Day 26 – Time to think…

For almost 30 years now I have been around kids coaching football. I listen to them talk, I hear about their lives, I see what they are surrounded by and consumed by, and I wonder if there will ever be another generation who just has time to think and be quiet.

As I’ve said, we only had 2 stations that we could get on the TV. Only 1 local radio station that anyone listened to and again NO INTERNET. The phones hung on the wall or sat on a desk plugged into the wall and unless you were reading a book, listening to the radio, maybe watching TV (there wasn’t a lot to look at), you were just quiet, gazing into space or lost in thought.

I don’t even know if teens could handle quiet these days, they are always pulled into something or someone. But I used to sit up in the trees, sway with the breeze and just “be”. In the fall and spring when the seasons would change, we would go to Third Street school and fly kites…now that was an art back in the day. If the tail was too heavy, it wouldn’t get off the ground. If the tail was too light, it was too unstable. But eventually, we would figure it out and then we would see how high it would go, then hold on to the stick that had the string wound around it, lay down in the grass and just watch it fly.

Debby and I walked everywhere when we were young, and no one bothered us. We would walk to the theater on Saturday afternoon and watch a double feature movie for 25 cents each.

We would walk to the library and check out books to read…well, Debby read, I just looked at pictures because I didn’t know it at the time, but I was dyslexic, and reading was a real pain in the ass for me. In fact, by the time I graduated from High School, I had only read 2 books… “Of Mice and Men” because I had to and “Daniel Boone” because I wanted to. And to make it even worse, by the time I was in college I only read one more book because I had to…Cliff notes were all the rage, and you could get by with it.

It wasn’t until 1970 when I got interested in the Bible that I started reading. I made myself endure the pain of reading because I wanted to know everything. Today, my absolute weakness above all else…is books. I buy them, collect them, and devour them, all the time. There have been times when I would read a book a week and when I used to fly a lot for business, I could read an entire book on each trip. I have bookcases everywhere in my house with classics, business books, self-development books and books about hobbies and adventure.

I have 25 books by Orison Swett Marden alone. He wrote over 70 books, and I’d like to get them all. He was the founder of “Success Magazine” (which is out of print now) and wrote brilliant books about positive mindset and believing in yourself in the early 1900’s

I have several absolutely beautiful books over 125 years old that are priceless in my mind. I read, I think about how it fits with life, I read some more and explore the universe with my mind.

I am generally a quiet person and I still enjoy sitting in my beautiful backyard, when there is not a foot of snow on the ground and just thinking about God, life, family and with universe we live in.

Today, it is a fight sometimes to get those quiet times, but they are well worth fighting for and can enrich our lives beyond anything I know.