Something Beyond— At West End Gallery
The more intensely we feel about an idea or a goal, the more assuredly the idea, buried deep in our subconscious, will direct us along the path to its fulfillment.
—Earl Nightingale
Feeling a little under the weather. You might think it was from my treatment, but it actually has more to do with a visit to our vet yesterday with one of my three studio cats, Gary. Yes, I named him Gary– but that’s a story for some other time. Anyway, Gary has never been to the vet so we weren’t sure how he would react. He is very skittish and quick to react. I did mention we share a name?
Let’s just say it didn’t go well. Without going into all the details, Gary somehow received his needed shots and I ended up going to Urgent Care after he clamped his jaws pretty hard onto my thumb. I was given antibiotics. I am glad I went since my thumb last night was extremely sore, hot, and swollen with a nice purplish plum hue.
Still sore this morning though less so but I am left with a pretty good headache. As a result, I am replaying this post that has run several times over the years. I run this post about every five years so it’s about due. As I say below, there are lessons to be learned in every endeavor we undertake. For instance, I learned yesterday to not try to grab a mad cat.
Anyway, here’s that post from a number of years back.
It’s funny sometimes what you take from an experience in your life. At one point in my life I was in the retail car business, working at a Honda dealership in Ithaca both as a salesman and for a time as a finance manager. In order to keep their sales staff engaged and excited about pushing their product, the management there would periodically send us to seminars with industry-specific motivational speakers. They would also provide sets of motivational tapes from other speakers that they would encourage us to listen to in our free time.
One of the sets of tapes was from famed motivational speaker Earl Nightingale who had a deep and engaging voice that added a serious dimension to whatever he said. As I listened to his tapes, it was easy to feel my interest growing as he told his little tales, and his lessons began registering within me.
One of his stories was a short retelling of a classic lecture from the early 1900’s called Acres of Diamonds from Russell H. Conwell (1843-1925), an interesting fellow who was a Baptist minister, a lawyer, a philanthropist and the founder and first president of Temple University.
The lecture, one that Conwell delivered over 5000 times during his lifetime, made the point that the riches we seek are often right in our own backyards. His tale is of an African farmer who sells his farm in order to go in search of diamonds and finds nothing but failure. His search ends with his suicide. Meanwhile, the man who took over the farm soon found an abundance of diamonds on the property and established one of the largest diamond mines in Africa.
There were a lot of lessons to be learned from this tale. obviously. But the primary lesson for me was that I had to leave the car business– it was not my backyard. It was the place to which I had come in search of my own diamonds. I had not even, at that point, began to search my own backyard.
I am not sure if that was the message that management had been hoping would sink in.
Or maybe it was. I was, after all, a pretty unmotivated employee at that point.
Their intent didn’t matter as I was soon on a different path, one that ultimately led me here, thankfully. I like to think that I have found the diamonds that were always under my feet. Or in my heart and mind. However you want to look at it.
The other part of Nightingale’s message was that you had to set a course, aim for a destination. Everything was possible if you knew where you wanted to go and truly set your mind to it. He gave a laundry list of great human accomplishments that were achieved once we put our minds and wills in motion towards their fulfillment.
That resonated strongly with me then and now. I had seen many people over the years who seemed deeply unhappy in their lives and most had no direction going forward, no destination for which they were working. Aimless, they drifted like a rudderless boat on the sea, going wherever the strongest current took them without having any influence over this motion.
If you can name it, you can do it in some form. Having a desired destination allows the mind, often subconsciously, to create a course that leads to that place.
As I said, it’s funny how things influence you. It’s been well over thirty years since I heard those words, but they still resonate strongly with me, even now. I try to be always conscious of the goals I set, knowing that the mind and the universe will always try to make a way for the possibility of achievement.
Most every job I had in my earlier life gave me little satisfaction and meager wages. However, the lessons learned from each were worth far more than financial rewards. They taught me what I was and was not. In this case, I learned that what I wanted most was to work my own fields, to find what riches I might sow and reap in that soil.
And I now always keep an eye out for a flash of light, a glint under my feet, that might be my own diamond.
Lesson learned. All I could ask and more…
Redtree Times 