WHAT I BELIEVE

 

During my senior year at Torrance High School, my Senior English teacher, Mr. Roberts, gave our class an assignment to write an essay titled “What I Believe”.  After putting the assignment off until the last possible moment, I wrote a fluffy piece of satire about modern medicine prolonging the lives of people beyond their usefulness.  Mr. Roberts gave me an A on the assignment and returned it to me with the note: “Good satire, Miss Foster, but what do you believe.”  Looking at it in retrospect, I probably wrote satire because I didn’t really know what I believed at the time.  

Today, almost fifty years later, it would be hard to confine my thoughts on that subject to the number of words required in that assignment.  This dissertation on what I believe is dedicated to Mr. Roberts, who believed in my ability as a writer and also believed, quite rightly, that I was not working at my full potential as a high school senior.  So, Mr. Roberts, here is my assignment a little bit late.

Life is a journey.  The pleasure is in the journey itself, not in arriving at a particular destination.  In fact, if you hang all your hopes on a destination, you will very likely be disappointed.  Life is full of ups and downs, joy and pain, elation and disappointment. The key is not to dwell on the downs, the pains and the disappointments.  When we look around us, we can always find someone who is worse off than we are.  Concentrate on the joy, the friends, the family, the good times.  These are the things of happy memories.  Let the past sadness and pain go and don’t look back. Look to the future with full expectation that it will bring more joys, friends and good times.  Fear not, for fear is a self fulfilling prophecy.  Don’t borrow trouble by worrying about what may happen.   When you expect the worst, you will very likely get what you expect.   It is done unto you as you believe. 

People sometimes do and say hurtful things.  Many people bear grudges over these things and even retaliate over real or imagined misdeeds, slights or insults.  In my philosophy, every human being on this earth is doing the very best they can based on their own consciousness and experiences at that given moment.  The people who are the least lovable actually need love the most.  Forgiveness, understanding and unconditional love hold the key to happiness.   Anger, resentment and retaliation bring about more anger, resentment and retaliation and benefit no one … least of all the angry resentful one.

It is my belief that life is pretty much what we make it.  People treat us, as a rule, pretty much the way we treat them.  There are those who always blame someone else when things do not go their way.  It is the boss, the spouse, or some one else without whom everything would be just lovely.  They are powerless to change their situation, because it is not their “fault”.  Someone else is to blame and they are the ones who have to change.  As long as these martyrs do not accept responsibility for their own happiness, they will be unhappy.  NO ONE can make us happy or unhappy.  We alone are responsible for the state of our happiness.  Certainly, sometimes changes need to be made, but we can not change anyone else.  The only thing we have the power to change is ourselves and our attitude.  The situation is external, the reaction is our own.  Interestingly, sometimes a change in our attitude may bring about a change in the one we thought needed to change.

Today is a time of fear, anger, greed, hate, drugs and mans’ inhumanity to man.  Wars are waged in the name of God with each faction not realizing that they both worship the same God, albeit they may call Him by a different name.  When we begin to focus on spirituality instead of organized religion, then we may be able to heal the ills of the world.   Almost all religious denominations believe in the separateness of humanity.  “If you don’t believe the way we do, you will surely go to hell”.  In fact, as long as we think we are separate from other human beings, there will be no peace in the world.  Have you ever watched little children relate to one another?  I have watched two and three year olds play together without regards to race, color or creed.  They accept each other for the wonderful human beings that they are.  After a few years of listening to the prejudices of their parents or other adults, they become intolerant themselves.  Gangs of teenagers of all colors; blacks, Hispanics, whites, Asians or whatever fight one another for no reason except that they are different.  Even gangs of the same race fight among themselves because of perceived differences.  Until we can become as color blind as two year olds, these gang wars will continue and people everywhere will hate others because they are a different color, have a different religion, and the list goes on.

My life to this point has been a wonderful, if sometimes painful, journey.  From a childhood in the southern Missouri Ozark foot hills to the hubbub of the South Bay in southern Los Angeles County, California, it has been quite an experience.   It has been fraught with pain and loss, including the death of our son.  Every experience has been a learning one.  In spite of the pain of losing my darling baby boy, I would not give up the two years we had with him to make the pain go away.  There are so many wonderful memories of him stored in my memory bank.  He had an incredibly joyful disposition and a smile that could light up a room.   He was an integral part of my life and part of what shaped me into the person I am today. My first marriage was a disaster, but there were four wonderful children from it and I would not change it even if I could.  I learned so much from that relationship.  There is no malice in my heart for my ex-husband, even though he abandoned me when I was pregnant with the fourth child and never paid a penny of child support.  He is the one who missed out on seeing his children grow up and knowing his grand children.  I only feel pity for him because he has missed out on so much and still does not understand that he alone is responsible for his life.

Somehow, in spite of all the upheaval in the world, I am optimistic about the future of our planet.  There are many people awakening to the oneness of all human beings and the oneness we have with our creator.  The power of God is within each and every one of us and the more people come to know this, the more powerful we will become as a force for World Peace.  Open your mind to the power of God.