How DO you turn the things you have to do into the things you want to do?

I'd just leave it at that, but the administrators would tell me I didn't have enough content, or some such nonsense.

Do you know (of course you don't) that I'm in possession of books on nearly every philosophy ever dreamed up by any philosopher who ever lived--crackpots included? I'm also way overloaded with self-help books. Many of those books I bought and never read. As I may have mentioned in the past, I thought if the books were in my possession they would magically impart their wisdom--I didn't have to READ them, only needed to OWN them. I used to buy every weight loss book ever written and one day when I was telling my best friend about my most recent purchase she said, "Donna, the next time you think you want to buy a weight-loss book, just give me the ten or twenty dollars and I'll tell you everything you need to know about weight-loss." She's a wise woman; full of common sense. Me--not so much.

But recently my two and a half year-old granddaughter has begun mysteriously plucking various books off my shelves that seem to contain applications for the problems at hand. Now, I have a variety of books--fiction, non-fiction, science fiction, philosophy, art, text books, but she's never plucked Peyton Place, Valley of the Dolls, or the Godfather off the shelf. One day when I was particularly down in the dumps she pulled an Emmet Fox book called Alter Your Life. Now, I suppose I knew the book was in the house, but I cannot remember ever having read it. I began flipping through the pages and discovered many lessons that began pulling me out of the dumps. Another day she picked When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull up a Chair(Geneed Roth). Believe me, this book contains anything and everything you will ever need to know about why, when and how we overeat. Yesterday she found How You Can Talk to God,by Paramahansa Yogananda--the title speaks for itself.

So what's my point? My best friend and my granddaughter know where to find all the answers! Out of the mouths of babes? Seek and yee shall find? Well, I suppose we already have all the answers locked up inside us; we just have to know how to listen.

But I think the most valuable piece of information ever written in any book is that we should live in the moment, something easier said than done. Rarely have I been successful at this valuable practice for long stretches of time. Living in the moment is a tricky concept, but when applied in any situation it helps alleviate the drudgery or difficulty of the task at hand. Any recipe for staying focused works, but it always involves love--pure love. When I'm living in the moment and the moment contains pure spiritual love, all tasks are pleasant. Non-spiritual love is painful, and jealous, and impatient. Spiritual love is there for the taking, 24/7, and always comforting. It's hard to maintain those feelings because we're always thinking about the past and the future, but the past can't be changed and we have no real way of knowing what the future will bring, so we may as well live in the moment. A very wise man once told me, "I believe the past often prepares us for the future." He's right, and as that thought applies to living in the moment: any time I've ever let my past bad actions or thoughts interfere with current decision-making, I've had a disaster on my hands. So if I take good lessons from the past and apply them in the moment and toss in some pure love, I can't go too far wrong. Living in the moment, I believe, can make the nastiest project easier. If I can let go of past judgments about the project at hand and see the project as containing the possibility for a new or better result, the task becomes an adventure. Well, as I said--easier said than done. But, as with anything and everything in life, practice edges toward perfection.

Maybe Suzi will pull a good fiction book off the shelf today and I can spend Mothers Day living in the moments created in another writer's mind.