We had the opportunity to attend a conference in Miami where one of the keynote speakers was a woman who had survived the holocaust. On the day her family was “rounded up” and put into a ghetto in Warsaw, her father had a prompting to tell her to wear her ski shoes to school. Though it wasn't cold and she complained she wore the shoes — the same ones she would wear for the next three years as she suffered first in the ghettos, then in a horrendous concentration camp and then on the “Death March.”
At the end of the war when the Nazis didn't want the outside world to know what had happened, she was one of four thousand Jews from her camp forced to walk hundreds of miles in the ice and cold of winter wearing rags. She was one of a hundred and twelve who survived.
While in the concentration camp she described being brutalized and starved. Standing in line for food she prayed that just one lump of potato would find its way to her ladle of thin watery broth when it came out of the pot to her battered tin bowl. Her best friend, a former neighbor who was a concert pianist, was suffering by her side. One week before she died, this friend found one precious raspberry in the gutter and harbored it tenderly all day until she was able to give this treasure to her.
There were so many things that she mourned the loss of in her years of mistreatment and incarceration but she said that the thing she missed and dreamed of most was “a boring evening at home.” She would have given almost anything for what we would surely take for granted! I was struck with that statement as I realized how often we just take those simple blessings of reading bedtime stories with our kids and then getting a snack from a loaded refrigerator for granted. Keeping focused on those seemingly simple blessings makes our lives full and happy!
In our "journeys" through life, we need to better appreciate where we are, to be more aware of where we are both in the earth and in our eternities and in the phases of our lives, to have more perspective on both our blessings and our trials.
Most of all, whether or not we travel, we need to understand that home is the best place of all, home with our families, home where we are with those we love most and with our memories and our heritage and our friends, home where we can have those wonderful "boring evenings" that are the heart and core of our lives!
Seasons
Part of the awareness I seek is a clearer perspective on the current season of my life. As much as we would like to stay (or think we would like to stay — due to the media) in our youth, in the springtime season, it doesn't happen, nor should it. Spring is no more beautiful than summer, or than winter, or than fall, just a different kind of beauty.
One blessing of living in a place with four distinct seasons, is that it can make you more aware of change, more aware of the uniqueness of each season's beauty, and perhaps more appreciative of the metaphor of life's seasons — of the vibrant, uninhibited wonder of spring, the full heat and abundance of summer, the fruitful and colorfulness of fall, and the serenity and wisdom of winter.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is to not align their priorities with their season. One of the most common (and sad) responses we get after our parenting presentations is, "I wish I had focused more on this many years ago when my children were small," or, "The kids are gone now — I didn't realize how fast that season goes." Or, "I've still got the business, but the kids have moved on — I wish I'd spent more time with them and less with the business."
I think it was Whittier who said, "For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these — 'it might have been.'"
One season lived with the right priorities, makes the next season bright and happy. What ate the priorities of Autumn?
Keep sending me your thoughts!
Notes
Awareness, perspective, and gratitude. I can't get those three words out of my mind this morning. And I don't want to. Because I feel that they are three keys to joy. All three of them are free, all three can be increased by the process of thought. All three are available to us at any time, and in whatever quantities we wish (and are willing to work for).
"Work," in this case, is mental work. Thinking about them is what brings more of them, because they are composed of thought! They come by thought and by faith. We gain more of them by applying thought and faith.
And those two things are related and overlapping (thought and faith). Joseph Smith said, "When a man works by faith, he works by mental exertion rather than by physical force."
So we strive for (and think for, and pray for) more awareness, more perspective, and more gratitude, and the result is more joy.
Seeker
Let me finish another part of the 86-year-old Holocaust survivor's story because it contains something we all seek. At the end of the death march, the few survivors were locked in a barn, and their Nazi guards (who now knew that the war was ending and that they were going to lose) had decided to burn the barn and kill the surviving Jews within it. Miraculously though, their detonating device failed, and as they retreated, the barn was still in tact, with its emaciated, bedraggled occupants still alive.
The survivors finally got the door open, but no one dared to venture out, thinking they would be shot. Finally, the lady who was telling the story, a young woman with barely the strength to stand, peeked through the door and saw troops that turned out to be American liberators. She walked out and was met by the patrol leader who steadied her as she tried to bring him back to the barn to help the others.
He opened the barn door for her, the first act of kindness she had received since her capture, and she said something like, "You don't need to do that for me; I'm a Jew." The handsome, smiling American soldier said, "Wonderful — so am I."
The beautiful ending of this true story is that the Jewish girl (who was now the 86-year-old telling us her story) and the courteous patrol leader who liberated her got married a year later and lived a long and happy life, raised a family, and had a good many "boring evenings at home."
