Life Lessons for Loving the Way You Live by Jack Canfield

Author:Jack Canfield [Canfield, Jack; Hansen, Mark Victor; Hawthorne, Jennifer Read]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicken Soup for the Soul
Published: 2013-03-06T00:57:00+00:00

Pause and Reflect

You can make a difference by doing simple things. Smile at a stranger you pass today. Put some quarters in someone’s parking meter. Ask an elderly person if you can help carry his groceries to the car. Remember: your life is your message.

LIFE LESSON #3:

USE ALL YOUR LIFELINES

Everyone needs help from everyone.

BERTOLT BRECHT

The popular television quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? allows contestants to use “lifelines” if they need help answering a question. They can ask the audience for help. They can ask the computer for help. Or they can phone a friend for the answer, one of five prearranged people they’ve selected with as wide a variety of knowledge as possible: a movie buff, a scientist, a university professor, for example. It’s a fun show. The only moments worse than a contestant’s failure to answer correctly are the ones where she answers incorrectly without having used all her lifelines!

What lifeline do you reach for when you don’t know the answer? How do you deal with fear, or worry, or life’s big decisions? Have you ever even considered what lifelines are available to you? And are you using all of them?

Lifelines are the things you can’t live without, the things that feed you, body and spirit. They include walking, meditation, the gym, writing, dancing, quilting, walleyball, swimming with dolphins, volunteering, a good book, your doctor, your pastor, your faith, and family. Ellen goes to the gym three times a week; Sue does yoga every day. At eighty-three, my mother finds her lifeline on the tennis courts.

Al-Anon is one of my most important lifelines, as is meditation. But, like Millionaire, my number one lifeline is my “phone-a-friend” list.

I used to try to be friends with everyone I met: the beautiful young woman at the cosmetics counter in Salt Lake City, the concert organizer in New York, my yoga teacher’s teenaged son. Let’s face it: I like people! But over time I found that I was depleting myself in an effort to maintain friendships with so many people—even if it was just through a card at Christmas. I now count six women and one man in my circle of closest friends. In case of emergency—mental, physical, or spiritual—I would not hesitate to call any one of them in the middle of the night.

But what can you do if you feel you have no one to call in the middle of the night? Think bigger. Wider. Unconventionally. Think government and social service agencies. Think people just waiting to help you. We have free clinics and libraries and civil liberties unions and lawyers’ associations that might offer to take your case pro bono (for free). We have support groups of every kind imaginable. We have 12-Step programs to help you in your fight against alcoholism, overeating, gambling, debt, sex addiction, and many others. We have counselors and ministers we can turn to. And the worldwide web to tell us how to find anything, anywhere, any time.

If you don’t have a

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