Posts Tagged ‘Self-Improvement’

In March, when Virgin Atlantic Flight 404 departed Los Angeles for New York at 10:10 a.m. EST, passengers never imagined they were jetting toward a hostage crisis. High winds forced 404 to divert from JFK to Stewart International 90 miles away. The plane landed at 5:15 … and the nightmare began.

Most people don’t realize the Land of the Free ceases to exist at the door of a commercial airliner. The plane may be free to move about the country, but no matter how long it’s been sitting on the tarmac, ain’t nobody free to leave the plane. For about seven hours the flight crew forced passengers to stay on that aircraft. No exercise. Little water. A few rationed potato chips and cookies. Can’t sleep in cramped seats.

Can you imagine letting someone get away with treating you like that?

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 Nooooo! Stopppp! I ran toward my friend, making wild arm gestures, desperately trying to wave him off as he unwittingly stumbled toward the precipice …

Too late. Crash and burn.

Okay … so my friend didn’t really take an accidental header over the side of the world then spontaneously combust. And my dramatic slo-mo attempt to save him was all in my head. I wanted to save him. The second he veered from his prepared comments into “I shouldn’t tell this story, but …” it was clear he needed saving. But I could only listen helplessly as he off-the-cuffed himself off the cliff. Later, as he tried to defend his inappropriate anecdote, he probably thought spontaneous combustion wouldn’t have been so bad.

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Launching a Web site is kind of like juggling watermelons. You can handle two, but when you try to add the third, things get a little complicated … which is why regular readers of MoveThatMountain.com have missed seeing new content in recent weeks. After posting more than 135 articles, I needed to work through a few blog-related tasks that aren’t as comfortable for me as writing.

Now that my grip on the watermelons is more sure, readers can expect new content about five days a week. And for those juggling watermelons of their own, here are a few words of inspiration to help you through the rough, um, patches:

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Poor Virgil was a sweet young man saddled with total ineptitude. Whatever he touched, he broke. No matter how simple the job, he botched it. Finally, given the easy task of polishing a set of keys, he managed to wear away the grooves, rendering the keys useless and sealing the door they were supposed to unlock.

Faced with this latest example of his incompetence, his cousin Barney berated his stupidity, leaving Virgil hanging his head in shame and defeat.

Fans of The Andy Griffith Show recognize the plot from the episode “Cousin Virgil.” But most of us have witnessed similar interactions between managers and employees—or worse, between parents and children. People screw up and other people berate them. We may have been on the giving or receiving ends of similar experiences.

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Did you know every hour you spend driving knocks 20 minutes off your life expectancy because of the increased risk of being involved in a fatal collision?

Neither did I.

Before the price of gasoline went sky high, I used to drive around just for the heck of it. Stress release. Sometimes I’d drive for a couple of hours. Taken in context with that statistic, now it sounds like I was ingesting slow poison.

Yikes.

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“The whole world is set on fire.”

That’s one of the more memorable quotes from the 1992 film version of The Last of the Mohicans. And since I’m indulging my inner drama queen, that’s how I’ve felt lately. As loyal readers may have noticed, a nasty little virus wandered in and briefly staked claim on behalf of some probably nonexistent terrorist group. Posts have fallen behind as I’ve focused on other site-related issues. Like many people, I’ve gotten caught up in putting out fires instead of blazing my path. As a result, the mountains have started to seem overwhelming.

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So you’re floating along, blue skies ahead, staring into a bright horizon. Life is good.

And a volcano erupts. In Iceland.

The blue skies become hazy. An ash cloud blocks the bright horizon. You’re grounded and the good is gone.

Major life disruptions can happen just as quickly as the eruption of the Icelandic volcano that grounded planes and stranded passengers all over the world. One moment things couldn’t be better. The next, financial markets crash and you’re unemployed. The doctor says your biopsy is positive. A call brings news that a loved one has died on the way to work. Lightning strikes and your house explodes in flames. And it takes some regrouping before you can figure out how to navigate around the new ash cloud that’s enveloped your life.

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Imagine you’re traveling in a foreign country and a man you’ve just met comes stumbling toward you through a crowded marketplace, collapsing into your arms with a dagger plunged into his back. Just before he dies, he whispers to you that a head of state is about to be assassinated.

Fans of film director Alfred Hitchcock will recognize that as the plot to the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, starring Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day. And of course, that tidbit of unwanted information plunges the tourist into a world of trouble.

These days most of us can identify.

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On a beautiful Saturday morning, I joined several friends who were setting up a traditional Easter egg hunt for children of varying ages. The hunt was at my friend Sarah’s home—a sprawling 20 acres where she and her husband Keith keep big dogs and even bigger horses.

Listening to Sarah admonish the littlest hunters before they set off to find their eggs, I realized her advice to them could also apply to my own recent searches for life’s goodies. Maybe you’ll find it useful as well:

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One of the cardinal sins of dreamstopping is pigeonholing: putting ourselves in a limited space and failing to see our other possibilities. Of course, if you were going to be pigeonholed, there are worse spaces to be boxed into than Hollywood movie star and sex symbol. That’s the space Hedy Lamarr occupied in the 1930s and 40s.

Lamarr was a stunning dark-haired Austrian-born actress who later became an American citizen. She captivated directors as a 19-year-old in the 1933 Czech film Ecstasy, and within a decade was capturing plum roles opposite Hollywood’s top leading men. Billed as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” she even wound up playing the ultimate Biblical seductress in director Cecil B. DeMille’s lavish 1949 production Samson and Delilah.

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