Harvest time

Jim Rohn once said: “The greatest form of maturity is at harvest time. That is when we must learn how to reap without complaint if the amounts are small and how to reap without apology if the amounts are big.”

This is probably the biggest problem I have, as many do. When I was a child I always felt inferior to others and tried hard to make up for it. I was great with board games and cards. I was usually accused of cheating if I won too much and had to learn to throw a few games. The easiest way to do this was to just throw the hand into a pile of cards and mix them up immediately. However, I’d usually wound up getting mad when someone started bragging about how much better they were than I was. Ergo, I would win several in a row after that to feed my ego and thereby got accused of cheating even though I clearly had not. As I grew older, I have learned winning is not everything and that it does not hurt to play and let others win, especially kids. I have a soft spot for people that need self esteem. I usually try to build them up. The problem is by doing that sometimes I have to make myself look bad.

I have always picked the underdog to win and do things others would not consider. My wife has cerebral palsy and the first time I met her she’d been crying all night after being dumped by a slug. I felt sorry for her but, saw great potential in her. She had dreams and no where to go for help. I had been hurt several times in the past and knew how she felt. I proceeded to tell her she was going to marry me and we got married within six months. Remember, I never asked her to marry me I just told her she would. I have since rectified that situation by asking her several times to marry me. She gets upset quite often since I push too hard to make thing better, for some reason or another. (Maybe I should give the poor woman a break, since she had to put up with me for all these years.) At first there was no love on either side of the relationship, but a friendship developed over time. Everything she told me she could not do because some well meaning person told her so, I saw to it that she accomplished. Have kids, no problem. Teach school, go to college and get the job. Anything she dreamed or thought of I tried to find a way, including teaching her to drive without hand controls. Over the years we fell in love and have been happily married for over 37 years.

I do not apologize for my actions, though most people would probably say I should. I probably should never have interfered in her life. But I say the results were clearly worth the effort. I received the greatest prize out of this and that was a beautiful wife and family.