Tag Archives: treasure

Antifreeze

dictionary with letter AAntifreeze (n): a liquid typically based on ethanol, which can be added to water in a car’s radiator, to prevent the engine from freezing.

 

Poverty promotes poor decisions.

Aside from the obvious dangers of starvation, eviction and financial humiliation, having little money often causes one to cut corners, which leads to dumping all of your existing treasure on the ground in a big heap.

When I was nineteen years old, I purchased an old green van which had originally been used by the telephone company. It was well-worn, but I was pleased to get it for $300.

Living in Ohio at the time, I was confronted with the perils of winter. One of those obstacles was the issue of “winterizing” your vehicle by adding antifreeze to make sure that you did not literally ice over and destroy your engine.

Well, here’s the problem. Antifreeze cost $2.99 a gallon, and I would be required to purchase two such units to take care of my vehicle. That was nearly six dollars–the equivalent of the food budget for my young wife and myself for three days.

I heard through the grapevine (which, by the way, is also inhabited by some nuts) that you could add rubbing alcohol to your radiator and protect it from the cold just as easily. Now, a bottle of alcohol was only twenty-nine cents, and I felt that three of them would be sufficient to provide me with the necessary coverage.

So I poured my alcohol in. A very cold Ohio night transpired, and I rose in the morning to start my van. I decided to peek in the radiator to see how my plan had worked.

It was frozen solid.

In my late adolescent mind, I figured that the best way to unfreeze my radiator was to start my engine and let the car warm itself up. (It made sense at the time.)

After starting my vehicle, I realized that I had cracked the block.

I discovered the reason for antifreeze. It performs a function. Its six-dollar price tag saves you from spending several hundred dollars repairing your engine.

It was a very expensive mistake, and one that I never repeated again.

Sometimes you swallow a little expense … so you don’t choke on a larger lump.

 

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Thank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix

Anticipate

dictionary with letter A

 

Anticipate: (v) to regard as probable; to expect, predict

 

The key to life is to possess a treasure of optimism, which is pilfered sufficiently by your pessimism, to welcome realism.

In other words, if you lead with pessimism and pilfer with optimism, you never actually become realistic, but instead, cynical.

If you try to lead with realism, you usually end up favoring either optimism or pessimism, tainting your original adventure.

This makes the word “anticipation” nearly obsolete in the lifestyle of those who want to move forward with a sense of achievement and good cheer.

Because quite honestly, if I anticipate that my family and friends will continue to love me with the intensity I desire, I am always disappointed with the natural human drop-off.

If I anticipate that my next business foray is going to be a bonanza, I will be only adequately impressed if it reaches my wishes and greatly despaired if it doesn’t.

Anticipation, unfortunately, is what people believe faith is meant to be.

The thought is that rallying behind the concept that having hope that a certain conclusion must be achieved is the best way to trick oneself into excitement and intimidate the universe into compliance.

But faith is actually an optimism which is adequately interrupted by pessimism, thus creating reality. For after all, faith is the substance of things hoped for (optimism), the evidence of things not seen (pessimism).

I get very nervous when I get around people who anticipate that the project we are pursuing is going to be a roaring success.

The wise steward of all good things is always joyfully stacking up boxes … while simultaneously perusing the room for additional containers.

 

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Thank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix

Andrews, Julie

dictionary with letter A

Andrews, Julie: (1935 – ) English actress and singer born Julia Elizabeth Wells. She is best known for the movies Mary Poppins (1964), for which she won an Academy Award, and The Sound of Music (1965).

Progressors.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are people who arrive at just the right time in history to do just the right thing, to progress things at just the right pace. Without them, nothing happens–and if they were any more progressive, they would have scared everybody away.

There are many examples, but certainly, Julie Andrews falls into this category.

For I will tell you, if Julie Andrews arrived on the scene today, she would be rejected for her sprightly personality, her clarity of singing and portrayed as a lightweight.

But at the time she arrived with her talent, there was a need for hope, inspiration and music sung with the purity of a nightingale and the intensity of a roaring lion.

She was a treasure. And because she worked very hard at making sure she maintained her excellence, her work endures.

Oh, we may think that “a spoon full of sugar” doesn’t “make the medicine go down,” or that the hills aren’t “alive with the sound of music,” but her infectious desire to bring good cheer to the listener is very difficult to criticize or ignore.

Now, there is a problem when we become nostalgic and insist that we need Julie Andrews back.

We don’t need another Julie Andrews–we need the next Julie Andrews to progress us in our consciousness. We need talented folks who bring hope in their own way, clarity using their own voice, and inspiration sensitive to their own times.

Without Julie Andrews, there never would have been a Barbra Streisand, and without Streisand there never would have been Heart with the Wilson sisters or Fleetwood Mac with Stevie Nicks, and without them, there would not have been Celine Dion, Beyoncé and Pink.

We need progressors.

And what is the goal for making this place called Earth better?

Anybody who promotes the idea that we are human … and that is not a bad thing.

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Thank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix

Affinity

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Affinity: (n) a spontaneous or natural liking or sympathy for someone or something

I think it has a meter–yes, an “affinity meter.”

When I was younger I was more intolerant. My affinity for others was based on three criteria:

  1. Do I like them?
  2. Do they have enough money to contribute to a pizza?
  3. Will they be fun?

Anyone who didn’t fall into all three categories was pretty well nixed from my holy circle of friends. I felt fully justified. After all, who wants to be around someone you don’t like, has no cash flow and is a buzz kill?

I don’t know when this transition occurred, but one day it crossed my mind that people have bad days, bad seasons, bad histories, bad relationships, bad luck and bad karma. Sometimes we catch ’em during one of these “sunken” places on their journey instead of at the top of the mountain. And if you start throwing all the heavy boxes overboard, you will eventually get rid of some excellent treasure.

So as I’ve aged, I have changed my “affinity meter.”

  1. Do I like them?
  2. Do I understand why I don’t like them?
  3. Can I hang around long enough to find out if it would be possible for me to like them?

As you can see, the need for pizza money is gone.

Affinity is the awareness that because nothing is perfect and nobody has it all, we gradually take many people into our lives–to piece together the whole experience of fellowship.

 

Acephalous

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Acephalous: (adj.) 1. no longer having a head: e.g. an acephalous skeleton 2. having no leader or chief: e.g. an acephalous society.

Sometimes the ancient philosophers put together some really interesting ideas. For instance, the notion that human emotions are located in the heart is kind of perfect. Because after all, the emotions are often caught between the head–where the brain is–and the body and genitals, where we live only a physical existence.

I think it’s also significant that the spirit of man is a breath. That’s what the Bible says–that God breathed into man the breath of life. So I guess spirituality is like our lungs.

So you can see what happens if you have a mindless society. People who are unwilling to think things through, and the emotions not having any breath from the lungs of spirituality, pump blood directly from the heart down to the genitals. After all, there’s no path north. Why not go south?

Of course, I realize this is all speculation and none of it is actual physiology, but the human heart is where we live. It is where we keep our treasure. Yet that brain sitting up there is where we make new decisions based on renewed concepts to use our bodies more effectively.

So if the heart doesn’t get breath from the lungs, sending that oxygen up to the brain to fill it with greater promise, then the body and genitals pretty much run the show on their whim. This is why we are ridiculously more upset with “sins of the flesh” than we are with “sins of the heart.”  Yet every sin of the flesh found its beginning in the human emotions.

We are a mindless society–headless, if you will–because we refuse to deal with our emotions and do not pump them through the breath of our spirituality to give some fresh air to our brains. So often we end up dictating the decisions of our lives based on regions below.

Unfortunately, attempts to use JUST the brain without accessing the heart and lungs make us light-headed and we pass out. (You can see, the analogy seems to keep going on and on, and you can probably find greater examples than I have in this small essay.)

Do not extol the value of education if you refuse to deal with the human emotions, and if you do deal with emotions, you should allow for the breath of spirit. Otherwise, we will be walking around as a self-fulfilling prophesy, with the little head ruling from below … and the big head completely decapitated.