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.
Familiar Guests
Imagine two coaches, poised on a rise above the beautiful City of Desire, which lies in the distance, like a mirage. Both coaches roll downhill over a meadow to a fork in the road. The way right enters hilly country, while the left road enters beautiful terrain.
Apathy drives the team, Opinion and Prejudice, as they dash along, taking the easy way at the fork because Apathy confounds their sense of direction. Doubt and Fear ask for a ride. Prudence says no, but Apathy says it doesn’t matter, pushes Prudence off and Fear sits in his place.
They stop for Self-Pity and Gossip, then Intolerance and Pride, Revenge, Confusion and I Don’t Care, a four-year-old who says, “I won’t. I can’t.” Worry, who’s always hungry, sits between Sorrow and Tears. The team begins to lag with the load, and the coach finally gets stuck in the Bog of Despair.
Reason and Imagination drive the other coach pulled by the team, Desire and Will. They choose the rough and stony way, but reorient themselves on every rise. Their passengers are Faith and Understanding, and Poise and Power, a newly married pair.
They meet Beauty, Strength, Joy, Ecstasy, Rapture and Delight, who surround the coach singing. Comprehension, the gate keeper, welcomes them at the City of Desire.
You meet all these familiar guests in life. It’s up to you to choose which mystery guests you invite into your coach. Everyone has stood on that rise and decided whether to take the easy way or the hard. No matter how often you begin the journey, finally you must choose the way to the City of Desire.
Fan the Flame of Desire
The “wishers,” the “hopers” and the “wanters” never get very far with their daydreaming. “Wishers” use the sitting end of their spine as a wishbone. “Hopers” are always praying and hoping for the best, but expecting the worst. “Wanters” demand what they want of life, despite payment here or hereafter.
All your new ideas come from dreaming dreams and seeing visions. However, you can’t just sit and idly wish, hope, or demand of life. Heart fires go out under passivity.
You must fan those “wishing, hoping and wanting” triplets into the flame of desire in your heart before they can work to your advantage. A flaming desire moves into an “active becoming” that can work wonders in any age.
The difficulty is that you allow your flaming desire to cool so often while you let go of your plan. It takes so much time to whip up the blaze again that you have no time left for active work.
When you start building for new things in your life, you must stick to it. You can’t turn against your desire by wondering what you’ll do if it doesn’t work for you.
You must be faithful to your plan, never again turn to passive daydreaming, or let old dreams absorb you. You must always possess the active ability to dream new things into expression while holding steady the flame of desire. Let a flaming desire possess you!
From Mountains to Molehills
Have all your pleasures turned to labors? Do you find yourself dreading the very things that you loved to do only a short time ago?
If so, you must add some new zest to your living, something entirely different must enter your day’s activities. You must find something else to give new hope to your tired heart. Where can you go to find these new hopes and desires?
Naturally, it would be a very simple matter if you could buy or find them on the outside, but you cannot renew life in this manner — and the effort of digging digging out your buried hopes from within is almost too great to contemplate. However, since no one will ever stick them on you from the outside, you must seek them within your soul.
Sometimes only physical fatigue or emotional reactions cause such a state of mind. Whatever the cause, you can conquer it only by yourself.
If you have been making mountains out of your little molehills, start digging. Enough will power applied now will make molehills from your mountains!
From Tail to Kite
Anyone becomes quite tired of being a “nobody” while everyone else is leading and getting credit for it while “anyone” works just as hard but is never noticed. People dislike the idea of being only the tail to some large kite with plenty of force and ability to fly high.
You’d like to be a kite yourself, but you can’t push your way through. It isn’t much consolation to know that no kite can leave the ground without its tail — you still do not like being the tail!
String is useless while waiting around doing nothing; however, string and kite can set a new standard in high goals. It takes that string and bits tied together to balance the kite, and where that kite goes, the tail follows!
While serving as a balance-tail and string-anchor to earth for another’s kite, you can learn how to become a kite yourself. The alertness and aliveness you learn while acting as a balance will allow you to soar high when your turn comes.
Let out that string and help the other fellow’s kite aloft. Some day his kite may fly right out of your life and forget to return — but you’ll be ready to become a kite, really free.
Give it Your Best
It is better to “make haste slowly” than to do tasks in a hurry and find that you must do them over because of slipshod work.
As you travel along life’s road, you may feel that the time you spend having to stop and do so many trivial things for family and friends is holding you back. You plan to do just so much during the day, but you have a dozen unexpected calls on your time and energy, which leaves you at night with almost nothing of the day’s original plan accomplished.
Your work piles up. Saturday finds you exhausted. Sunday is no day of rest.
This is one lesson you can learn and, in learning, save yourself bodily wear and tear, at least. Never work for greater patience, or you find your life full of little things to try your patience — attracted by your call for more patience. Move up into your tower room of poise. From this vantage place of Power your only expression will be peaceful, expressing all the patience you need.
Do your very best in each thing. Use your best mind, your best heart, your best effort, even on extra calls and the time you save will give you all the time you need!
Give to Get
Has life let you down? Has your search for sympathy and understanding been unfruitful? Are you tired of waiting for someone to give you both? Has your expectation of another’s sympathy and understanding led you into a load of obligations?
Many married men and women are caring for a family because they thought their partner was sympathetic and understanding. Both were seeking the same thing and both were fooled.
Most folks want free sympathy and understanding without giving anything in return, except housework, cooking or a monthly check to cover expenses. The truth is that giving of the inner self must earn both sympathy and understanding.
Remember that day you went home to get sympathy and found someone with a worse story, so they thought, and you gave them comfort? You found your release in giving to someone else, and your own burden grew lighter as you gave.
That which you demand of life, you are always forced to give to life.
Growing Up
Have they called you a failure? Did it hurt? Did it make you sore? Or did it rouse your pride to greater endeavor?
You can take it as you choose: As an opportunity to toughen your moral fiber, or as an occasion to become involved in more self-pity. You can make it a stepping stone to advancement, or something to push you further into your shell. No one cares very much which of these you choose.
Do others begin to tell you that it’s too far to the top, it’s too hard to climb, you can’t do it because you haven’t the education or the ability to make the grade? When they do, then you have already started the long climb to the top.
Your head is already above the crowd, or no one would spend his valuable time telling you that you are a failure. They are afraid you will pass them on the way up.
From now on use every bit of faultfinding as a challenge to greater endurance. Use both criticism and the laughs you’ll get as a measuring rod. Watch yourself grow!
Failure isn’t real, but it is lack of faith in yourself. Turn your back on what “might have been” and become what will be when faith rules your life.
Half a Loaf or Whole
Is your life one compromise after another? Does your day always leave you with an armful of substitutes instead of the things that you start to gather?
Have you almost reached the stage where you do not know substitutes from the things that you wanted? Have you buried all your ideals under such a mass of practical ideas and so much common sense that you can’t find them?
You can’t ever forget that person you wanted to be, but you’ll never get anywhere just by sighing over your lost youth either. Every idealistic problem always has a common sense approach. If you give up because you can’t make it work the first time, you can’t expect much from it.
Because the approach to its creation was wrong doesn’t mean that the idea was wrong. It only needs further thinking to find the right way to make it practical. All the rest of those things that can’t be done are going to get themselves done, so why don’t you see what you can do about them?
Compromise if you must; use that half a loaf or that crust, but be sure to keep on wanting the whole loaf and the real thing.
Hours of Gold
Do you know that every hour is all new, shiny and golden? Do you know that God has sent them to you as pure Light?
What if He sent them all gray and drab and you had to make them into Light? That would be hard, wouldn’t it? Yet He has sent them to you as perfect as He can make them, and has fully equipped you to take care of them and see that they are not made into darkness.
You have feet, hands, heart, brain cells, faculties, voice, tongue and lips to form words and send them forth, all to keep these golden hours pure Light. Isn’t that an easy task? He gave you the easy part to do, to return to Him each night the day’s page of hours unspotted by the world.
This is your hour to open a new account with life. In this account, deposit all you desire to draw on for your present needs. You cannot draw from it unless you have already deposited in it exactly what you expect from life.
What have you already deposited with life? Cold emotions, dark thoughts of doubt and fear? Or are you now drawing on an account overflowing with joy? Remember, you must place your own account with life. No one can ever do this for you. You can open it with whatever deposit you want.
How about a new account with God’s Bank of Life, all joy, plus? Resolve to deposit a huge new account, right now, of all good things overflowing. Remember, God is abundantly able to supply all you can imagine or desire.
Ideas in Mind
Plato said, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” During the next ten years, necessity will cause more new inventions than during the past hundred years. Anyone can see this, for the lack and shortage is public property, and we must find substitutes.
Inventors will recombine many old materials to replace those we no longer have to use. Someday we will use coal exclusively for materials and electricity will come directly from the atmosphere. Scientific research is open to anyone who likes it.
Have you thought seriously of how this relates to you? What contribution would you like to make toward this change? Are you completely satisfied with your work? If not, now is the time to make that longed-for change.
You won’t feel so conspicuous while everything else is in transition, too. Begin right now to do what you really have always wanted to do. Fifteen minutes a day for ten years will cover any college course of study.
Someone must remake all our gadgets to fit the need, and these new ideas are now waiting in Mind. Someone must invent them, why not you? You can make the effort, can’t you?
Inner Peace
Peace comes from an inner grace that radiates from the soul into the world. Peace comes from understanding others, not having them understand you. “Live and let live” is probably the motto to cover this.
Family peace is established when each member does everything possible to understand the others. The first step toward permanent peace, whether among families or nations is to live without misunderstanding.
You could make any nation peaceful by removing all the people — there it would be, all peace and calm! It’s the action of rubbing elbows with those who are not agreeable that causes disagreement.
You cannot look for peace from outside. True, lasting peace must come from that inner sense of well-being buried deep within each heart. It must come from a conviction in your heart that you can bring it about by living in peace in your spot. You cannot talk peace and go home and fight with family.
Peace can be made a habit, just as easily as any other emotion. The sooner you start to cultivate peace habits, the more rapidly it will spread into the world.
A peace that will last must be started sometime. Why not now — by everyone who wants peace!
It’s Never Too Late
Right now is the time to take a firmer grip on that load you’re pushing to the top of the hill. This is the right place to draw a deeper breath for those last few difficult steps.
The long climb has made you tired — who wouldn’t be with such a load? Your poor feet and hands are aching and blistered, but don’t stop now — the top is in sight!
Remember how you started: Young and confident, gay and laughing, ideals and idols, dreams and visions, ready to conquer every dragon in your path, ready to lay the whole world at the feet of your love, ready to give up the whole world for your love?
Well, it’s never too late — it’s only too soon if you have not yet created your dreams or collected your million. Get this one thing: It’s never too late.
Rest a while, but do not let go of your load again or it will roll to the bottom of the hill as it has so often in the past, with wrappings broken and your life scattered in every direction. It takes so much valuable time to seek and pick it up again.
Turn around if you must, but keep your back against the load. Don’t lose an inch of ground gained. See how far you’ve climbed? A little extra push, a little more steam, an ounce more of grit and you’ll be over the top!
Jealous Mistresses
Life and salvation are free to everyone alike. They are priceless, the most expensive commodities in existence. They cost nothing, yet they cost everything. To hold them, you must devote every moment of life to them — both are jealous mistresses and brook no rivals in love.
Yet why do you need more life and what good is salvation? You must do better to save yourself from economic slavery.
The whole world needs saving. Weak eyes, weak backs, weak knees and weak minds mean lack of life. To be saved from weaknesses, you need ever more life. To be saved from darkness of slavery, you need more Light.
To have strength and freedom, you must court light and life. You must woo them above all else. Life and salvation are free to be loved and held in triumph.
Just DO It
If you live among others, you are bound to blunder occasionally. The better you are, the more a tiny mistake stands out, the more folks see it, the more wrath it calls upon you. Another, who is not so good, may make many mistakes and never gets blamed for it, which peeves you.
Being “called on” one mistake is better than having a dozen overlooked. No one expects much from the lame ducks, but if you are good, everyone not only expects but demands more from you. Regard the reprimands as spurs to greater effort, for no one can afford to become satisfied with his performance, or he will lose his reputation.
If you’ve been a bumbling blunderer, keep an account of every future bumble and study how-not-to-do-it until you remember them. You’ll learn all the right ways and methods one day by the process of elimination. Never join those who are afraid to do anything. If you aren’t sure, do it anyhow, and do your very best.
Remain cheerful, leave behind self-disgust and self-blame, and pay any price necessary to become letter-perfect in your relationships. With your eyes facing front, reach out to new ways to live, and practice self-discipline. You’ll win.
Law of Averages
Have you forgotten how to meet the new need for greater speed? Have you lost the desire to accomplish more every hour? Have lean years slowed you down or made you feel old?
The law of averages and compensation is exact, no matter whether you believe it. If your daily average of service is only 10 percent of your ability, then 10 percent is all you’ll take in returns. To get 100 percent from life, you must put that much in as your share of the world’s service.
Service is the rent you pay for the space you occupy. This investment of ideals and service given to life must return to you in the amount you’ve invested, and you must average 100 percent every day.
If you can shake loose from past self-indulgences, you can scale any heights that you can envision. Accept a greater destiny for yourself and keep your eyes fixed on a long distance view, if necessary.
You are not less than you were, despite time, age and waiting. You are all that you were plus all that added experience has given you. Buried deep in your soul is the ability to bring forth your finest dreams and they fuel themselves!
Stop resisting your destiny, and step up your creative effort!
Life’s New Opportunities
Are you fond of airing your opinions or of telling someone off? Do you often threaten to tell someone all about what you think of his wrong ideas?
Lying in wait for the other fellow is all right, if you don’t happen to be the other fellow. Do you wait until the other fellow is completely off guard, then land hard, making him look foolish, making him stutter and fumble in dismay? This may give you satisfaction, but it leads to a dead end eventually.
Right or wrong, must you always be right? Opinions and prejudices change with the seasons. Sometimes you later find that everyone was wrong. If you are too wrapped up in what you think you know, you’ll never be alert enough to find the new answers to the new opinions.
You gain a reputation for a snappy comeback only by watching for the new opportunities in life. Dwelling upon old issues clouds the thinking processes and persistently giving away pieces of mind might lead to giving away too much! Then what would you do? You might give away all that you have — one piece at a time!
Life’s Balance Sheet
How deep is your bondage to people, to ideas, or to your self? Is your freedom-seeking a desperation that is driving you into greater confusion?
Trying to avoid responsibilities and planning to “get away from it all” might work, if you could “lose yourself.” Unfortunately, you take yourself along when you run away. If you dislike rain in one city, you will certainly dislike it in another city.
Have you taken a self-inventory lately to see where you stand? What have you found? Does your balance sheet really balance, or have you debits in red? Has your service been halfhearted because more than half your heart is elsewhere?
The only way to balance your book of life is to cure you of the wrong kind of desire-ideas. Tinkering with the laws of life will not cure this. Giving up the desire-idea of escape means working right where you are with all your heart centered upon the work.
True freedom comes from conquering what surrounds you. Emancipation from any place or situation comes from mastering yourself and the condition, instead of running from it. True freedom is accepting your responsibilities and getting acquainted with life!
Life’s Basic Types
In life you meet just a few basic types. You can tell who they are by what they say: “Blamers” want God to do it for them and blame Him when life does not go their way. “If I knew what God wanted, I would do it. God never answers my prayers. If God wants me to move up, He should lift these things from my path. God is punishing me.”
The “wisher” class waits for success to fall into their laps, and everything is too much trouble: “This is so hard. I just wish God would take care of this. I never get what I want. God doesn’t answer my prayers.”
The “off in a corner” type says “I can’t stand the vibration of a group. I can do it alone. I don’t need help.”
The “fearful” type is afraid to be wealthy or to be trusted with money. “Money isn’t important to me.”
Who can pay the bills by being proud of poverty? “God must not want me to have it.” God trusts you with the priceless gift of free choice, so why shouldn’t He trust you with His infinite substance? Stop being afraid that if it’s good for you, it will hurt someone else.
You can become a creator. God can’t wait for you to become perfect, but uses you in the hour you see perfection. If God can do such magnificent work in your ten minutes of burning desire, think what He could do if you stood at that white point of heat constantly.
Look UP, Not Back
Once upon a time, so the story goes, two cities were to be destroyed by a great fire. No one believed that they would be destroyed except the prophet who received the information when he was without witnesses. He believed, so he removed his family from the cities.
Any woman could understand the Lot’s wife and why she looked back to see whether the cities really were burning. She looked back even after she had been told she would turn into a pillar of salt if she did. In the first place, her husband was always talking about something.
She had just hung new drapes in the living room, the furniture had been recovered and she had a new piano that she didn’t want to leave behind. She just had to take a peek. One look back turned her into a pillar of salt!
Perhaps you do not believe the story, but you do look back. People turn to hardened arteries, hardened brain cells, hardened hearts and lives.
Looking forward and living upward renews the cells and makes for youth and beauty.
Which do you prefer? Hanging onto past glory and fame, while turning to a pillar of salt, or joy today?
Love’s Golden Thaw
Do you feel that you’ve given too much of yourself too extravagantly in the past? Does no one ever appreciate what you’ve done for them? Has love passed you by? Does no one ever give you a gift?
Are you the one who does all the giving? Is all the bread you so generously sliced from your loaf of life still floating around somewhere? Perhaps it’s frozen fast to one forgotten event and cannot move to return to you.
Love is the magnetic, golden thaw that calls your own to you. Only love can open a barred door and melt frozen assets.
Giving from a sense of duty, obligation or resentment sends forth the gift as cold ice to be resented in turn by the receiver. Giving easily, but with regret later, freezes every gift. Ice cannot move of itself, so how can a frozen gift return to the giver?
Love is elastic, and any gift given in love returns immediately, having collected the butter and jam for your slice. Love increases itself, going and returning. Turn on the heat! Melt that ice! Spread on that love!
Love the Promise
The tears people shed about unfulfilled promises could irrigate the Sahara Desert. Most people are sincere in what they say, as they say it. You may even think you mean the hasty, angry words you speak, but realize later that they were born of hurt and grief. Your dearest loved ones may look like ogres to you at night, but shrink to normal size in the morning.
Life is full of situations where you make promises impossible of fulfillment: The friends you promise to see often, the letters you never find time to write, the little attentions you intend to give your family but forget. You mean your promises with all your heart — when you make them.
Why can’t you underwrite your life with common sense? Why not sip the last bit of joy from each promise another makes, then forget it? Why not accept the love behind the promise, and take your discounts then?
If they fulfill the promise, you have another great joy. If they forget it, you are out nothing. You have not wasted any time or emotion over its fulfillment, so you cannot be disappointed. Forget the tears and be happy.
Make Every Minute Count
Do you put off certain tasks until you have “spare” time? Do you spend time resting and letting down while you wait for others? Do you unfinished projects clutter your closets, basement and attic?
Ruskin said that he could tell what a man was by the way he used his spare time. Some folks use it resting until they finally become invalids for life. “Letting down” leaves you too low to do anything when you try to get up. Use a stop watch on yourself for one day, and the total of unused minutes will amaze you.
One who has a poor memory, who does not exercise his powers of recollection, who lets brain cells and nerve centers atrophy is only a lazy person. Make yourself memorize something while knitting, sewing, gardening or mowing the lawn. Prose, or poetry, do it now!
Enough spare time will finish all the tasks and reading you’ve long put off. Every five minutes spent “doing” will cover much ground in a year. Don’t wait for three hours, use that three minutes. Harness your mind to the present. Use all your spare time to prevent useless stagnation. Make every moment count in constructive practice for doing!
Making Time Fly
Failure does not exist. Each is a success exactly as far as today has brought him. Failure consists of getting tired and hunting a place to sit and rest while asking “why” of life. The only answer is more effort. The only cure for life is more life.
Too many “whys” produce self-pity, which drains the body of all desire for more life. Success is steadily marching toward a goal, the extra pressure you apply to get to the top, the reaching forward that draws to you more life.
If your work or play absorbs you, you never tire while at it, and time passes on wings. The secret is to carry over the same absorbing interest into the less interesting parts of your life.
Keep your attention centered on what interests you in life. Make yourself take an interest in things about you. Hold yourself to that high point of quickened interest, and warm up to the dreaded task. Speed up the work you are doing or find new ways to do it.
You can push just a little bit harder. You can do just a little better and find something beautiful to think about. Stop asking “why” you have to, and get busy now doing something you really like to do!
Mastery: The Bottom Line
Do you seek freedom from boring relatives or domineering friends who push you around and dictate to you? Do you give of your service with an inner grudge, thinking, “Well, you can have it, but you’re not welcome to it”? Many do, though they ask no credit on the outside.
If this is your attitude, now is the right time to change. Emancipation comes only through mastering the inner self. Self-mastery is the only freedom.
No matter how hard you try, you cannot master anyone else. You can remake no one, though you may spend your whole life trying. You can conquer self by changing your general attitude toward family, friends and life.
Each is in exactly the right place now for learning his next lesson. If you do not like it here, then this not the place waiting for you in the Divine Plan. It is the place you have made for yourself. You can leave anytime you like by cleaning your present spot and learning to like the lesson, not the place.
You can change your mind, which is one thing for which you are wholly responsible. You cannot control outer things or people, but you can control yourself. Miracles come from a change of mind and heart, but you must make the change.
Mathematics of Life
Life itself follows mathematical laws, all under the rules of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. When you do not follow the rules, you become unbalanced and confused.
Using physical energy subtracts energy from the body, which you must replace with more air, food and rest. Mental work subtracts from mental energy, and you must replace it through relaxation and recreation. Prayer must increase the Power of the spiritual life, the very essence of both the mental and physical life.
Letting go of the old is subtraction. Adding the new is addition. You must divide the essential from the nonessential, lest your life becomes cluttered with unimportant matters and filled with confusion.
No one can govern your mind or heart unless you allow it, so you can subtract the unnecessary thoughts and emotions, if you choose. Yet first you must divide what builds from what tears down your life.
Add room so your natural abilities and hidden talents have a chance to breathe and multiply themselves a thousandfold. Adding zest and multiplying enthusiasm makes every day a new adventure. Subtract the old stuff that bores you to death. Dullness vanishes when you are fully alive.
The End of Part 2
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 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
Edna Miriam Lister – Life in A Nutshell Part 4