Sunshine Dialogue Number One

Editors Note. I am reprinting this since this article appeared very early in Beautiful Summer Morning’s histroy. I offer it up for a now wider range of readers. Nick

“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.” From “Manual of Maud’Dib” by Princes Irulian, from the novel, “Dune” by Frank Herbert.

At this beginning, I must confess I am not sure where this series of Dialogues will lead. I hope along the path you will join in with your comments and suggestions, which I hope to share with those who decide to take this journey with us, that way they truly are dialogues and not monologues. Eventually I plan to package the dialogues into book form, so you have a chance to influence the finished product somewhere down the time line.

This web site www.beautifulsummermorning.com emanates from my passionate belief that we all share a role in uplifting the current state of man. Before you feel overwhelmed however, let me rush in and say, I am not talking of marches or revolutions, or onerous demands on, what has become our most precious resource, time. I speak to small, life affirming, actions we can do everyday with only a little more conscious thought than we exercises now.

In these dialogues, with your help, I hope to share my lifetime of experience on a journey to arrive at this day, this hour, and this moment being here with you now. I hope these dialogues are occasion to celebrate the abundance, the diversity, and the awesomely inspiring story of life.

At this beginning, let me declare this web site as a negative free zone. If you want to wallow in negativity, read a newspaper, watch T.V. news, go to all those negative websites, this is not the place for you. Accuse me of wearing sunshine coloured glasses if you will, I am proud of them.

At this beginning, let me declare that this website is not about religion, or politics.

This website is about a beautiful summer morning, bathed in sunlight, filled to brimming with potentiality held in stasis ready to bust forth into joyous actions as free as the fresh scented breeze on the warming air.

Start Your Diary

I want you to start a diary. You can use any sort of method you would like, but it should be easy to take from place to place. A bound book is best, it can be fancy, it can be plain, but should be with out lines, it can be a laptop, or a micro recorder, what ever the form it should be something you keep near you though out your day.

One of the greatest Diarists of all times was Leonardo da Vinci. So, enjoy the exalted company and stop groaning.

You’ll understand the request in a minute or two.

A Philosophy of Life

Philosophy is a scary word, perhaps due to reading those thick tomes of Emmanuel Kant with sentences that went on as long as a baseball games. Perhaps we associate philosophy with mind twisting questions on the nature of life.

For instance, the first definition of Philosophy in the World Book Dictionary (my favourite, the dictionary that is) is: The study of the truth or principles underlying all knowledge. Give me a break! I’ll settle for definition number three: A system for guiding life, as a body of principles of conduct. A little easier to manage right? I always like to look up the root of the word, which usually means Latin or Greek. In this case the word comes from the Latin philosophia love of wisdom. That boils the subject down to 3 words.

My basic philosophy of life is to share with others that vision of the beautiful summer morning, I discovered as a kid of 11 or 12 years old. (For more on the springboard to this blog, please read the post in the side bar, titled, Why Blog.)

I believe we all have a beautiful summer morning inside us. Just as an exercise, stop reading push back in you chair, close you eyes, and recall a beautiful summer morning in your life. (I’ll give you time to do that.)

Are you smiling?

I want you to write down in your Diary what you see in your minds eye when you recall that summer morning. Describe your impressions, emotions. Record what you hear, what you see, what you smell, and the various sensations that surround you. Can you feel the heat of the sun on your skin? Can you smell that summer scent? (Refer to that first entry in you diary whenever the clouds cover the sun.)

That beautiful summer morning is what I want to give away everyday, to everyone I meet. Yes, I’m human, it won’t always happen, but that is my mission statement for my life. “To share that beautiful summer morning inside of me, with everyone I come in contact with, plus by example, to live in the moment of that summer morning.

Everyone needs to have a mission statement that guides his or her life (we’ll be working on that). I took my time finding my mission statement. In my diary, I refer often to getting what is inside of me out. I felt frustrated because I didn’t really understand what was trying to get out. It took the fabulous people at Franklin Covey, with a little instruction CD that came with my purchase of a $45.00 daytimer at Cosco to lead me to the discovery of my beautiful summer morning! The best 45 dollars I have spend in my life.

In my college days, we often sat around talking about ideas for changing the world. I remember the conversation turning to happiness at one point. A very intelligent, and wealthy student studying for law, asked me point blank if I was happy.

“Yes.” I answered forgetting the question came form a lawyer to be.

“How can you possible be happy in a world so full of misery and suffering as this one?”

The question startled me. A twinge of guilt flickered through my body.

“So you think that I should be unhappy? Aren’t you happy?” The idea that a handsome well off, intelligent individual, could be unhappy, floored me.

“No I’m not happy, and neither should you be.”

“So you want me to sink down to the mire and the mud, because of the state of the world?’

“Well how can you be happy?”

I couldn’t think of an answer, I’m a writer, not a lawyer, which means I can answers many years later without suffer the penalty of the law.

The answer is simple really. If we all sink to the lowest common denominator, as we sink, the denominator drops even lower. Simple factional math speaks to the truth in that. Instead we must rise up, aspire to greater things, and by doing so help those around us rise up too.

Again, I am not talking about revolt and revolution. I am not say that as a society we must… A society cannot change anything, since society is a collection of individuals. Then the individuals within a society are the ones who have the power to change the world. That doesn’t mean we all have to be Leonardo da Vincis’. However, we can change the world with a smile, with a polite hello to a stranger, with a helping hand here, a word of encouragement there. These gestures rob us of very little time, yet they light up the world with sunshine.

Share a beautiful summer morning with someone today.

Nick Grimshawe