your friend, I have recently taken the approach that I am going to send my Love to the person I am talking to and my experience so far is that without fail, the Love comes back to you in the form of the result you had hoped for.

April 26th, 1980 was an incredible day, that was the day I married Suanne Fodstad but it was also the day I really listened and took to heart 1 Corinthians 13 from the Bible.  This passage is in my opinion the best definition of Love there ever was and as I have re-read it the past couple of days, it is truly amazing to me how it applies to everything I have been doing to turn my life around and get back on track.  If you have never read this passage or have forgotten what it says it is worth re-printing here for your review:

1 Corinthians 13

¹ If I speak in the tongues^[a] of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. ² If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.³ If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,^[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing.

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

⁸ Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. ¹¹ When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. ¹² For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

¹³ And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Faith, Hope and Love….. there it is.  Can you see what I mean about how this can apply to every area of your life.  Just in the way you do business or deal with others, if you do it with Love you cannot fail.  A dear friend of mine from High School sent me a great power point presentation today called “Life on a Train’, I don’t think she had any idea how much I love trains, and love riding them but this presentation she sent me compared Life to a long train ride and it was so right on, it was just another one of those moments where the light clicked again and everything in my life has started to make sense.  That power point presentation got me thinking about Love and what it has meant to me recently as I have tried to apply it to everything I do.  Then that mental Juke Box of mine picked up Love message and combined it with the train analogy from the power point and wouldn’t you know it, it flipped on the turntable in my head and started playing the O’Jay’s classic  “Love Train”  which led to me writing about Love today.   So let me leave you with the words of the O’Jay’s  Start a Love Train  and Please don’t miss this train at the station, because if you do, I feel sorry, sorry you. Join hands Start a Love Train, Love Train….it is all you will ever need to get everything you want in life…..I love you !

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Your Kiss is on My List

“My list of the best things in life”  includes music that puts a smile on your face and makes you feel good all over.  Like my Blog post “Don’t Worry Baby”, music is great therapy and hearing the Hall and Oates classic “Your Kiss is on My List” immediately brought me back to the early days of dating my wife ( 30 years of marriage, and 35 years of dating).  Not only did it bring me back to the early years of my relationship with my wife but it also made it clear to me that we are constantly creating our own experiences in life.  And what may seem a simple coincidence is actually much more.

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner.   Whether you call it Synchronicity or coincidence, I believe it all happens for a meaningful reason and it is up to you to figure out what the synchronicity in your life means.  So where am I going with Hall and Oates and Synchronicity ?  Well, something very interesting has been happening to me since I started writing this blog, meaningful and fulfilling synchronicity is started to appear daily, I am getting back into the zone where I was completely in control of my life and able to create things almost exactly as I wanted.  Miracles both large and small have started to happen but most importantly, friends, family and random people who have found my blog have started to have similar experiences.  I received an urgent text today from a business associate who has been reading my blogs who wanted to let me know what a great day she had and how everything was falling into place as she visualized it.  Now I know this particular person is very spiritual, has incredible faith, an awesome attitude and likes to read things like “The Secret” and similar works.  So she is understands the whole “knowing” thing that was the reason I started writing this blog in the first place.   What was really cool for me was that she created her day the way she always knew she could but she took the time to share her experience with me.   Her sharing of her experience today sent a positive shock through my body of knowing we can all create exactly the lives we want and that thought (good or bad) is contagious.  

Hall and Oates, what role do they play in today’s post ?  That’s another fun story I would like to share with you today because it is a great example of the incredible sychronicities in my life.   A few months back while searching Facebook for old friends, neighbors and business associates, I ran across Bren.  Bren or Brenda as I knew her back in the 60’s and 70’s was the cute Blonde from across the street in the neighborhood I grew up in.  Bren was a year younger than me but I had a crush on her during my entire elementary school experience.   Back then,  and I suppose at that age, you never hung around with girls in a grade below you and besides I never thought she had any interest in me.  But I always had that crush and anytime I had the chance to give her a ride on my Schwinn Apple Crate bike, I always was happy.   Well it turns out that Bren is a huge Hall and Oates fan, which was interesting because my wife when I started dating her in 1975  was also a huge Hall and Oates fan.  I have enjoyed Hall and Oates ever since my wife first played “She’s gone” for me from the “Abandoned Luncheonette” album.   So last week, I am checking out the news feed on Facebook and Bren posts that Hall and Oates are going to be in town and she wants to know who’s going with her ?.  I jokingly, immediately posted that I was going.  I really wanted to go but couldn’t justify spending the money at the moment.   So after posting my reply, I forgot about it, then late last week Bren sends me a message telling me that she has two extra tickets that my wife and I could have.   Wow,   I couldn’t believe the offer so I told Bren I just had to check with my wife to confirm.  Saturday rolls around and I tell my wife about Bren and the tickets, she was thrilled, so I immediately confirmed with Bren.  Now that was all incredible and fun but listen to this,  so my wife and I decide to go to a movie that afternoon, we decided to see “You Again” with Jamie Leigh Curtis.  Now, we decided to got to this movie just minutes after I confirmed with Bren about going with her to the Hall and Oates concert.  My wife and I really knew nothing about the movie except that Jamie Leigh Curtis  was in it.   So we are sitting in the  theater, eating a HUGE bucket of buttered popcorn when all of a sudden the couple in the movie are playing the Hall and Oates song “Your Kiss is on My List” on the radio, now that may seem like just a funny coincidence to you but to me it was synchronicity and a reminder to me that I played a role in the events that had just been created.  Even better, at the end of the movie and rolling into the credits, Hall and Oates and the cast of the movie sang “Your Kiss is on My List”.   While I always enjoyed that song, I never remembered the lyrics including the line “The Best Things in Life”, when I heard that, I knew the Universe was sending me yet another message about why happiness is the key to everything and when you know the outcome of your life, you can’t help but be happy.

You can have all of the Best Things In Life, you know you can, you just have to visualize your list of the best things and sit back and watch them show up.  I am adding something to my list of the best things in life, getting everyone to know they can create incredible experiences in their lives.  I know you can do it and I know that in my life, cancelling out the media has had a major impact and changed the way things are going for me.  I no longer listen to  or watch  any of the major news networks including my favorite Fox news, I don’t pay attention to the political nonsense going on in this country (I do intend to vote and I know my intuition will guide me to the right candidates),   I have turned off talk radio in favor of audio programs from Wayne Dyer, Mike Dooley and Joe Vitale.  Yes you could say I am brainwashing myself with positive, fulfilling and uplifting messages, and yes the brainwashing is working, I am washing out all the dirt and replacing it with clean new information.  I hope you will join me in creating incredible life experiences and if you get a chance, a text message, blog comment or email would be great, I love to hear about people and the great experiences they have created for themselves.  Get to work on your list of the “Best things in life” and make your life the best !

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Teachers, Tests and a Lifetime of Learning

It is very interesting to me that since I started writing this Blog last week the Universe is putting me in touch with Teachers, giving me tests and allowing me to learn from what I am blogging about.  Now I am not talking about traditional teachers or tests, I haven’t gone back to College or a trade school, I am just running into people and having situations arise that I KNOW are the Universe’s (God’s) way of teaching me or testing me.  When I was on my walk with my dog “Flash” this morning, I was planning on writing about how Dr. Terry Lyles ( www.terrylyles.com) appeared in my life at a very tough time, while most people thought he was just a business partner and someone whose book I was going to publish, I saw him as a teacher who was brought to me by God to help my Wife and I deal with a very tough time.  My mother in-law was dying of cancer and Terry helped us both deal with the trauma associated with it.  Terry believes that every crisis or tragedy in our lives are actually gifts, which was what I was talkng about a few days back when I said that there is something good in everything, you just have to dig hard sometimes to find it.  Terry has worked with everyone from Professional athletes to first responders at ground zero (9/11) to the victims of hurricanes and Tsunamis.  Terry spent over a month working in a makeshift morgue in Thailand after the Tsunami helping people identify and deal with the loss of their loved ones.  Terry will be the first to tell you that this experience was one of the greatest gifts of his life.  One of the things that Terry taught me that sticks with me and helps me deal with any obstacle thrown in my way is the stories Terry tells of working with  theNavy Seals.  Most people when faced with danger run the other direction but the Navy Seals are taught to run toward the danger and deal with it head on.  This is something you need to do with the obstacles(danger) in your  life, run toward it and deal with it.  Running away, makes it fester and creates the stress that we all think we can’t handle.

First thing this morning, God throws a huge test at my feet, I had a letter forwarded to me about a business deal I am involved in that could have created a disastrous situation and maybe still will.   A few months back, I would have been extremely upset and fired off a nasty response, taking it personally that some would dare to do this.  But today, I took a deep breath and said to myself, there is something good here, I detached myself from the situation and suddenly the words for a positive email response were flowing through my fingers.  I sent the email and a few hours later got a response that I was afraid to look at but when I finally got the nerve to open the email, the response was the polar opposite of what I expected, I will even call it pleasant.   Now it may be that I just set the right tone with my original response but either way a volatile situation has now turned into a manageable situation and I am content that a positive solution will arise.  The key is stopping to recognize the tests that are presented to us everyday and looking for the teachers that come along to teach us in places we least expect it.

My friend from high school, Heidi, responded to a post I had about patience on my Facebook page today and she talked about the incident with the flight attendant on Jet Blue last week where a passenger was so out of control the flight attendant litterally  couldn’t deal with the situation and left the plane (with two beers and a trip down the inflatable slide).  Had the flight attendant realized that the unruly passenger was actually a teacher sent to teach him something, the outcome might have been much different.  Dr. Wayne Dyer talks alot about the teachers that show up in our lives and he specifically refers to the people that bother us the most as the people that are here to teach us what we really need to learn.  These teachers include the drunk at the baseball game that pours beer on your wife, the guy in the red camaro that cuts you off on the interstate, the snowboarder with the bad attitude that gets in your face or the umpire that calls a foul ball ball when you were actually hit in the wrist by the pitcher.  The next time someone really irritates you, instead of getting upset, think to yourself, what was this person sent here to teach me.  I think you will find that you will feel better, your blood won’t be boiling and you might actually learn something that makes you stronger.  This is just another way of looking for the good in every situation you are presented with.

I had a great lunch today with a very good friend who makes movies for a living, he had mentioned that he had read my blogs and appreciated the living in the now comments I had made.  We were talking about how today’s world with all of the economic worries and families in financial crisis that it has forced us to look at things differently.  It really is a great time to live in the now because no matter where you are Omaha, driving by the landfill on the South Side of Chicago, Glacier Park or North Minneapolis you will find amazing things to appreciate and be thankful for.  You have no idea what you are missing if you haven’t visited the worlds largest ball of twine or driven down West Broadway in North Minneapolis.  Everywhere you look there is something to appreciate and be thankful for and yes to enjoy !  You just have to live in the moment and learn to appreciate everything.  Today more than ever I appreciate the amazing friends I have and the people like Chris who I had lunch with who is so creative and interesting that the lunch was a seminar in itself.  So do yourself a favor, be alert and pay attention to every person that crosses your path, try to figure out what each one was sent here to teach you, what each obstacle or test was designed to teach you and how to appreciate the lesson plan that God has created for you.