A few days ago I was walking with my dog when an elderly woman in her late fifties approached me. Rounded shoulders, not too tall. I didn’t know her. She wore a red jacket with a hood that covered part of her face. Very modest but tidy clothes. yes, she looked poor. We started chatting. I smiled and she opened up.
In a few words she described her own life from birth in Poland during the communistic times, the orphanage she grew up in, abuse and loneliness. She has not created a family neither a stable place to live. She travels from one town to another, stays away from the crowds, lives on what she finds or people give her. Intelligent, she became a person that people do not care to notice.
While chatting about her life, she mentioned something…
Books, books.
She spent her childhood in the orphanage without any real friend to chat with or protect her. The only friends she had, were books. She read many of them, about great spirits, travels and Indians in the North America. She loved them, and dreamed about becoming the David who conquered the Goliath.
“I only had the books, but … they did not save me.” she said.
it reminded me of somebody else…
Oprah Winfrey,
woman who came through similar life conditions, extreme poverty where she wore dresses made of potato sacks, was abused, raped at a very young age, ran away from home and … has become one of the most powerful women of our time, the first Afro-American Billionaire, a person who seems to be happy and surrounded by wishing her well people.
“When I was a young girl growing up in Mississippi, I would have never known that anything existed other that the poverty I lived in if it weren’t for the books I read.”
The books were her only allies when she was growing up. They helped her create the vision and strength to carry on, no matter what was happening around…
so similar, right? So why are their lives so extremely opposite?
There are obvious differences between the two of them, like in terms of the places they grew up in, the woman I met – the communistic Poland in the fifties of the XX century and the democratic America, but still… such life circumstances are only of minor importance. We can break through nearly anything we want, if only we…
ACT
do it, try it, practice it, feel the taste of the stories you read, and take them one step further, use the new behaviors you read about in your life, create new language, use new words…
when you read something, don’t just feel inspired and amused, but put the ideas into action. Let them live and go deeper into your mind and soul.
The first woman was to afraid to try anything on her own skin, she dreamed and cried, while Oprah wanted the happy life and followed the examples given in the books she read, she tried them, changed her thinking and behavior.
The results the women have created in their lives are as distant as the South and North Poles are. Yet both real. Total misery – Total joy and power. And the reason responsible for the difference hidden is in three letters only…
ACT
……..
we chatted for a while, and she said: …you know…life can be so hard…
after that she turned around and left quickly, as if even mentioning what she had been through made her memories alive again…
ACT
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