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.
The Fountain of Youth
What causes youth and strength, age and weakness? They are ideas. Youth and strength train together and are interdependent, one on the other.
Age belongs to the calendar, and weakness belongs to mind. Yet Spirit is the same, yesterday, today, forever. So, what happens? People age and weaken because they entertain undesirable guests, thoughts that overstay their welcome. If you stop entertaining them, they leave.
A strong will never changes its purpose. A weak will is afraid to change its attitudes, tactics, or way at a moment’s notice.
You must hold to the purpose of your goal. All the powers of life back the person who surrenders completely to God’s Power. No half way measures are acceptable. You must gamble life, and stake everything to hold all the aces in hand and play them at the right time.
When the powers of life control you, nothing can stop you. Steadily, unchangeably, surely, determinedly, the game is yours. If you listen to the world, you are beaten before you start. Start in the silence, under Light, and never reveal your hand.
No condition can down, conquer, hold you back, or keep you away. Youth and strength grow from agreeing with God and adjusting to the world. God built you to be and do now.
The Good Front
Keeping your eyes on the rest of the world is so much easier than keeping them straight ahead. Yet watching neighbors and friends is a waste of time, and never pays a single dividend.
You cannot judge what is going on behind a smile or a frown you see. A smile may cover a deep grief you would not care to hide away in your heart. A frown may hide a heart afraid of being hurt again after some devastating experience. Both are putting up a good front behind which you may hide the real self.
You show the world what you want the world to see. You must look deep below the surface if you would uncover the important things of life, and this takes time. You cannot do it with a casual glance.
Sometimes a “two-story front” covers a shack behind. Yet a poor front could cover solid gold.
Keeping your eyes straight ahead is no easy task. It’s a full time job requiring full strength and courage. Save your eyes for seeing only the important and true things of life.
Meet life head-on, laughing instead of groaning, struggling even when too tired to move. Victory comes from steadfastly holding your eyes on your goal.
The Greater Works
Life is filled with examples of the known and the unknown, which is fast becoming the known. Practically everything that formerly belonged to the “it can’t be done” class is now being done by someone who didn’t know that it couldn’t be done.
We are living in an age of “greater works.” Two thousand years ago the fastest travel was by the ship of the desert, called a camel. Our ships of the air now travel faster than the speed of sound.
We used rush lights first, then tallow dips. Now we turn night into day with electrical power. If this isn’t doing the greater works, someone should say so and make us believe it.
Why doubt your ability to do greater things, to apply greater power as strength of mind and body to act, as greater new ideas to apply? Despite another’s lack of faith in your ability, you succeed.
Occasionally your family or friend’s “you can’t do it” is exactly what you need to make you dig in and do. Go the limit on today’s power and you will have more for tomorrow.
Someone is going to do all the new things, why not you? If you don’t know that something can’tbe done, you can do it.
The More and More Plan
Each year we harvest and gather countless tons of fruits, vegetables and grains, while other untold measures of verdure and flowers come forth and wither. Yet each field and garden has the same amount of soil after harvest, and we must prune the trees and bushes again.
The substance that nature uses in this growth comes from the invisible Source of all life. The power of attraction draws it from the heart of the tree, bush, bulb and seed. All growth follows undeviating natural laws of expansion, and nothing added from the outside can change the essential process.
Do you really think God endows tree, bush, bulb and seed with the ability to contact this Source, draw forth everything needed for expansion, but denies this to you? Do you feel bound to run your life on the “less and less life plan” because you believe you do not have the Power to operate on the “more and more plan” of abundant nature?
Life does not hang its gifts on the outside like ornaments on some Christmas tree. Creative gifts must come from exercising your inherent powers and abilities, which are far greater than any possessed by a tree.
When will you let go of foolish ideas of lack, and let the Power within you draw all it needs to further the great design of life you have planted? Now is the right time.
The Real “I”
Will and desire must work together to attain any goal. If desire wants to play golf, but will takes you back to the office while your friends go to golf, chances are overwhelming that you’ll accomplish nothing the whole afternoon.
Desire is on the golf course while will sits in the office betrayed by imagination’s pictures of the game’s pleasures. Will can’t concentrate when abandoned by desire and led down the primrose path by imagination.
You can easily tell whether you’re in charge of your creative tools. Take an inventory: Would I like to find everything I’ve imagined during the past month sitting on my doorstep, waiting in my office, resting in the living room or perched on my kitchen table? Or are they nightmares?
Would you like each of your imaginings to come true right now? If you would, you’re well on your way to complete success. If you wouldn’t, then start right here to hold your own.
Consciously imagine what pattern you desire, then cut your thinking to conform to your chosen life pattern. Make sure your emotional life does not give power to what you don’t want in your life. Keep imagination’s eye on your chosen goal, not letting it run wild, daydreaming or idling away your valuable time.
Your real “I” takes charge, dictating to imagination what you desire to create as your new, successful glorious life.
The Road to Wisdom
Constructive fear and common sense go hand in hand as companions gaining wisdom from every new experience. Just to be afraid of a new experience is neither common sense nor constructive fear. It is just fear.
To wait for the traffic lights to change could be caused by a fear of being hit, but it would be a good, constructive fear, for it saves lives. To avoid disobeying the law for fear of getting caught is a constructive fear and leads into the habit of obeying laws.
“The end of fear is the beginning of wisdom.” Wisdom comes from learning that something is wrong to do or that it won’t work. That is how you instill morals into children’s minds.
Without enough imagination, wisdom never grows. When doing hazardous work, imagination builds pictures of what could happen, you becomes afraid and because of this use the necessary caution to protect your life.
A constructive fear of getting caught makes you avoid unwise actions until the habit of obedience invites wisdom. To be tough and not care what happens is lack of imagination, not wisdom. A constructive fear, imagination and common sense leads to wisdom.
The Secret Enemy
You achieve, not by what you add to the outside, but by what you get rid of on the inside. The only enemy you have is that little fellow deep within your heart who is always looking for trouble from the outside.
You waste enough time playing detective, gathering evidence, trying the case, judging and sentencing those you call enemies to run any two lives perfectly.
You must agree with this hidden adversary “whilst you are in the ways with him,” which means at the very time he rears his head and not a day or week later. You can agree with anything you find in the world of your expression.
When you allow this secret enemy within to rule your life, you surely believe in outer enemies. Then you fight many battles in your mind, supplying your enemies’ answers, too. But when you go to battle over imagined wrongs, the enemies you’ve created never give the answers you’ve put in their mouths. Often you’re left in a worse state than when you started your “war.”
Success in the outer is caused by ridding yourself of hidden enemies within your heart. Do it now.
The Virtue Hunt
Are you certain that your family deliberately laughs the most when you feel the worst? Just when everything has gone to smash and you can hear the opening rumbles of one of your worst moods?
Being with folks is always hard because they have such a variety of dispositions, each needing different treatment, and the strain finally gets too great to bear. You can become unbalanced if you keep looking for faults, including your own, until you see only faults everywhere while sinking fathoms deep into a sea of super-faultfinding.
Did it ever occur to you that you could hunt for virtues?
What you see depends upon where you are looking. What you are hunting determines what you will find and what you feel depends upon both.
Everyone has at least one virtue. You might find it, if you hunted hard enough. You may have to dig in under that family laughter to find it, but you can.
Last year’s best is not good enough for this year’s struggle. You must earn this year’s success this year, which takes persistent effort in finding the good instead of pursuing the worst. Forget your worst moods and faultfinding — laugh with your family instead.
The Voice of Peace
Beneath all racial hatred, jealousy, fear and greed are the same underlying principles of creative desire. All religions are founded on them, and politicians use them to mold men and women to their will.
From the savage to the highest intellectual type, aspiration awakens the desire for something to follow that is greater than oneself. Whether it is an idol or fetish, business, science or cause, once the focal point is found, faith supports it and devotion gives its all.
All earth’s religions teach this, yet they have overlooked or left out that ingredient essential to breed peace: Brotherly love, which is the very essence of peace. When brotherly love reigns, you forget the self in service, forget hardships in love of the cause served, and face death without fear in a sacrifice born of love, not hatred.
If dictators can use the qualities found in every heart to produce war, then we can use those same qualities to produce peace!
How? When you deeply desire the same for your brother as for yourself, when the cause of brotherly love possesses you with a flame of eagerness, then unconquerable faith backs your efforts to bring it to pass. When enough of us prove that faith by our continued devotion, then we will erase war from the minds and hearts of mankind.
Troubleshooter
Would your family be disturbed if you decided to stop always hunting for trouble? Aren’t you tired of expecting trouble, day after day?
Any time you get tired of trouble you can give it up. No one can insult you unless you allow it. No one can get inside your mind to mess it up unless you open the door and invite them in to do the stirring.
Your thoughts dwell upon the dark side of everything with your permission. Only you can change them.
Did it ever occur to you that you might be boring your family? It is a bore when someone is always watching — like a cat waiting for the mouse to dash for the cheese — picking on every phrase to make it into something. Besides, why look for trouble when just waiting brings enough, and mostly it turns out for the good after all.
Why not become a troubleshooter instead of a troublemaker?
A troubleshooter can always find a trouble cure, and this pays more dividends for the effort than do trouble-making and hunting. Change a bad habit into a good one by curing troubles rather than make them. Once a troubleshooter, always a troubleshooter.
Tune in the Joy Station
Your brain cells and the corresponding faculties form a complete broadcasting and receiving set and are individual. You can send out whatever you desire to ride on the waves of universal ether, and you can tune in upon any vibration on earth.
In fact, you must send forth every thought, emotion or vain picture you allow in your station. If your thinking and emotions are messy, so is your broadcasting.
What do you tune in from the world, and what do you broadcast? Are you the victim of vagrant thoughts and scattered ideas that you pick up unconsciously? Do you allow your own subconscious mind to broadcast all the intimate thoughts and feelings you would not care to have recorded and re-broadcast to you?
When your mind wanders and “nobody is home,” no one is in charge of your station to consciously direct and control your faculties. When you are home and in charge, you can choose what you broadcast and tune in only those positive and constructive ideas that will aid you to grow stronger.Let this Joy Station pay you great dividends for your service.
Uncle Sam’s Britches Patches
When we fully stop doctoring, operating upon, tinkering with and patching our Republic and let it breathe for itself, we’ll realize exactly what the dictators have always known — it is a perfect form of government for all peoples.
Because of the demagogues’ loud shouts we’ve put it to bed, spending our time feeling its pulse, feeding it broth and putting an ice pack on its head. No wonder it has nearly died, which is what the world’s dictators want. They are afraid of it, or they wouldn’t bother fighting it.
Rule by law is unwieldy and cumbersome until it gets up to speed, then nothing can upset it or hold it back. We do not need to make everyone work together. We may ask questions, but we work for love of freedom. We may become disturbed, but do not stop.
We’ve taken on the heaviest load ever tried before by a nation, but we can carry it, even the share of those too lazy to haul their own weight — our reward will be liberty for all nations. The work of freeing these nations from darkness too great to contemplate must continue faster.
When we finish ripping all the propaganda patches off Uncle Sam’s britches, underneath we’ll find good cloth, ready to wear just as long as it takes us to win!
Use Your Time to Climb
We are all born equal in the number of hours we have for individual living. We can neither add to them, nor take from them. They stand.
These hours all come from the future, slip into the present and sometimes become the past without having ever been used or lived. If you rest through them, you may rest yourself to death.
If you strain to live in the future, you produce ragged, oversensitive nerves. If you sag into your body, hiding while you let life go by, you grow old before your time and live only in the past. By watching your present use of hours, you can foretell your future, unless you change overnight.
Life is one barrier after another for you to surmount. Each hour means greater strength or greater weakness. Hours of self-pity weaken you, and tears make you a cousin to a jelly fish. Hours of courage strengthen you, and joy makes you alive.
Conquering self this hour creates a stronger desire to climb higher on tomorrow’s hours. Choose to stand on time this hour, concentrating all your powers in one direction. Years’ end is bound to find you nearer your chosen goal.
What’s in a Name?
Has the world called you an opportunist? Have you let down and slowed down because you can’t stand to be called names, especially this one?
Well, if anything said about you can stop you, you’ll never win any race. When a horse refuses to start with the rest, when he always gets out of hand, he goes into the racing discard pile. Life is surely one long race with time. However, life is good, though the going is mostly on a muddy track.
What if you do knock down the bar when you take a high jump? You can charge it to practice and keep on trying, can’t you? Falling doesn’t mean a thing, but mounting again counts.
Unless you watch for each opening, you’ll never win any race in life. Yet, if you see an opening and dash through before anyone else, you’ll be called an opportunist. How can anyone win anything without taking advantage of every opening that life offers?
So, play the game cleanly. Be proud of every scar, count every bruise as evidence of advance on success, and don’t mind a bit of mud. Take the bit in your teeth and ride hard. As an opportunist, be a good sport.
What to Do Next
You do know what to do next. You may think you don’t, but you always do. You stop and fumble to avoid what you wish to escape because you don’t like what you should do next. You may have hidden it from your conscious mind, but it is there, under the surface, a hindrance, a limitation.
If you’ve reached the end of your rope, you have only yourself to blame. It’s your job to know when your rope is getting short, and find another length to splice onto the end.
What wears you out, physically and mentally, isn’t the work you do, but your internal conflicts about doing the duties you feel belong to another. You feel imposed on and cheated of what’s rightfully yours, even if it’s just free time.
No one loses all faith and hope at once. The background of loss must cover a long period before you slow down, stop doing and waste time saying, “I don’t know what to do next.”
Another task is always at your fingertips. You always have another place to go, another person to see, another hour to live. You may have faith in this. Nothing can conquer faith. Your faith isunconquerable, so carry on! Do the next thing next!
White Heat
If you sit awake all night, waiting for a new dawn, you never see it because you’re too sleepy to know when it comes. If you stand and work for a new day, the dawn always appears, and you are awake to see it. When you sit long enough, you forget what you were waiting for and turn your interest to something else.
At the white point of heat, the steelworker pours the metal for a steel bar. He never allows it to cool before the pouring. Sitting and waiting cools you off, and the longer it continues the less enthusiasm you have to pour yourself into the needed mold of life.
Why can’t you get hot under the collar, or just hot without any collar about your job, your friends, your ideals? Why can’t you keep boiling over about your own future?
The experts call this white point of heat “efficiency,” but they never seem to tell you how to hold to that point. If you cool all day with boredom, you will surely be full of flaws at night. If you can learn how to boil all day, you can do anything you set your heart on, even when someone pushes you off the fire and into the corner.
The trick of success is to continue your effort and get the most from life by running on your own steam, which is that white point of heat needed to produce results!
Who’s the Goat?
Do you always avoid the blame by making someone else the goat? Or are you always made the family or office goat? Do you seem to invite this?
It takes two to make any bargain, and you need not be the second party. Allowing someone to tag you with a load you know nothing about can become a habit. Bearing the whole burden, taking all the leftovers, always getting the smallest piece of cake, having plans interfered with every time can finally make anyone a martyr. Worse, it can set the mind to enjoy being martyred.
Is it better to be the goat or to make someone else the goat? This depends upon your viewpoint. Keep right on being the goat, if it satisfies you and you enjoy it, otherwise speak up for justice.
Make a stand that the family share burdens equally. Let each in turn take the small piece of cake. They’ll respect you, even if they do not like it.
If you’re among the world’s goat-makers, don’t be surprised when, like proverbial chickens that come home to roost, your little goats return to their maker, butting you fore and aft. It’s better that both goat-ees and goat-ors mind their own business now.
Why Turn the Other Cheek?
Free advice to all would-be martyrs: To achieve martyrdom in the shortest possible time, try turning the other cheek whenever your manner or precious words of counsel offend someone. This is guaranteed to cause more folks to hate you than any other approach you can try.
If you don’t care much for being a martyr, you must learn a lesson. If you are foolish enough to get into a situation where someone wants to slap you once, it seems common sense to turn the other cheek for another slap to impress on your subconscious mind that you are in the wrongplace, to remember never to be caught there again.
Nothing is written in stone that tells you that you must return to the same person for a future slap for the same old thing. You are supposed to have the good judgment to avoid having to learn the same kind of lesson repeatedly.
Sacrifice those words and actions that give offense in favor of a charming personality. Which means more to you, martyrdom or charm?
X Equals Your Determination
Have you had an inner, secret urge all your life to do something different — something you’d love to do, but are afraid to start?
Never has an urge been placed within the heart of man that he could not realize, if he were willing to do enough good hard work to develop it. When an idea touches your mind, it has come from your Source and must, under law, carry with itself the ability to become that which it is, in form.
The difficulty of preparation and hardship of change is its only hold-back. What do you feel or think will hold you back? Analyze yourself carefully in stages and decide which trait is your own peculiar drawback to success. Are you afraid of being laughed at by your family? Whatever it is, bring it into the light of day, then firmly talk to yourself like this:
“You can be what you desire to be. You can do whatever you desire to do. You can make good, provided you make the first effort and start.” The rest is just plodding steadily toward that goal. Your ability equals your desires, X equals your determination, and you determine the value of X.
Your Chariot of Life
Will, desire and imagination are the tools you use to create your life, to envision or dream actively. They are your detriment or your salvation, according to how you use them.
Will and desire are the team mates drawing your chariot of life. Imagination is sitting in the driver’s seat, holding fast the reins of control. If the team pulls in the same direction and with equal strength, you can have anything you can imagine yourself as having.
Do your will and your desire pull together? If will chains you to a desk to work and desire leaves your body to go to the ballpark for the game, your team mates are pulling in opposite directions. Your imagination becomes confused and cannot concentrate upon the business in hand.
The broad highway of life leads straight ahead. If will and desire are pulling to either side, imagination is drawn and quartered trying to hold the lines and keep your chariot of life on the highway.
Will and desire must pull together always. Either bring desire back to the desk or take will out to the ball game. Get your imagination, desire and will going in the same direction, simultaneously.
Your Five-Year Plan
What have you planned to accomplish with your life by the end of this year? What is your five-year plan?
Unless you plan, you won’t do enough daily building to reach your desired place. Unless you set a charted course, your life will slip by and you’ll find the years have caught up with you without having furthered your aims.
If you don’t plan to uncover and unfold your greater abilities and powers, if you don’t take time daily for self-improvement, time steals away. One day you’ll realize that you’ve become a member in the “Grand Order of Discards and Has-Beens,” a large organization whose members are all waiting for something wonderful to happen.
You cannot wait to receive more before giving more. If you do, chances are you’ll never create the opportunity to show the world how good you are. Someone will always beat you to the next place by just a few minutes.
The more you give right where you are, without grudging the service, the greater your reward will be. What do you care about tough going, or bumps and bruises? The goal is the thing. Forget your bumps and bruises and get busy.
Your New Year
This is your year of fulfillment. Do you know exactly where you are going this year? Have you charted a new course to fit the changing times? It doesn’t matter how many small ports you are forced to visit by circumstances beyond your control, how often you must stop for forced repairs, how many contrary winds blow you off your charted course.
Delays cannot keep you from finally reaching your chosen goal, if you constantly hold to your original course, clearly outlined on your new chart. Always set your helm on a straight line back to your course of life. No matter the delay, return to the original line the instant your ship is free to move again.
Keep your mind made up. Do not allow anyone or anything to unmake it for you.
God’s winds are always with you. Do you know this deeply enough in your own heart to remain strong in confidence that you can win? Constant in your thinking and determination to strive and struggle with life itself until you have won?
Nothing is too hard to do, no effort too great or too long to make, no goal too distant to attain. The long-range view of life is the success view. When you cramp your view to today’s despair, you lose incentive and the power to move toward success. So, make yours a long-range vision, part of a 10- or 20-year plan.
Give yourself time enough to accomplish a truly great plan. Now is your time of fulfillment! “Old age” and “too late” don’t exist! Life is “deathless, ageless and abiding.” Life is “the same yesterday, today and forever,” and you are that life.
Chart a new course. Tie down your helm to stay the course, so no contrary winds of earth can blow you too far to return to that course. No heavy gale can take the helm from your hands, or make you alter the course toward your goal.
You are complete within yourself, and you are already your own fulfillment.
Your Subconscious Sieve
Do you have trouble remembering things? Do you continually think that perhaps your memory is failing you? Why do you think this?
Subconscious memory is a sieve so fine that nothing ever falls through, but is held there for you to draw on the memory impressions of your life with all its experiences. The subconscious is a willing servant, ever ready to aid you by sending whatever you desire to use to the conscious mind. However, the subconscious grows careless unless it is rigorously well-trained and maintained.
Any servant treated in a slipshod way does slipshod work. The subconscious memory servant is no exception to this rule. If your thinking is sloppy and confused, if you’re always contradicting yourself, subconscious memory may refuse to answer your call. It’s neither lost nor gone — it needs only some good, hard corrective measures.
Before sleep at night give it definite orders to listen and obey your commands. Tell yourself that your memory is wonderful, that it sends everything you need instantly. Don’t contradictyourself. Keep coaching yourself until you get results!
Zest or Rest
The only way to make life bearable is to live vigorously and gloriously every minute. Running from life’s problems does no good. A problem has a way of catching up with you at the worst possible moment, even while you are congratulating yourself that you are rid of it.
You’d never get to enjoy your escape, even if you could find a place to “leave it all behind.” Everyone else would follow you to escape, too.
There you have it! You have no place to go to get away from life. No amount of wishing, fretting, fussing or hating life will rid you of it. If you try to avoid living life where you are now, you find yourself twisted out of shape from walking forward while looking backward!
Get right down on your knees and scrub the mess. Roll up your sleeves and punch the fear. Take up the duster and clean out the cobwebs of your thinking and emotions. These efforts will make you zestful about living and enable you to meet life head on.
Stop thinking about how noble you are. Brush the old clutter off your tired brain cells. Make room for new ideas, new friends, new plans and more life to pay extra dividends.
The End of Part 4
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 3
Contents
Odds and Ends
One Step at a Time
Open Your Door
Opinion or Action
Peak Performance
Poise
Prime Your Pump
Problems
Promotions
Racetrack or Rut-track
Resting UP
Return on Investment
Rich Man, Poor Man
Rx for Joy
Score on Life
Seasons of the Soul
“Sensitivity”
Stagnation or Clarification
Stars: Alibi or Goal
Taking Stock
The Balance of Power
The Burden of Habit
The Doing Quality of Faith
The Education Habit
The Face of Beauty