Lesson 3 – How to count your blessings

“I had the blues because I had no shoes,until upon the street, I met a man who had no feet.”

Eddie Rickenbacker drifted about in a life raft for twenty-one days and when asked the biggest lesson he had learned from the experience said, “If you have all the fresh water you want to drink and all the food you want to eat, you ought never to complain about anything.”

If we want to be happy then all we have to do is to concentrate on the 90 per cent that is right in our lives and ignore the 10 per cent that is wrong.

The words,”Think and Thank.” are inscribed in many of the Cromwellian churches of England.

Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels was the most devastating pessimist in English literature, yet he praised the great health-giving powers of cheerfulness and happiness.

“The best doctors in the world,” he wrote,” “are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.”

“We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack.”

We can express only what is in our own consciousness and so, to experience joy, happiness, and health, we need to think only the thoughts we want to live by.

A woman who spent a year ill in bed and nearly died said, “I never really learned to live until I feared I was going to die.”

Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote, “The habit of looking on the best side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a year.”

Logan Pearsall Smith wrote, “There are two things to aim at in life: first, go get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.

“You and I ought to be ashamed of ourselves,” writes Dale Carnegie, “all the days of our years we have been living in a fairyland of beauty, but we have been too blind to see, too satiated to enjoy.

If you want to stop worrying and start living, Count your blessings – not your troubles.”