How to Be Perfect and Thoreau

Excerpts from "How to be Perfect"

by Ron Padgett

Get some sleep.

Eat an orange every morning.

Be friendly. It will help make you happy.

Hope for everything. Expect nothing.

Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room
before you save the world. Then save the world.
Be nice to people before they have a chance to behave badly.

Don't stay angry about anything for more than a week, but don't
forget what made you angry. Hold your anger out at arm's length
and look at it, as if it were a glass ball. Then add it to your glass
ball collection.

Wear comfortable shoes.

Do not spend too much time with large groups of people.

Plan your day so you never have to rush.

Show your appreciation to people who do things for you, even if
you have paid them, even if they do favors you don't want.

After dinner, wash the dishes.

Calm down.

Don't expect your children to love you, so they can, if they want
to.

Don't be too self-critical or too self-congratulatory.

Don't think that progress exists. It doesn't.

Imagine what you would like to see happen, and then don't do
anything to make it impossible.

Forgive your country every once in a while. If that is not
possible, go to another one.

If you feel tired, rest.

Don't be depressed about growing older. It will make you feel
even older. Which is depressing.

Do one thing at a time.

If you burn your finger, put ice on it immediately. If you bang
your finger with a hammer, hold your hand in the air for 20
minutes. you will be surprised by the curative powers of ice and
gravity.

Do not inhale smoke.

Take a deep breath.

Do not smart off to a policeman.

Be good.

Be honest with yourself, diplomatic with others.

Do not go crazy a lot. It's a waste of time.

Drink plenty of water. When asked what you would like to
drink, say, "Water, please."

Take out the trash.

Love life.

Use exact change.

When there's shooting in the street, don't go near the window.

Excerpts from "How to be Perfect" by Ron Padgett, from How to be Perfect. © Coffee House Press, 2007.

It was on this day in 1849 that Henry David Thoreau (books by this author) self-published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, his first book. It was an account of the two-week boating trip Thoreau had taken with his brother, John, 10 years before, from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and back.

Thoreau had always been the introverted and studious one, while John was gregarious and fun-loving. They were close; John helped pay his brother's tuition to Harvard, and helped Thoreau open his own school when he got fired from his teaching job over his objection to corporal punishment. A few years after their boat trip, John died unexpectedly from tetanus in his brother's arms. Thoreau decided to seclude himself and began building a cabin by the banks of Walden Pond. He lived there for two years, completing the drafts of both his A Week, often seen as a memorial to his brother, John, and a series of lectures that would eventually become the classic Walden. Since A Week was initially rejected, Thoreau was only able to publish it by paying for its printing from its sales. Four years later, after paying off the printing debt, Thoreau wrote in his journal that his publisher had delivered the remaining unsold copies to his home. He wrote, "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself."

Thoreau said: "To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.
And, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Family Woes Don't Define US!

Re: In Response to Dawn and Susana

Posted by: "mopsaaspom" mailto:mopsaaspom@gmail.com?Subject= Re%3A%20In%20Response%20to%20Dawn%20and%20Susana  mopsaaspom

Tue May 29, 2012 11:40 am (PDT)

Hello Phyll,

Thank you for your inspiring words!

I wish you a meaningful life too, with many glimpses of happiness :)

Susana

In mailto:hspbook%40yahoogroups.com, "PEP" <pepstar27@. ..> wrote:

I'm so sorry to hear of your hurtful family situation.
Know that the actions of others do NOT define YOU.
Meaning, if they choose to be distant, demeaning or
dissociative from you, that's THEIR choice---for whatever
reason--but YOU DON'T have to be affected by it.

Easier said than done, I understand. Yet, we only have
one life, a very, very precious life, and the way WE CHOOSE
to spend it depends on US. NO ONE ELSE. Period.

Do whatever you have to do to find happiness!!!
I can't stress this enough. My family are very
hurtful to me, too. And, my sisters have turned
their children against me---so I've lost 2 sisters
and 3 neices/nephews. I have no one except 10
darling pets: 8 cats, 1 dog and 1 pony and carriage.
(Which I drive down country roads and feel real nirvana!)
THEY give me abundant love, joy, PURPOSE, meaning,
and HAPPINESS! Plus, I do not feel alone, anymore.

Turn your attention to whatever elicits this kind
of meaning and happiness FOR YOU! It's out there!
FIND IT! And give yourself to it (rather than giving
IT to yourself)--- whatever IT is. Pets, art, music, friendships, writing, (pen your life, make a million dollars and buy a villa in Provence!) DO SOMETHING, anything to experience joy. And, I gurantee you will NOT care, one iota, how you son-in-law brainwashed your daughter against you or how the other two kids ignore you from abroad. You will not EXPECT anything from anyone(except those outlets that CAN and WILL give you sustenance, renewed energized outlook on life and pure JOY!)
Promise!

Try it. Start diverting your energies, and attitude,
towards those things or beings (pets, plants, people) who
do, can and WILL be there and come through for YOU. It's
very sad, I WELL know, when family turn their backs on us.
I felt depressed about my own family situation for years---
then I woke up, acquired all of my FURRY FAMILY and stopped
ALLOWING these ignorant, unkind, narrow-minded people to
influence, hurt and stymie my life ANY LONGER. And, they
don't and can't and won't ever hurt me, again.

The benefit? Renewed confidence, more energy, higher
creativity-- -in short: a happier, healthier LIFE!

L'chaim! ! ! Start living it, NOW!!
Phyll

Deep Caring

Very deep caring is something we are each born with; this is not something that is an add-on or a fringe benefit. We are each born with it, so if we don’t feel that way, that means that it has been drummed out of us, beaten out of us or we have been brainwashed in thinking something else. But the truth of us really is that we are creatures of tremendous benefit.

-Robin Goddard
Balanced View Trainer

Ralph Waldo Emerson

May 25, 2012

It's the birthday of the man who said, "Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air." That's Ralph Waldo Emerson (books by this author), born in Boston (1803). His father, who died when he was eight, was a Unitarian minister, as were many of Emerson's family members before him. He was a quiet and well-behaved young man, not an exceptional student. He graduated in the middle of his class, studied at Harvard Divinity School, and got a job as a ministerial assistant at Boston's Second Church. Not long after his ordination, he was married. He was happy at home and in his work, and soon he was promoted to senior pastor.

Two years after Emerson was married, his wife, Ellen, died of tuberculosis, at the age of 19. He was devastated. He began to have doubts about the Church. A year after Ellen's death, he wrote in his journal: "I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers." He took a leave of absence and went on vacation in the mountains of New Hampshire. By the time he returned, he had decided to resign from his position as minister.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

Writers Who Died Too Young

May 23, 2012

It's the birthday of poet Jane Kenyon (books by this author), born in Ann Arbor, Michigan (1947). She married fellow poet Donald Hall, whom she met as a student at the University of Michigan, where he was a professor. They lived in his family farmhouse in New Hampshire. Hall wrote: "[W]e got up early in the morning. I brought Jane coffee in bed. She walked the dog as I started writing, then climbed the stairs to work at her own desk on her own poems. We had lunch. We lay down together. We rose and worked at secondary things. I read aloud to Jane; we played scoreless ping-pong; we read the mail; we worked again. We ate supper, talked, read books sitting across from each other in the living room, and went to sleep. If we were lucky the phone didn't ring all day. In January Jane dreamed of flowers, planning expansion and refinement of the garden. From late March into October she spent hours digging, applying fifty-year-old Holstein manure from under the barn, planting, transplanting, and weeding."
She published only four books of poetry before she died from leukemia at the age of 47. She was the state poet of New Hampshire at the time.

It's the birthday of children's writer Margaret Wise Brown (books by this author), born in Brooklyn (1910). She loved reading as a child, and years later, she remembered all the stories she read, but none of the authors. She said: "It didn't seem important that anyone wrote them. And it still doesn't seem important. I wish I didn't have ever to sign my long name on the cover of a book and I wish I could write a story that would seem absolutely true to the child who hears it and to myself." Brown went on to write children's classics like The Runaway Bunny (1942) and Goodnight Moon (1947).
Brown never had children herself, but she worked with young children as a teacher in a progressive education program at the Bank Street Experimental School. She was also a New York socialite — tall and strong, with blond hair and bright green eyes. She dated the prince of Spain and loved to host parties in her Upper East Side apartment. She spent her first royalty check buying an entire cart's worth of flowers, and often took the proceeds from a book and purchased a ticket to France or a new car.

She died suddenly at the age of 42, energetic and adventurous up to the end. She was on a book tour in Europe when she was stricken with appendicitis and had an emergency appendectomy. She seemed to be recovering well, and she decided to show her doctor how good she felt — so she kicked up her leg in the can-can. It caused an embolism, and she died immediately.

She said: "A book should try to accomplish something more than just to repeat a child's own experiences. One would hope rather to make a child laugh or feel clear and happy-headed as he follows a simple rhythm to its logical end, to jog him with the unexpected and comfort him with the familiar; and perhaps to lift him for a few moments from his own problems of shoe laces that won't tie and busy parents and mysterious clock time into the world of a bug or a bear or a bee or a boy living in the timeless world of story."

Love

Love is the ultimate coach.
Do what you love, let love guide you,
let love inspire you.

 

Robert Holden, of the Happiness Project

Love Conquers All

I've made the most important discovery of my life.
It is only in the mysterious equation of love
that any logical reasons can be found.
  John Forbes NashAmerican Mathematician and Nobel Prize Winner

Nellie Bly

Today is the birthday of journalist Nellie Bly (books by this author), born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania (1864). When she was 16, her family moved to Pittsburgh, where she read an editorial in The Pittsburgh Dispatch titled "What Girls are Good For." (The paper's answer was "not much," at least, not outside the home.) She wrote a furious reply and signed it "Little Orphan Girl." The editor was so impressed that he invited her in and offered her a job. She took it, and she borrowed the name "Nellie Bly" from a Stephen Foster song to use as her pen name.

Unlike most female journalists of the time, she didn't write about fashion or gardening, though. She wrote about the poor, and the way women were exploited in factories, sometimes posing as a sweatshop worker to report from the inside, which made companies nervous. They threatened to pull their advertising, so she was demoted to a beat that was deemed more suitable for a lady. She turned in her letter of resignation along with her story.

She went to New York in 1887, and after several months with no job prospects, she talked her way into an opportunity with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Her assignment was to cover the notorious Blackwell's Island Women's Lunatic Asylum, and she went undercover, convincing doctors and judges that she was mentally ill. She was committed to the asylum and lived there in appalling conditions for 10 days. She wrote: "I have watched patients stand and gaze longingly toward the city they in all likelihood will never enter again. It means liberty and life; it seems so near, and yet heaven is not further from hell."

In 1914, she went to work for the New York Evening Journal as America's first female war correspondent. She wrote from the front lines of World War I for almost five years. She returned Stateside in 1919 and died of pneumonia in 1922.

Dr. Spock's Birthday

Today is the birthday of Dr. Benjamin Spock (books by this author), born in New Haven, Connecticut (1903). He wrote The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946). It began, "You know more than you think you do," and it became the parenting bible for all the post-war moms and dads raising the baby boomer generation. People like Spiro Agnew and Norman Vincent Peale blamed his permissive parenting philosophy for the '60s counterculture movement. Spock replied: "Maybe my book helped a generation not to be intimidated by adulthood. When I was young, I was always made to assume that I was wrong. Now young people think they might be right and stand up to authority."