Edna Lister wrote these brief essays as parts of a syndicated newspaper column published in the 1930’s and 1940’s, in major cities throughout the Unites States. As you read her essays, discover how they answer your questions today. Feeling powerless in the face of life is a miserable existence. When you follow her suggestions for vital living, you capture the joy of becoming a conquering creator, fully in charge of your own life.
Odds and Ends
When summer finally comes, you may feel so fed up with winter’s grind, so tired of everlasting routine that you’re apt to sag into tiredness and let go completely.
When fall comes and you must resume added duties, you waste too much effort trying to get into action, lose too much time trying to pick up the scattered ends left dangling all summer while you rested “down.”
Letting go too far means slipping into slack mental habits. That means it’s always Thanksgiving before you get started to really accomplish anything.
The only way to save yourself both time and effort is to find a method of relaxing without letting go, without losing any of your alertness and aliveness. Finding this happy medium is not too hard and will save plenty of time in the fall.
If you cannot change location or homes or work during the summer, you can change both your ways and times of doing things. You can put on a new summer mind and leave all worrying until fall!
One Step at a Time
Who invented the idea of failure anyhow? Who thought up the “doormat” idea? Why do you go right on planning to become a failure and turning into a doormat?
There’s no choice between the two. They are both poor excuses to replace that original fame you intended to gather from life.
If you persistently push forward a step at a time toward your objective, be it ever so small, you can’t fail. Failure is just getting tired and quitting before you arrive. Plodding on must mean success sometime in the future. The time required doesn’t count. Nothing does, except your dedicated determination to succeed.
Don’t join the “doormat” family! Meekness is all right, if it is an active meekness that holds up its head and takes everything squarely on the chin.
Passive meekness is an invitation to the whole wide world, including your dear family, to pick on you. A “doormat” attitude, which makes others want to wipe their feet on you, is no good.
If you act like a “doormat,” someone will surely step on you! See how much you can take with a smile — and like it!
Open Your Door
Do you believe that opportunity knocks but once at anyone’s door? Have you failed to answer that one knock, then decided that it was too late to do anything about it?
This belief has immobilized many a potentially successful life, and if you accept it, it will delay your success too, despite the fact that opportunity knocks at your door every day.
Each opportunity knocks but once, except in rare instances, yet new opportunities arrive at all hours. To greet opportunity you must stand with open arms, waiting.
Not many find a ready-made place for themselves. You must do the making with the ideas, plans, tools and materials you have, and your combination of these factors determines what you can make.
You must know your goal and defend all that you do toward that goal. Intermittent work and lagging steps do not help. Continuity of effort is what succeeds, never giving in or backing down, no matter the cost.
Time never stops and neither will you if you keep moving with it. This is the very hour of fulfillment for anyone who believes it.
Opinion or Action
Tumbleweeds grow in the dry lands of this country. Their tops are enormous compared with their shallow roots, so the first windstorm of the season pulls them up and sends them scurrying in every direction. They blow along aimlessly until they pile up against some barrier, huddling together for comfort in their plight.
Opinion drifters are like tumbleweeds, and pile up in the same way, for the same reasons. Disgruntled drifters gather, discuss and blame everything and everyone — but never do anything about the subjects of their complaints. They never blame themselves, never admit that they could be responsible for any of the situations about which they complain.
Indifference and lukewarmness are today’s curses because those who indulge in them are always prey to those who oppose the social system, government or individuals. The indifferent mouth catchphrases with great gusto because it gives the do-nothing class something to do.
Much talk covers up their shortcomings. They blow from camp to camp exactly as tumbleweeds blow in arid country, never resting, finally ending in dry barrenness.
As a nation and as individuals, we must have deep-rooted convictions about our ideals, general or specific. Our nation’s greatness is based on the depth of our individual roots in the soil of right thinking.
Peak Performance
It takes real strength to be a success. Do you really want to be the strongest person in your family, community or business? Of course, the strongest one always has the most work to do because others can always use a weak back, weak knees, weak eyes and weak head as an excuse to duck the hard tasks.
If you are honest enough in your effort, you do try to run at 10 percent physical efficiency on a daily basis. Yet you dissipate your other 90 percent in silly gossip, fritter it away in imagination. You run old imagination films during the day and sometimes run one film repeatedly all night. All this uses physical energy with all sorts of negative results.
Procrastination uses energy. Billy plays away his energy, then is too tired to cut the lawn — but the lawn waits for him. Billy isn’t the only one who is forever using double energy to accomplish things!
Dreading a task misuses energy as procrastination. Getting to it uses the energy generated when the idea was born, and leaves the body with a surplus. This is the secret of abounding strength to do as you like.
It becomes a joy to be the strongest one in your group, for then you can always say, “Yes, send me!”
Poise
Do you admire those individuals who are always unruffled under every condition? Have you wished that you could achieve the same fine balance and poise?
You can, but you pay a price for poise. Only the deep desire to be a greater person gives you the courage to make the necessary payments. Like all worthwhile abilities, poise does not come overnight. It is a matter of slow growth. It must be earned.
What sacrifice can you make to gain this serenity of spirit?
No one can run from family and duty to be free. Yet each may find sanctuary from the hardship of life in a high place of the soul. Living in this high place will create within you the needed calmness to face the outer world unruffled.
You may reach up into this sanctuary at an instant’s notice and in it find all those needed answers to life’s problems. It is the place of foresight instead of hindsight.
Poise is an inviolate place, which noting and no one may invade, and it is not escape!
Prime Your Pump
When enthusiasm dies, hopes fade with it and old age sets in. Love flies out the window when enthusiasm for the loved one dims, usually because of the daily intimate contacts that disillusion both parties.
Enthusiasm is the very motive power of all life and must be kept alive within the heart if you are to advance. Without enthusiasm to give life meaning, progress slows, and all desire to conquer fades from heart and mind.
Do you start everything enthusiastically then lose interest? If you do, it leaves you with no energy to complete your project.
The time comes in every phase of your affairs — love, marriage, friendship or business — when you reach this dull, drab place. You must call upon every reserve of strength and duty to push through, without regard to feelings or desires, paying no attention to discouragement or disillusion.
By looking up to the stars, by holding fast to the joy anchor deep in your heart, by lifting high all ideals and faith, by adding a new interest or doing things a different way, you cross this desert.
To prime a pump, you have to pour some water into it. Prime your pump with hope, and enthusiasm will come bubbling up in your wellspring.
Problems
What is a problem? Loads of folks say that no such thing exists. A problem is a situation that your own thinking, emotions and imagination have produced.
If you insist upon living with a problem, insist upon taking it to bed, insist upon taking it to work, insist upon taking it to play, insist upon taking it out to exercise it, it will thrive. As long as you are “conscious” of the problem, you feed it. When you shut off its food, it grows weak.
The idea that you “must be free” is an indication of bondage. Face facts: Since no one can bind you, you must be binding yourself.
Freedom from problems is the natural result of knowing truth. Truth is the sum total of facts and processes as they exist, move and are stated in principle. Truth about life is the sum total of facts and processes as you find them in life.
The truth of principle is life as God knows life. You must know life as it is in God. How is life in God? Inevitable, invincible, limitless, Substance, Power, Mind, and ideas.
If you have to know first, you’ll never arrive! You must “seek first” to open the real of the possible. Let go of the problem entirely! Don’t care about it! It is good!
Promotions
Does it always rain when you go on vacation? When you go out to dinner, is your favorite dessert always gone? Are the good seats sold out when you get around to buying yours?
When you reach the place in your affairs where everything leaves a bad taste in your mouth, where work or play is drab monotony, where your house is getting old, your salary shrinking, your car rattling, then something must be done.
Perhaps you are so interested in these things that unconsciously you are holding out on your family, your boss or your business. Perhaps you are forgetting that you must hustle. If you hold out on life, life will hold out on you.
Anyone can foretell the finish of this attitude. Start now to prepare yourself for stepping up and you’ll be discovered. Don’t worry, you’ll be seen. Steadfast effort is the only royal road to promotion and advancement.
Prove yourself ready for it now by carrying more of the load where you serve, by accepting more responsibility in your present place, by giving twice as much as they pay you for doing.
You must earn promotions before you can receive them. You can’t change this law to suit your preferences. Diligent expectancy keeps you grinning even while you’re struggling.
Racetrack or Rut-track
Do you pride yourself on being a good sport and obeying all life’s rules? Can you obey all the rules when life stacks the deck against you?
Life is like a race track. At intervals during the year, hurdles are set that you must take in your stride. Your particular rut is the race track, the hurdles are your peculiar limitations, mainly old opinions and prejudices, which you must renounce if you ever expect to see the gates open on the road to success.
How much effort have you spent trying to avoid taking your hurdles? You’ve already wasted too much time going around them or crawling through the bars. Why, some even try digging under until they find that this disqualifies them for the track. If you’ve been bold enough to push the hurdles aside, you find them back in place your next time around the track.
Wildly you dash, or slowly you drag around, years on the same old rut-track, dodging the same old issues, same old battles, same old people doing the same old irritating things, same old story of everything stacked against you, while time passes.
Face it now. Life is just one obstacle race after another. Hurdles and obstacles make life an adventure to a contender.
Resting UP
When you find that you haven’t enough strength to carry you through a whole day’s activities, you cannot always blame it on the physical body. The idea that you are not strong enough to go the whole day will eventually so deplete the body of nervous energy that physical weakness is the result.
Some can run for eight hours, others for only three hours. Then they must go to bed again to gather enough strength for another round. They live eagerly for the first hour, then sort of run down again. This is not living. It is existing, resting to gain more strength.
Passive resting is a sure sign that life is boring you until you can no longer face it except in short periods. Going to bed to rest, reading from story to story with nothing interesting between, doing only what must be done and getting back as quickly as possible — all are signs of wanting to evade a life that bores you.
You can generate enough energy within your body to carry you through the whole day. You can decide to live a whole day without getting too tired. You can take an interest in what’s around you, actually listen when others talk to you.
An expectant attitude will keep you on your feet and build a strong body with plenty of energy. Resting is passive waiting. Living is active expression.
Return on Investment
Across the road from each other live two gardeners with the same soil and climatic conditions, both having an equal start in life. One gardener is prosperous and has good crops. The other’s garden is run down and produces extra poor crops.
One always wins, and the other always loses. He is a day late with his planting and it rains, or he plants, then it is dry. Nothing goes right for the one, and everything goes right for the other.
You can find this situation in any walk of life — it is common. You will not find the cause in outer events or factors, but must seek it within the individual himself. Only a discrepancy in the two attitudes toward life — something expressing from within — can account for the outer difference.
One lets details slide, and they accumulate until he is too late to do the right thing at the right time. He’s off somewhere else when others need him in a vital role. His attitude of “what’s the use” grows as he accomplishes less and less — soon he is waiting for a “break.”
The other drives himself to do the necessary tasks in turn, he studies climate and market. He turns both to his own advantage.
“On the job” and “do it now” may bore you. However, they form the right attitude toward your own outer success and pay the greatest of all returns on your investment.
Rich Man, Poor Man
Once upon a time two brothers lived near each other. One was wealthy and the other one couldn’t be bothered thinking about money because living was so important. The wealthy brother was always worrying about his improvident brother when not busy worrying about other things, but he always had to worry.
The poor brother wouldn’t return to get the dime he was short-changed of because he couldn’t be bothered about the interest on a dollar. He never cared about money until his purse was empty. Then he hustled to fill it again, but he always had a relapse.
He either had money or didn’t, but it never bothered him either way. He was too busy laughing at life and singing his way through it. His heart was happy because he was alive and well.
The wealthy brother was never well, and happy only when his money was increasing. He certainly had no time to waste just enjoying life. Someone had to earn money, didn’t they? Now, his wealth had dwindled away because he worried himself into weakness and illness. The poor brother is earning more all the time, still laughing.
You can’t have it both ways, can you? You must choose.
Rx for Joy
When the sun hides behind a cloud, do you think it’s gone forever? Do you choose the shady side of the street, then complain of the cold? Do you sulk and freeze instead of crossing into the sunshine?
You can, if you like, because no one will come along and carry you. Folks may think it odd to act that way, but they’ll leave you free to please yourself.
On sunny days you can live under clouds of darkness formed in your own head. On cloudy days you can live in the sunshine because your heart is singing with joy. Choose which you prefer, sun or clouds, and live it.
Don’t be a half-and-half person. If you like clouds, then make good black ones. Cover your spot with them if you like, but don’t expect another to share your spot when he likes the sun.
If you want a popular spot, make it sunny and folks will seek you. Friends will come and friends will stay when your spot is full of warmth.
Remember, no one else can make your spot sunny or fill it with shadows. No one can keep you under clouds or force you into the sun. This is your life — under the clouds or on top of them in the sun!
Score on Life
Is your greatest desire to find a sheltered nook where you can rest? A sunny spot where you can watch the world pass, leaving you safe, quiet and untouched?
If you are spending your time hunting an easy spot where nothing can ever happen, or a safe place to sit away the years, you might as well give up. Such a place doesn’t exist, either here or in heaven. Playing the harp twenty-four hours a day for a million years sounds like hard and boring work.
To hide isn’t to be safe. To be safe isn’t living. To be perfectly safe is only existing.
Life means growth, growth means pain. To give plenty of life a chance always hurts at first. When your arm goes to sleep, it hurts to awaken but later feels fine.
No one ever had too much life, it is having too little that gets you down. If you decide against having any more life because the little you have hurts so, you might just as well go find an old shell and crawl under it to live like a turtle.
Don’t let life score you, score on life. Life is like a thistle — to be lived, it must be grasped tightly, thorns and all. Every pain is a step up. The advantage is yours when you decide to hunt the hard spots before they hunt you.
Seasons of the Soul
In fall, sap descends from the tree’s branches to the darkness at it roots, instinctively obeying the laws of nature regarding its particular life. In winter, the tree lies sleeping while it gathers the strength you see portrayed in buds, leaves and blossoms.
Occasionally a tree dies, which is escape from life, but it is not beyond an unconscious or instinctive consciousness to do this. Spring opens a time of great expansion. Homeowners dig weeds, plant, prune and prepare for growth as the sap of consciousness ascends.
Your unconscious instinctive phase of mind responds to the seasons, and dictates your spring, summer, fall or winter as you ascend and descend the pole in consciousness. During fall and winter, desire, vitality and consciousness recede to subterranean depths. You bury yourself and may wallow in the trough of self-pity. Some people live through four seasons a day!
Subconscious mind is like a garden full of weeds — hatred, rebellion, selfishness, jealousy, self-pity, resentment. Yet you can change them into beautiful flowers of love. You eventually begin to dig around your subconscious roots, plant new seeds of consciousness and begin pruning to lift subconscious mind to live in the Light where it belongs.
No matter how often you dig, you find weeds to pull, and must pull them to learn why you are in bondage to petty emotions. This is no wasted effort, but part of being a good caretaker in your garden of soul.
Be a faithful excavator of hidden self. It returns to you as goals fulfilled, new security, new increases, new friends, new illumination, new beauty in your life.
“Sensitivity”
Are you so self-conscious that it makes you unhappy? Do you just know that when you walk into a room everyone has been talking about you because they become silent as you enter?
When over-sensitivity reaches this advanced stage, it needs drastic measures. Isn’t it a bit far-fetched to think that you are the most important being in the life of everyone you meet? That a room full of people cannot meet without using you as the main topic of conversation? It could be possible that they might be thinking and talking of someone or something else.
Are you just too, too proud of being super-sensitive? This is only an exaggerated form of egotism, though you think it a sign of extra special “fineness.”
When you tell folks all about your super-sensitivity, you are only telling them how madly in love you are with yourself. When you study your effect upon others instead of their effect on you, your eyes will be opened to a thousand things you’ve been blind about before.
Popularity comes from showing interest in others and their affairs — and in remaining silentabout your own. Try forgetting self-consciousness in service for others.
Stagnation or Clarification
Do new ideas pass you by and land in your neighbor’s mind, though you are eager to have ideas of your own? Are you discouraged by your inability to grasp new things?
Sometimes you have so many old, cherished notions and ideas in your mental house that you have no room for any new ones. If you will not give up your outdated, outgrown ideas, they grow long Spanish moss, just like southern trees, shutting out everything new.
You must prepare a landing place for a new idea. The mental house cleaning is just as important as the physical house cleaning. A pitcher filled with stagnant water is useless. To be useful, ready to refill, you must empty it and clean it.
You may find valuable data, effective unused ideas lost in the clutter. Yet when opened to the light of day, they may attract new material, giving birth to a new presentation for practical use.
Results of a mental house cleaning can be amazing in clarifying mental alertness. Empty the old ideas, and take your mind somewhere for a refill.
Stars: Alibi or Goal
Do you collect alibis? Are you full of excuses for dawdling over things? Do you whine when things go wrong and gripe about everything you dislike? Do you believe in fate you can’t escape or that the stars rule your life?
It cramps your style to believe in a fate that cuts everything by pattern, then sews it up in fine seams, while the stars somehow compel you to follow that pattern. Fate and stars are safe alibis, since they can’t retaliate.
If you wait to have your stars “right” before asking the boss for a raise, he may refuse because his stars are all wrong that day. The uncertainty of living on the Fate and Star Program is that the stars and fate never seem to get together for you. Whining and excuses went out of style with hoop skirts!
Today you can change your fate line into your Path of Destiny. Reach for the stars, knowing that you can do anything you desire to do, provided you back it up with hard work.
Real work needs no excuses. Everyone can see what you are doing.
Taking Stock
Are you always “on watch” for others’ words and actions so you’ll miss nothing that might be offensive? Do you feel like “starting something” over everything you hear?
If you’re miserable because no one understands you or sympathizes with you, this is a good time to take stock. How can you blame an enemy’s enjoyment if you look hurt or offended by everything that happens?
If you show that you’re sitting on the point of the pin every time something hits you, you can count on more blows. Do you wriggle and squirm every time you are hurt?
Almost everyone likes a circus and some folks just have to play ringmaster to keep their fatty ego inflated. They must play to a grandstand, though it is only their victim. When the performance impresses the victim enough to cringe, a sense of power thrills the ringmaster.
The only cure is indifference to the performance except to admire it as perfect in its kind. Become the admiring audience instead of the cringing victim. Stop watching for offenses and ignore the hurts.
Why start something or be miserable to satisfy someone else’s ego?
The Balance of Power
Have you harnessed your three great creative aids, imagination, thinking and desire? Are they working for you twenty-four hours a day? Have you bridled them with a curb bit? Are you driving them straight toward your destination?
Life might be likened to a pair of balance scales, with the two sides representing the positive and negative sides of your life. In the right pan are all the fine, positive, constructive things that thinking, imagination and emotion can do for you. Into the left pan go all those factors that are negative and destructive, that give the lie to your real self and tear down all the good.
Which side holds the balance of power in your life? The positive or the negative, the right side or the left side?
Are you certain that you are using imagination, thinking and desire to create what you want from life? If not, then empty the left side now and make sure your balance is on the right side.
You’ll find that delay in your affairs will vanish, things that you have been working to find will search for you. Results will come from your honest efforts, sometimes without effort or work, instantaneously.
The Burden of Habit
You compose your life of right habits and wrong habits, which most people are perfectly aware of having. Thinking, imagination and emotions are the tools you use in fashioning habits. Thinking makes the plan, imagination etches the blueprint, and emotional desire releases the substance that fills the habit-plan with life, body and expression.
If you fill the two sides of a scale with each day’s thinking, imagination and emotions, you might be shocked at the answers to many of your questions. Place your positive, constructive habits on the right side and the negative and destructive on the left.
The side that sags tells the story. If you want the habits on the heavy side of the scale perched in your living room, sitting at your table, or waiting in your bedroom, then you are using these tools of a creator perfectly.
You create your life. The way you use your imagination, thinking and desire determines what kind of life you have, what kind of habits you form. Thinking, imagination and emotional desires work against you, if you misuse them with wrong habits. It takes good old-fashioned perseverance to form new, constructive habits.
You can do it. Just let go of indifference and lukewarmness. Use your imagination, thinking and desire tools and determine to create only those habits that you truly desire to express in your life.
The Doing Quality of Faith
“I won’t” is a challenge that you send the universe — one that reacts on you like a boomerang. “I will” becomes an overdue invoice for you to pay all your debts to the law.
A reason backs the yogi’s incessant mantra. He knows that, you color the substance of your life with every thought, emotion and picture that imagination builds.
Substance goes forth as breath, dynamic and powerful, or weak, right or wrong. Substance goes forth to do something every moment of your life, both here and beyond what we call the “veil.”
Sending forth substance backed by good, constructive ideas formed into words to create for you will remake your whole life. You must take advantage of this law and watch your expression through words because every word has a composite numerical value and creates after its own kind.
“I won’t” always returns to you, and you must eat it and like it. “I will” recalls to you all the little clouds of darkness you’ve left behind, to be inhaled and cleansed.
So, to accomplish anything really worthwhile, you should say, “I can” and “I do” instead — they challenge the forces of the universe to aid you at any hour. I now can do all things under faith.
The Education Habit
Do you wish you had the education that would make it possible for you to walk and talk with those who have been well-educated? Do you feel inferior among your group?
Any honest heart-desire for education can be satisfied easily in this land. However, if you are traveling with some group of folks who make you feel inferior, start traveling in a different direction with another group.
Educated folks will never make anyone feel inferior or uneducated. Education is a part of the one who is truly educated.
No one is conscious of the skin covering his body unless something happens to it. Education is as much a part of the soul of the person as the skin is part of the body. Once skin is normal, you forget it. Once you gain education, it is so a part of you that you are never conscious of having it.
Education is always drawing from the other fellow to itself, consequently, when in the presence of a truly educated person, you always feel at your best because you are being drawn upon for bits of knowledge.
The “education habit” is always too busy learning to waste time causing inferior feelings. Therefore, seek those who are still educating themselves.
The Face of Beauty
One day you look in your mirror and are surprised at the strange face that gazes back at you. The face you see is yours and has been forming as many years as you have to your credit. It is something you have earned. In fact, it is you that you see.
Written on your face is the total of your life. One woman, Marie Stopes, said, “You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul’s own doing.” Youth is always beautiful. However, beauty at sixty is real because living in beauty earned it.
A beautiful feeling within translates itself into beauty of the outer form. Of course, the reverse also must be true.
This is the only face you’ll ever have and it’s a shame you can’t turn it wrong-side-out to save the wear and tear from your poor old emotions. Since you can’t, it seems an excellent idea to begin now to remake it. Of course, you could avoid looking in the mirror, but it is too bad for the fellow in front of it, don’t you think?
Your body will forever respond to the mind behind and within it, and you can remake it in the image of any desire of that mind. Living at the center of your being in poise will give you the expression of peace, and you will radiate a new-found joy — it costs only effort and time.
The End of Part 3
Edna Miriam Lister – Life in A Nutshell Part 1
Contents
Act As If
A Firm Foundation
An Ounce of Appreciation
Anti-Fog Formula
A Simple Faith
At the Heart of Soul
Battles, Dragons and Life
Believe to Receive
Bite Your Tongue
Cat Lessons
Chickens Come Home to Roost
Classes, Exams and Grades
Confusion or Clarity
Conquering Life
Courage in Action
Crossroads
Cycles
Determination Is the Pipeline
Do One Thing at a Time
DO Something
Dreams: Idle or Planned
End of an Era
Eternally Young
Face That Dragon Now
Faith, the Builder
Edna Miriam Lister – Life in A Nutshell Part 2
Contents
Familiar Guests
Fan the Flame of Desire
From Mountains to Molehills
From Tail to Kite
Give it Your Best
Give to Get
Growing Up
Half a Loaf or Whole
Hours of Gold
Ideas in Mind
Inner Peace
It’s Never Too Late
Jealous Mistresses
Just DO It
Law of Averages
Life’s New Opportunities
Life’s Balance Sheet
Life’s Basic Types
Look UP, Not Back
Love’s Golden Thaw
Love the Promise
Make Every Minute Count
Making Time Fly
Mastery: The Bottom Line
Mathematics of Life
Edna Miriam Lister – Life in A Nutshell Part 4