Free Advice

One of the advantages of having been around for six full decades is I’ve learned a lot of lessons I am more than happy to pass along.  Since these are free you can bail out at any time and not have lost more than a few moments of your day.

First thoughts are sometimes the best ones, but if they are always the first things out of your mouth they will often be replaced by your foot.

It is easy to swear, it takes no discipline, no self-restraint and no thought for others.  It also usually accomplishes next to nothing in affecting the conversation, persuading others or making good impressions.

Listening is the hardest thing in the world to do well.  We are almost always thinking about what we should say in response when someone is talking to us.

None of us want to be judged, yet most of us have no reservations about judging others.  Actually this isn’t right, all of us want others to judge us as wonderful human beings, but that is next to impossible when we are busy being our judgemental selves.

Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes all the way to the bone.  On one level a flippant remark, but if you think about it there is great truth buried there.  If you have a mean spirit where you always think the worst of someone, or spend your time tearing others down to build yourself up -- your “ugly” does go much deeper.

There is great social value in the 10 commandments, even if you choose not to believe they are handed down from God, so let’s talk about them.

1.     I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, of the house of bondage.  You shall place no other gods before me.  [Seems like a reasonable request, but what if you don’t believe in God?  I think the point here is that as a people we need a unifying construct to keep us together, if we loose that then we as a society will break down.  We can look back to the Romans, Greeks, and even the French, as their unifying beliefs became weaker so did their society.]

2.    You shall not make yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or is in the earth…  [This has to stem from the practices of the ancient societies and separates the Jews from those other religions; it also had to make traveling through the wilderness for 40 years a lot easier since they didn’t have to carry that graven image around.]

3.    You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.  [Even God didn’t like swearing and since we use it in prayer I am sure he didn’t want to keep going “What, What did he say?”]

4.    Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.  [The commandment that says STOP and smell the roses!  Most of us older people remember when stores closed on Sunday, you had little to do but relax, a quality we spend too little time appreciating.  It required you to plan ahead, another lost quality.  Living in Europe it was really great to know on Sunday you didn’t worry about shopping you could go to the wald (woods) and bike, picnic, visit and relax.]

5.    Honor your Mother and Father.  [The idea of family is central to the survival of a society.  If we don’t have mothers and fathers then how does that society continue?  This has got to be one of the harder commandments for teenagers who know they know everything and their parents are out of touch.  This leads directly to the next commandment!]

6.    Thou shall not kill. [questions?]

7.    Thou shall not commit adultery.  [Divorce has always been messy, think about the divorce courts back then when sheep were the currency of the day.]

8.    Thou shall not steal.  [If everyone is stealing from everyone else how does a society stay together?  For us to prosper we need to know when we give our words they count, and we also need to know that others will not take advantage of us.  What we are seeing today is just the opposite of this, today it seems to be “Thou shall get all you can from the sucker”]

9.    You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.  [see previous comment]

10.  You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbors wife…. [Coveting was as big a problem then, as it is now.  Today everyone is coveting something, liberals covet rich peoples money, conservatives covet no taxes, politicians covet tax payers money, televangelists covet more TV time and everyone’s money, etc.]

My last bit of free advice is to eat ice cream on a regular basis, but if you want to stay thin you need to exercise.  If you don’t want to stay thin make sure you have a king size bed.