Ellen and I were talking about how we keep making our world smaller… and smaller… and smaller… while all around us everyone wants to expand… get bigger… acquire more….I called it my narrow little life…. hmmmm…
Why does that sound negative….? Maybe because I used to put down people with that description of their narrow little lives? Do you think that might possibly have something to do with it? 
Man…. I was so caught up in the world’s idea of success thing…I mean…. anyone who wasn’t multi-tasking with 70 zillion things on their plate was leading some kind of narrow little existence in their tiny little world. How about that? Interesting word… this word narrow. You know Jesus used it when He told us that the gate was narrow… not only narrow but that their would be few who could find it…. He was talking to His followers about that… the wide gate is the world’s idea of life and success and wonderfulness… why do you think that the Church has gone thru that wide gate? You know… the one that says bigger is better that I talked about yesterday… yeah… that one… it is the gate that leads to the destruction of my life…. a life that revolves totally around me.
Narrowness means reduction of me… it means the end of all my great plans … they all go into the ground with me and die there… that death leads me into Him… the one who is life.
Hope I just keep getting skinnier…..
So there I was just musing away about what I was trying to communicate to some guests the other day… about how much we enjoy what we do here… and how different it is from all the other businesses we’ve been involved in… what triggered the whole thing was an email from my friend John in NH about how he was changing jobs… and all excited about how he was changing jobs from this huge company with 400,000 employees to a little one with only 5,000 employees… all I could do was laugh!!!!
Here I was talking to some guests here about how the best thing with the B&B was having no employees… as in like zero… none…. nada… What a difference from the old Restaurant days…. an employee nightmare… that eventually got me back to the days of our manufacturing business…. Jersey Crane Corporation… at the height of my arrogance… I mean… come on man…. I had 35 employees… that made me a real big shot… a huge success… entitled me to drink my lunches with sales guys from the steel companies who wanted my steel orders… get me outta here….
Obviously more is better… it’s the great American way… actually it’s the whole world’s system’s way… if you got one you need to get another one… if you have 5 employees success is 35???? Where do you put 5,000 employees…. or 400,000…. ? Where does it stop? When do we ever get there? Is there ever enough? Hmmmmm… so many things one can muse about.
Personally I believe it is just another of those things that we have upside down and backwards… God’s way seems just the opposite… His way is for us to diminish… decrease not increase… regress not progress… become less not more… I keep getting all these illustrations and scriptures flying through my head…. we say get busy… He says be still. Jesus ends up alone on a cross. Paul ends up alone in a Roman jail. John ends up alone on Patmos. Watchman Nee ends up alone in jail his last 20 years. Ozwald Chambers gets sick and dies a young man far away in a little hut in Egypt.
And we still think what God wants is busier - bigger - better - do great and wondrous things - bring in the crowds - have great ministries - huge churches - build bigger mousetraps ????? You gotta be kiddin’ me… when will we ever get it.
Somehow I don’t think I am finished with this line of musing… hmmmmm
Still recovering physically from all the madness of the past couple months… it is time for Philip to get back to whatever “normal” is supposed to look like for him this month. After our surreal run in July with 93 room nights… we closed out an even more surreal August with 95 room nights… August is supposed to be much slower than July. Whatever happened to the economic downturn? ……
I can’t seem to get rid of this deep mucous congestion in my chest…. plus ….just being tired a lot more than I’m used to. At the same time, I made the mistake of cutting back on my supplements to see if it would effect anything… it did... old arthur came to visit again… (you know him… Arthur Ritis) … :) Thought he was gone for good … but I guess he never quits… so when I couldn’t pick up the coffee pot with my right hand… I said that’s it … and went back to my full supplement regimen… the difference has been dramatic… helps with my golf too!
Actually… even with my hands hurting… the Lord blessed me with being runner up at our Super Seniors Championship at Copley Country Club… another of those kind of surreal things that seem to just continue in my life and keep me thankful… runner up in 2008… winner in 2009 and runner up this year… I still like those kind of blessings a lot more than the other kind… the kind that helps me not to think more highly of myself than I ought to think!
I need to write about all that has been going on with us for some new Newsletters I’d like to post on our web-site. I am trying to do that a little more often this year…. Also want to try to put a Facebook thing together for the business…. hmmmm… I thought we were cutting back….
It almost seems that the more stuff we stop doing… the busier we get…. go figure!
I would invite anyone visiting my blog for the first time , to read three of the pages listed at the right side of the opening page.
Why these musings will explain how I got involved with blogging
Philip’s Story will give you an idea of where I am coming from.
Good to have you visit will lay some groundwork for all that will follow.
Everything else…..just daily thoughts and stories, running from one day to another….. starting at the beginning will help it all make sense….. kind of a journey thru my life that I started recording here back in mid-December 2007 ……..I sincerely hope you will enjoy the journey.
I sure have!
As if 60% occupancy in July wasn’t a bit of a stretch in itself… (….that is foliage type occupancy when it seems like every room is full every nite) we are already past that now for August and August isn’t over! Then all the family celebrations during this past week was simply just… “over the top”… we just crashed yesterday… it was the first day we had nobody checking in since the 8th of July!
It was also my birthday which we celebrated by a trip to the Lake to remake all the beds and load up all the trash from the week spent there by 12 of my grandchildren… we also picked up the second car my brother Marc was using over at his place on Shadow Lake…. it was a good thing we had the two cars… since there was barely room for Philip and the trash!
Of course we had already celebrated my birthday twice… plus Marc’s birthday… and my daughter Carla’s birthday… all during this incredible “week of the family” that just came to a close… there were 63 people who came to the party Mom wanted us to throw to “Celebrate Her Life…” there are no words yet to describe that night of August 26th at the Town & Country Resort in Stowe…. maybe next time…
We barely survived physically… been hacking for several days now and slept forever this morning… more guests arrive a little later on for tonight ….
Did fine with realizing this was my 75th birthday… at least until one of my brothers suggested that I had now lived three quarters of a century…. guess that means I am in the final quarter of the game…. hmmm… I will be musing more about that I am sure…
To write… or not to write… that is the question… that is not from Shakespeare… just old Philip Musing…. Shakespeare was wrestling to be.. or not to be… that’s a little bit heavier question… more in tune with his non-understanding of life… life being the tale of an idiot… full of sound and fury… signifying nothing…
I guess I’ll never get it… life is so full here every single day… full of purpose… one day at a time is all I can handle… all around me I hear folks talking about life was terrible yesterday and really sucks today… always looking for tomorrow for things to turn around… sorry… the future is not ours to know… we are supposed to just be enjoying today…
I will probably fall asleep sometime soon… there is a plan in place for the morning… 8 folks for breakfast at 8:30…. cleaning up afterwards …and whatever else “happens” in the morning… phone calls… emails… booking on-line?… who knows?… I sure don’t… 12 grandkids arriving at the Lake…. my brother Bruno arriving from Milwaukee with his wife and grand daughter… the predicted rain may mess up the golf match with my brother Marc… hopefuly we will get to work out some sort of schedule for the Celebration of our Mom’s life on Thursday… but we haven’t lived any of that yet and really don’t know what it is going to be like… we do know that almost 70 people will be coming in over the next few days for the big dinner celebration at the Town & Country Resort in Stowe… hopefully everything will go as planned…
But we don’t really know… that really isn’t our department… our department is to flow with the go … and enjoy it… doing the kind of things we do… the next order of business is to get some sleep… except I heard guests just come in the door… and I probably should process the reservation that just came in… oh well….
So what do you think? Is it? Is life a “tale told by an idiot… full of sound and fury… signifying nothing”… ? And us? Are we insignificant … our lives meaningless… ? My friend Chris… he writes things like I do… to try to stir folks up to think about life… what is really going on here… and I always enjoy how his mind runs in the same direction as mine… you can check out the kind of things he says by clicking on the link “think about it” over there in my blogroll to the right…
He just wrote about the movie “Gangs of New York”… posing these same thoughts… as powerful an ending to a movie as I have ever seen… the movie was a bit to horrific for this old fella so I never made it to the ending before I clicked on Chris’s link to youtube where I watched the final minute of the film… and listened to the closing words… this what Chris wrote…
“The movie, Gangs of New York, is set in a small New York city neighborhood in the mid 1800’s. The young city is already filled with corruption and gangs have begun to establish their little territorial kingdoms. You watch the turmoils and the interactions of the 2 rival gang leaders as they protect their turf. You are drawn into their world as they suffer defeats and celebrate victories. You become interested in all the deep emotions, conflicts, and agonies of their lives. There is a rather vexing scene at the end of the movie. The 2 opposing gang leaders die and are buried side by side. The camera lingers on this cemetery scene … the graveyard in the foreground with the NYC skyline across the Hudson River and looming in the distance. You watch the graveyard and the skyline “time lapse” from 1863 to 2002.
Your mind races as you compare the changing skyline to the graves that become overgrown with grass and weeds….as the final line of the movie plays games with your mind. “For the rest of time, it will be like no one ever knew we was ever here.”
Is that really the way it is.? What do you think? Will our lives have had no purpose either? Hmmmmmm.
Old Philip the Muser was pretty tough on old William the Shakespeare yesterday… sorry about that… in reflection on how I said he ( Shakespeare) was totally clueless… I must also say that Philip was just as clueless the first 32 years of his life… nothing about life made any sense to me back then… life for me was a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury… signifying nothing…”
My best friend was killed in a freakish accident when I was 28… my marriage was a mess…. my business was coming down around me… full of sound and fury… life sucked… signified nothing… everything I was experiencing was a tale told by an idiot… so I escaped this terrible life into the world of little theater… my little make believe world where I could always become someone else… and never have to look at who Philip really is….
I didn’t do that by acting in plays like Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Macbeth… but in plays by his 20th century counterpart… Tennessee Williams… he made Shakespeare look like an optimist about life… his character Stanley Kowalski was the epitome of his twisted view of males… Blanche and Stella took care of his view of women…. and the play itself…. Streetcar Named Desire was the declaration of his world view…. Philip… the one before he became the Muser… loved it… agreed with it… hid in it… and lived it… I became the total hedonist.
I seriously needed some help… finally found it on June 24th, 1968…. everything changed drastically on that day…
My world view changed overnight.
What is it about tomorrows? We plan for them…. we live for them… we are consumed by them… we save for them…. we think about them all the time… why is that? People who know me understand that I do have a couple of opinions about one or two things… actually I do happen to have one about this as well…
It is a desperate need in us to control our lives… be the master of our fates… the creators of our destinies… everything is about what is going to happen in my life tomorrow… and tomorrow… and tomorrow.…next week… next year and on and on….
…the truth is …we haven’t got a clue about what is going to happen tomorrow… if we will even have another tomorrow … not our department… tomorrows are not under our control… someone else is in control of that… not us….
We don’t like even the thought of such a thing…
Shakespeare even wrote a soliloquy about them in MacBeth… when we do not understand either life or death… we write something like this….
“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.”
Shakespeare was clueless about the purpose of life…. to him all of life was tragic… sorry Bill… Life is not a tale told by an idiot…. signifying nothing… when we tune in to the One who does control our tomorrows… there is suddenly meaning and purpose to everything about life… it becomes His Plan… His purpose… His tomorrow…
… and we can just kick back and enjoy today… big time… and stop worrying about any tomorrows….!
Our string of days with one or more bookings finally ended… after 10 days in a row… a total of 23 bookings for 42 room nights… aw shucks…. I mean com’on… now why did it have to stop like that…. I was really enjoying myself….
I am saying this totally tongue in cheek… I am clueless why the Lord is blessing us in this particular way… I am much more used to His blessing us the opposite way… although I must confess I like this sort of success kind of way a whole lottabunch better… and then He totally blew me away after our one day drought… by selling the whole house for 6 days over Thanksgiving…. I really do not have any place in my 42 years of walking with God to put this kind of thing…
I do know that the very last place I want to put it… is to tell people that if they walk with God the way that I walk with God… then He will do the same sort of thing for them… took me a long time to learn that one… so for right now… I am just sitting back enjoying the journey… and realizing that Ellen and I have absolutely nothing to do with any of it…
We live thankful… in that knowledge… and are staying quite busy just trying to keep up with all the work He is creating for us each day… taking it one day at a time… one day at a time…. living in the present… not in the past… not in the future…. just enjoying today…. ’cause we are clueless what tomorrow will bring…
Probably won’t be what I think it should be….