Monday Musings-Know Your Dream

The below column was written some months after my life had begun to reknit into whatever it might become as I adjusted to widowhood. So many people just kind of give up after a major loss and they encounter the need to fashion a different life. I like to remember and quote something I read long ago and have no idea who said it. Whoever it was, I thank them. "Don't cry ('...for too long', as a sweet cousin we recently lost wrote in a letter to her family.) because it ended, smile because it happened."

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     Hold On Tight to Your Dreams

Better advice in a song was never given. When the Electric Light Orchestra first recorded their song my life was so full I barely remember hearing it. About ten years ago I re-discovered it. A few years down life’s road waited an event, my husband’s major stroke/cerebral hemorrhage, which signaled the beginning of the end of something that had defined my life since I was nineteen, marriage.
     My marriage had included dreams, also, though most were shared dreams that God graciously granted. A peaceful home, a beautiful daughter, a grandson to be proud of, loving families and many dear friends.
     But in my heart I cherished dreams that were mine alone. Like most people, I had doubts those dreams would ever come to fruition. But I learned, as many people have, that once I stepped out and made a few efforts God, or the Universe, depending on your persuasion, set events in motion to bring them to pass. 
     One long-held dream was that I would be a published author, accepted and active with other writers in writers groups. The adage that we should be careful what we wish for comes to mind, but that’s another story. After I began seriously submitting my work I had stories accepted in print and online, wrote and published a couple of books.
     A few months before my husband’s death I achieved another goal I’d studied for off and on for several years. I took and passed the exam for my amateur radio operator license and am now a member of a local amateur radio club. My call sign – KJ4WJL.
     Since I first began seriously marketing my work, I had kept one dream close, to become a regular newspaper columnist. No editor was even slightly interested the few times I mustered up the nerve to pitch my ideas. But this year, twelve months into widowhood, that dream, too, has been realized in the column you’re now reading.
     After the anguish of three years watching my husband weaken and decline until his battle was finally over, these personal achievements gave me a stable place to stand and regroup when my world crumbled. I think he would be proud because he was my biggest supporter in all my attempts  to achieve my dreams.
     I’d love to hear from anyone else who has pursued his or her dream. If not, why not? To my mind no one is too old to go for a dream.

Jottings from the Past

Welcome to Friday's Jottings from the Past on Post Oak Chronicles.
I'm going to do my best to do a different one every Friday. We'll see how long that lasts, knowing full well what a procrastinator I am.
I was encouraged to do this by a new/not-so-new friend who presented a program last week at a local writers group meeting. Meaning I'd met her once a year for several years at a writers conference. Her name might be Donna and she might be a professor at King College in Bristol, Tennessee! If you see this, thank you again, Donna!
She talked about blogs and posting regularly on them being such a chore. During lunch I mentioned to her that I wrote a short chatty, family-friendly column that lasted four years for a small local weekly (no longer published) a few years ago. She told me I had a veritable backlog of blog posts! And she was right.
So I'm going to start off with posting one of those with maybe a few comments on Fridays. And also that I'm changing the appearance of the blog, still working on that. Tune in next week, it might be entirely different!
This first Friday's Jottings is a column I did on inspiring people, of which there are many in this old world, believe it or not.

Inspiring people
aren't necessarily famous or prominent. They can be, but aside from a various sized circle of personal friends and acquaintances, well-known people inspire at a distance, you might say. However all of us, I hope, know people who inspire in our own circles. Either because they are the doers of inspiring deeds or just by keeping on putting one foot in front of the other in spite of being hindered by obstacles we might feel would have put us down.
We all probably know people for whom illness has been an obstacle. Once I knew a woman, a neighbor, who became paralyzed from the waist down after an automobile accident several years before I met her. Afterward she was confined to her bed for the rest of her life. She had been engaged but broke it off, refusing to allow her fiance to be bound to a disabled woman. She worked daily from her bed, providing the only telephone answering service in town. Her life inspired able as well as disabled people in much the same way that Joni Erickson Tada, paralyzed in a diving accident at eighteen.
Others also do their inspiring deeds out of the public eye. One person I know is generous with her time and talent for preparing delicious food for others’ special occasions, weddings, anniversary celebrations, etc. Another spends little of her money on herself. She gives monthly not only to members of her family but to other individuals around her with fewer resources, to an organization that helps injured returning soldiers. People like these are my inspiration.