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[I2]I Am Behind You
by Elsabe Smit, Els
You can think up the most appropriate and most descriptive title, only to discover - yet again - that there is nothing new under the sun and someone has beaten you to it, or you can have a title that you think is perfect, but nobody else does.

And let's face it, when we buy or select books to read, we in fact select titles and authors before we select the contents. The titles first catch our eyes, and then we explore further.

There is actually an annual prize that is awarded by the Bookseller Magazine for the oddest book title of the year. The first winner of the prize in 1978 was the title "Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice" (University of Tokyo Press)

Here are some winners from other years:

"Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the Other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts"

"How to Avoid Huge Ships"

"Development in Dairy Cow Breeding and Management: and New Opportunities to Widen the Uses of Straw"

"Weeds in a Changing World"

"Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service"

"Living With Crazy Buttocks"

"People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It"

"The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification"

Now the top prize has been allocated to the 1996 winner, "Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers"

A cancellation number is a postal marking applied to a stamp or stationery indicating that the item has been used. We can see the cancellation details on the mail we receive, because a print on the stamp indicates where and when the item was mailed, and we cannot use the same stamp for other mail.

It appears that Greek rural postmen each had a cancellation number that they applied to incoming mail to cancel the stamps before distributing the mail. The prize winner book tells the human stories behind each of the cancellation numbers.

Cancellation number 87236 was the number used by rural postman, Dimitri Vassilikos, to cancel the stamps on all mail routed through the Elassona post office in Northern Thessalonika.

He died at the age of 87. After his death, seventeen 17 bags of undistributed letters were discovered in his attic. It transpired that Dimitri sat at his kitchen table all day, drinking ouzo (a traditional Greek alcoholic drink) and cancelling the stamps on the letters.

But then he never actually delivered even one of the letters in his life. He simply added the mail items to other bags of mail that he had been storing in his attic. As a result the inhabitants of Elassona are known to this day as "the isolated ones". Not even Readers' Digest could get past Dimitri Vassilikos, it seems.

Why would a postman do something so outrageous? Because he feared that his worthless sons would discover the hidden mail in the attic, steam off the stamps and use the proceeds to go to the Greek island of Mykonos. These young men seemed to be quite attracted to Mykonos and would do anything to get there. I wonder how many used stamps with the number 87236 they would have had to sell to get the money to go to Mykonos.

We think the old man was crazy, but don't we do the same in different ways? Think of the crockery and cutlery and bed linen that are hidden away and only taken out to impress visitors. As if we are not good enough to use beautiful or valuable stuff every day.

And how about the clothes that we only wear on special occasions? Often the special occasions are so far apart that the clothes "shrink" while in the wardrobe and then we need to buy new clothes, only to wear them once and hide them away again anyway. What a waste.

In the culture that I grew up in, there was the justification that you use beautiful things rather than leave them for the second wife to enjoy. Somehow there must be some external reason for attaching value to yourself, even if it is by comparing yourself to an unknown person that may or may not be in the future of your beloved partner.

We do the same with our emotions. Our love is precious, and therefore we are reluctant to tell people we love them until we know the end of our time here is near or there is some crisis that justifies us using the words. We do not understand that love breeds love, and we prefer to hide it away in the attic so that others cannot abuse it.

How often do we praise our children or others around us that do well or achieve something? No, we rather withhold the praise because we do not want them to become vain or conceited. Why would we encourage people to break down the boundaries around them and explore their full ability? If we do anything like that, we will just have to dig up more of the praise and encouragement that we have been hoarding, and that will leave us with nothing. Will it?

Positive emotions like love and praise and encouragement may multiply slower than the more heated emotions of jealousy and resentment, but positive emotions multiply for ever, while negative emotions only multiply until we see the damage they do and wake up and choose not to feel them.

So it is quite OK and in fact a very good idea to take all the best things out of the wardrobes and cupboards and our hearts and use them every day to make our world a beautiful place. The more we use the best things, the more wonderful things will come into our lives, because we are worthy of the best.

When my wife and I got married several years ago, one of our biggest goals we put down on paper was to work where we wanted to live. When I originally wrote those goals, I imagined living on the beach listening to the waves crash on the beautiful white sands of Florida. It's funny how times change. While I wasn't born in Florida (I leave that distinction to Michigan), I lived most of my life in FLA. My wife is one of the rare few who was actually born AND raised in Florida and lived all her life there until I was offered a job several years ago in Tennessee when we moved to Nashville.

I love Nashville and to this day many believe that it is the GREAT secret of the South, and personally, I'd have to agree.

I thought long and hard about where I could imagine living, working and raising our son when I started my business. Last year my wife and I took it to heart, so we spent several weeks scouting areas of the country where we suspected we wanted to live. We flew and drove throughout the South and the Northeast and finally we took a trip out to the mountains. When we arrived, it was amazing. We are outdoors people so we both loved the vistas of the mountains. Living in the South most of our lives, we wanted to be connected to friendly people, and we wanted someplace that had a business infrastructure I could continue building my businesses on.

As I write you this BLOG entry, I have completed an exhausting 2 day drive to Boulder, Colorado. We've sold our house, and I'm now living amongst stacks of boxes in a hotel room until we move into temporary quarters to scout for a house. Technically, I'm homeless.

What a weird feeling. We had a goodbye dinner with some great friends a few days ago, I was asked repeatedly if I was excited/scared/stupid for leaving a town that my son was born in and where I had so many great friends and clients?

While my clients are still my clients and nothing more than a short flight away, the Internet has afforded us the ability to work virtually anywhere on the planet, I can even keep my same telephone numbers if I choose to. I talk to and email my clients every day and except for a few times a year for lunches and connectivity meetings, I could be anywhere on the planet, hence why we decided to do this.

Want to go out on a limb yourself? Try a little mental exercise for a moment. If you're not already there, pretend you have a thriving business all your own and you have based it on a passive income stream. You don't have to be a gazillionaire, you make a solid six-figure income and could live virtually any place in the world. What would you do? Where would you live? If you already live where you want to be, how about taking a 3 month vacation and living in the Caribbean or the Fiji Islands? Are there people who really do that?

When I set out to build my business, this was a motivating factor for me. I had to be able to give myself choices and CONTROL my life, it is one of the most freeing sensations in the world and I encourage you to do it too.

So how do I feel now that I'm here and actually doing it? Am I excited, scared, asking myself "What am I doing?"

Yes, yes and yes. But I wouldn't trade it for the world. We're out here by choice, not because I have to be. What would you do if you had a choice?

Article Source : dianetics self improvement package

About Author
Both Elsabe Smit & Benny Carreon are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Elsabe Smit has sinced written about articles on various topics from Religion, self improvement and motivation and Religion. Elsabe Smit is the author of the soul-touching collection of short stories, A Tapestry of Life and of the blog
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