Notes2nicky's Weblog

On Seeking Wisdom………………..

notes2nicky — Sun, 29 May 2011 19:38:30 +0000

Sigmund Wollman’s Reality Test
by Robert Fulghum

It was the summer of 1959. At a resort inn in the Sierra Nevada of Northern California, I had a job that combined being the night desk clerk in the lodge and helping with the horse-wrangling at the stables. The owner-manager was Swiss, with European notions about conditions of employment. He and I did not get along. I thought he was a fascist who wanted peasant employees who knew their place. I was 22, just out of college, and pretty free with my opinions. One week the employees had been served the same thing for lunch every single day. Two wieners, a mound of sauerkraut and stale rolls. To compound insult with injury, the cost of the meals was deducted from our paychecks. I was outraged. On Friday night of that awful week, I was at my desk job around 11 p.m., and the night auditor had just come on duty. I went into the kitchen and saw a note to the chef to the effect that wieners and sauerkraut were on the employee menu for two more days. That tore it. For lack of any better audience, I unloaded on the night auditor, Sigmund Wollman. I declared that I had had it up to here, that I was going to get a plate of wieners and sauerkraut and wake up the owner and throw it at him. Nobody was going to make me eat wieners and sauerkraut for a whole week and make me pay for it and this was un-American and I didn’t like wieners and sauerkraut enough to eat them one day for God’s sake and the whole hotel stunk and I was packing my bags for Montana where they never even heard of wieners and sauerkraut and wouldn’t feed that stuff to pigs. Something like that. I raved in this way for 20 minutes. My monologue was delivered at the top of my lungs, punctuated by blows on the front desk with a fly swatter, the kicking of chairs and much profanity. As I pitched my fit, Sigmund Wollman sat quietly on his stool, watching me with sorrowful eyes. Put a bloodhound in a suit and tie and you have Sigmund Wollman. He had a good reason to look sorrowful. Survivor of Auschwitz. Three years. German Jew. Thin, coughed a lot. He liked being alone at the night job. It gave him intellectual space, peace and quiet, and, even more, he could go into the kitchen and have a snack whenever he wanted to – all the wieners and sauerkraut he wished. To him, a feast. More than that, there was nobody around to tell him what to do. in Auschwitz he had dreamed of such a time. The only person he saw at work was me, the nightly disturber of his dream. Our shifts overlapped an hour. And here I was, a one-man war party at full cry.

“Lissen, Fulchum. Lissen me, lissen me. You know what’s wrong with you? It’s not wieners and ‘kraut and it’s not the boss and it’s not the chef and it’s not the job.” “So what’s wrong with me?” “Fulchum, you think you know everything, but you don’t know the difference between and inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire – then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. “Learn to seperate the inconveniences from the real problems. You will live longer. And will not annoy people like me so much. Good night.” In a gesture combining dismissal and blessing, he waved me off to bed. Seldom in my life have I been hit between the eyes so hard with truth. There in that late-night darkness of a Sierra Nevada inn, Sigmund Wollman simultaneously kicked my butt and opened a window in my mind. For 30 years now, in times of stress and strain, when something has me backed against the wall and I’m ready to do something really stupid with my anger, a sorrowful face appears in my mind and asks, “Fulchum. Problem or inconvenience?” I think of this as the Wollman Test of Reality. Life is lumpy. And a lump in the oatmeal, and lump in the throat, and a lump in the breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference. Good night, Sig.

Nicky,
Seek wisdom from the wise. Don’t take your advice from people who are not living the life you want to have. Don’t find a homeless person to give you advice on your 401K. Don’t seek out the sleezy 3 time divorcée in the bar to give you marriage advice. Find people you admire, who have what you want and drink them in like it’s your last drop of water. I was so blessed to be given a copy of the book “All I Really Need To Know, I learned In Kindergarten” by Fulghum when I was very young. My next door neighbor, Tammy Vought gave me her dog-eared copy and I cherished every word in it. Not that the enclosed wisdom was life shattering or earth moving, but it did open my eyes that it is within us all to think deeper. Just because I was born into poverty did not mean I had to stay there. Just because those around me have shallow and narrow minded thoughts did not mean I had to also. I could think! I was so trapped in that little cockroach invested apartment with my tiny baby girl. We had no A.C. I had an 8th grade education, no car, no money other than food stamps and no way out as far as I could see. But I could think bigger and I could dream bigger! Tammy and Mr. Fulghum set me on a path to find wisdom. Wisdom gave me permission to hope and hope gave me a way out. While I still might not have much wisdom today, I know it when I see it. I see it in the above passage from Fulgums’ later book “Uh-Oh” not his best work as a whole but this story might be his best advice ever. Learn to put things into perspective. Ask yourself will this issue matter to me in 8 hours, 8 days or 8 years. It is not 8 years, then no drama.

Love, Mom

Why I do what I do………….

notes2nicky — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 20:32:06 +0000

Dear Nicky,

Being your mother at this moment in time is harder than any other phase of being a parent and a child that we have been through in our brief twenty-two years together.

This is harder than the “I am seventeen years old and know it all” stage, this makes the terrible twos seem like a cake walk. Not that you were terrible at two, actually you were quite adorable, sweet and easy-going, but that is beside the point. This is harder than trying to wean you off of your pacifier and even harder than trying to explain mine and your fathers divorce when you were five, harder than knowing you were dealing with a middle school bully, harder than puberty and harder than explaining sex. This stage requires me to stand by and do nothing. To let you flounder around, to suffer even.

Doing nothing is not in my nature. I am a get-up-&-go sorta gal. Getter’ done, high-strung micro manager. This is hard. I mean really really hard! This stage in your life, wait, in my life, test the bounds of self-control, mercy and common sense. I am your mother! I want to save you. The cells of my body, the marrow of my bones, the core of my very soul call out to be your mother. I was born for that job. It is my very reason for being. Yet right here in this time in space and the universe says that I have to stand back and allow God to be God. To trust my prayers and exercise more faith than I humanly possess, so that the end result will allow you to be the women God has called you to be.

I have to stand back and watch my child suffer so that she can put away her childish ways and childish thinking and grow in grace and be the women God has called her to be.

You are not there. God did not call you to live the life of chaotic couch surfing nomad. Sure if I had the money I could set you up in another apartment, buy you all new furnishings, a new car and even call and remind you to brush your teeth every night. But those things wont help you become who you are meant to be.

I have to let you choice your own lifestyle. Free will as an act of love seems contradictory. But I can’t help but feel as if I loved you right into the mess you’re in. I am so positive that if I had allowed you take your lumps and suffer in the very beginning you would have learned to walk on your own by now. I bailed you out time and time again only to see you go even further down.

Maybe taking a hands off approach is wrong, but one thing I know for sure is this: It is stupid to continue doing the something over and over again expecting a different outcome. I know what I have done over and over again. I know that I have made living this lifestyle easy for you. I know that by buying you cars, paying deposits, supplementing rent, paying past due utility bills, phone bills and even buying you necessities did not produces an adult who was the strong independent women that I was trying to raise. I know it would be stupid to keep doing the same thing and expect you to become something different.

In the end, please know that I loved you this much.

Friendships….

notes2nicky — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 18:36:23 +0000

Friends who will tell you that you are wise and wonderful are worth their weight in gold.

Friends who will call you out and tell you when you are full of shit are priceless!

Good

notes2nicky — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 19:52:00 +0000

Nicky if you are given the choice to do something nice for someone or doing nothing at all, ALWAYS choice kindness. Maybe the person you were doing the nice thing for will never appreciate it or ever recognize it, but we all reap what we sow. The good things, the kindness …….what you put out into the universe will come back to you.

Galatians 6:7-8 (King James Version)

7Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

8For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.

Galatians 6:7-8 (King James Version)

7Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

8For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.

notes2nicky — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:05:36 +0000

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing”

Dealing with stress

notes2nicky — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:40:51 +0000

One of the greatest keys to peace is learning to put things into perspective. Every day normal issues do not have to be a cause for great crisis or a major drama. Peacefulness is a choice. Gratefulness for what you do have is the antidote.

When you find yourself at the end of a very long stressful day (week or month) after you have said your bedtime prayers – lay still and think about how bless you are to have the bed your laying in, the roof you have over your head, the pillow your sleeping on, the person (or cat) your laying next to.

Graduated is easy once you get into the habit! And it is one of those things you can totally fake until you have it. Force yourself to be thankful. What you will find, in a very short amount of time, is that gratitude becomes a habit. It becomes your way of life and you no longer have to think about it or force yourself to acknowledge it. It just is.

On failures

notes2nicky — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 04:34:31 +0000

Just as it is vain to be obsessed with one’s successes, it is vain to be obsessed with one’s failures. The world goes on after your failure, so should you.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

notes2nicky — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:49:49 +0000

This really struck a cord with me when I read it in June 2009 issue of the Readers Digest. The quote comes from an interview with an entrepreneur named Greg Quinn.

Q: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
A: What I hear every time I fly: “Put the oxygen mask on yourself before you help anyone else.” You can’t help anyone if you yourself are struggling

notes2nicky — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 03:30:02 +0000

After A While

After a while, you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul.

And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning, and company doesn’t mean security.

And you learn that kisses aren’t contracts and presents aren’t promises.

And you begin to accept your defreats with your head up and your eyes open, with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child.

And you learn to build all your roads on today because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans,

and futures have a way of falling down in midflight.

After a while, you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much, so you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul,

instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

And you learn that you really can endure…

That you really are strong…

And your really do have worth…

And you learn and learn…

With every goodbye you learn.

I love this Poem. My best friend in middle school (Dione Jenkins) gave me this in a note that I have saved to this very day, but I was in my late 20′s before I truly understood it.

Marriage stuff

notes2nicky — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:09:01 +0000

Give

Take

Always in that order.