The Universe Will Be Yours, Because The Walls Are Gone

"Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls".

Steven Behr

Wellness Educator

These words sent to me about one of my articles from Steven, my friend, my mentor, my dancing advocate and my email pal. These are the words of Joseph Campbell.

Many people I know will tell you they had hard lives. Usually it was from financial woes they had growing up in a family without a lot of income and therefore they felt they were deprived of a good education after high school and therefore they are now in jobs they detest and wish they had taken any opportunity to get additional education. I know of a young lady whose dad died when she was eighteen and she wanted to be a nurse and she would have made a wonderful and compassionate nurse, had she been given the chance. She had to go to work as did her siblings and they helped support the mom and each other. Now she is in a job she does not care for even though she is really very good in doing it. She works in a doctor’s office as a front desk receptionist. She does this job with dignity, kindness to the patients and great efficiency. She resents having to do this though her husband makes a fairly decent living and she got both of their daughters through a local university. Both are doing well even though they did not go to a fancy college.

She did the best she could when she had to be employed at eighteen and though now she is about fifty-three, it is, she thinks too late to accomplish the goal of the high school time. She feels she is caught in a time warp and looks forward to retirement days. Another lady I know did go back at a late age and got a nursing degree. She came to this country from Norway with her brother and she took up hair styling and made a good living and raised her two kids after she divorced. At about the age of fifty something, she enrolled in nursing school and it took her four years of part time work in college, while doing her hair styling in between. Finally, she graduated as a nurse at about fifty-six and obtained a nice nursing job making good money at a local hospital here-St. Agnes. She is happy now and she deserves it because she persevered and obtained her desired goal, thirty some years later after coming to this country.

"Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls". She, the nurse did follow her bliss and tore down the walls that were stopping her. Sometimes, when she was styling my hair, I would ask her why she was so tired and she told me she had just come off of a student learning time shift in the hospital associated with her nursing school. She had time to run home, shower and come into the hair salon. She was awesome for sure. My own brother did that too while going to pharmacy school five days a week at age forty with a family; he drove a truck delivering circulars to upstate New York from Baltimore. Some shifts were on Sunday night and he would come home at about five a.m. from the trucking job, shower and race to pharmacy school for the eight a.m. class. When he graduated first in his class several years later and won a five hundred dollar award for excellence, the professor at the graduation told how he always wondered why  Mr.Sohmer was late every Monday morning for his particular class. He, only five minutes before the award, was told by Mr. S. that he raced there to school and class from his truck driving job every Sunday night. The audience applauded and stood up for him to honor him for what he had accomplished at the now age of almost forty-three.

Doors can open up for us and the walls will be gone, if we really want something so badly, we continue on and on until it happens. A young girl just won a gold medal in the Olympics and at age fourteen, she left home and went far away to another state to train with an excellent trainer. She was on TV and told of being homesick and asking her Mom could she come home and Mom said stick with it and here yesterday, she was feeling so much bliss, happiness and contentment over her tremendous accomplishments and the hardships she endured getting to yesterday’s golden climax. That is what is called supreme achievement, realization and fulfillment. Her name is Gabby Douglas and she said “it came from sweat, blood and tears.”

She reached this glory with lots of sacrifice of not being with her immediate family and going off to live with a host family, so she could be trained by a top person in this sport. It paid off and she has been rewarded with the greatest of all rewards. She did it, accomplished it and is a winner.

We can all be winners in anything we want really a lot. It can be like Gabby in the Olympics, it can be a dance trophy or medal awarded at a dance competition that we trained for with lots of time given to studying and practicing dance; it could be for a college scholarship that we deserved because we studied hard and were at the top of the class. It could be in a regular job we are employed in and we excel and our employers notice our hard work. It could be in a marriage that we wanted with a special someone and we work hard at realizing our happiness, our children and our grandchildren. It can be anything you want and many times, it is never too late to start and to try and to maintain our regular life while achieving something we desire.

A friend of mine had one of her poems published online and she is thrilled beyond words. Now she is going about getting lots of them together and hopefully they will be published in book form. This is her achievement in the making and she is seventy-nine. I am happy for her and for this accomplishment at this age. Her name is Susanne.

There are still many opportunities for all of us regardless of the wish we have, to have it fulfilled and for us to be like Gabby winning a medal, bronze, silver, gold, your choice, and to feel as if we are winners whatever age we are now. It need not be a medal, though whatever it is, it is still a medal of sorts. Whatever we bring to fruition that is our medal of recognition. We recognize our self to be a winner, doer, a go-getter and most of all, a person worth recognition and appreciation.

The universe will be yours because the walls have come down.