Treasury of Joy & Inspiration Read online

  To my amazement, a ten-million-dollar underwriting of the picture project came as a result of that telegram. Had we delayed to talk it over we might have cautiously talked ourselves out of the whole idea. But Pitkin knew how to act on the spur of the moment. He had learned to trust his impulses.

  Behind many an imposing executive desk sits a man who is there because he learned the same lesson. You’ve probably seen him in action more than once. Somebody is presenting to him a new idea, say in employe relations. It calls for extensive changes in office routine. And, deciding instantly, he calls an associate and gives instructions to make the change—then and there, not next week or next month.

  We envy such men the ease with which they make up their minds and swing into action. But this ease is acquired over a long period of years. Rather than being, as we sometimes think, a privilege of their position, it is a practice that has led to their success. First in small matters and then in larger ones, they have acquired the do-it-now habit.

  Calvin Coolidge remains an enigma to political commentators because the reasons for his actions were seldom apparent and the source of his astuteness could not be traced. No one could seem less impulsive than Coolidge, yet all his life he trained himself to rely on “hunches.” He was not afraid of his impulses, and the celebrated Coolidge luck followed a pattern of action based on them. As a young attorney in a country law firm Coolidge was interviewing an important client one day when a telephone message informed him that the county political boss was in town. It occurred to Coolidge that he ought to see the local bigwig at once and propose himself as a candidate for the legislature. Without hesitation, this usually shy young lawyer cut his legal conference short, left the office and hunted up the county leader. That impulse bore fruit, and from then on the inner urges of Coolidge led him consistently to political success.

  It should be clear from Coolidge’s case that the person who follows his impulses is not necessarily flighty. The timid soul, however, is fearful lest impulse lead him into all manner of mistakes. But mistakes are inevitable—we are bound to make them no matter which course we take. Some of the worst mistakes in history have followed consciously reasoned decisions. If we’re right 51 percent of the time in our impulsive actions we aren’t doing badly.

  The mistakes of inaction, flanked by heavy reasoning, are likely to be worse than the mistakes of genuine impulse. For one thing, they make our inertia worse day by day. Not long ago a woman whose husband had left her came to seek my advice. The difficulty between them appeared to be one of temperament which could be easily adjusted. And the woman told me that what she really wanted to do was simply to call her husband up and talk with him. I told her to follow that inclination. She left me somewhat at peace. But she didn’t make the call; and in a few days she was back again. Once more she left with that impulse to call her husband. Unhappily, she never did. And a domestic rift that a few impulsive words on the phone might have healed finally ended in Reno. From childhood she had made time after time the mistake of letting her impulses die aborning.

  We all know people who go through agonies of indecision before taking any important step. There are always arguments for and against, and the more we think about them the more they seem to offset each other, until we wind up in a state of paralysis. Impulsive action, which originates in a swift subconscious appraisal of the situation, might have saved all worry. And when a painfully thought-out decision proves wrong, how often we remember an original hunch that would have been right!

  The way to get things done is to bring mind and muscle and voice into play at the very second a good impulse starts within us. I know a writer who was once engaged on a major project and was resolved that nothing could divert him from it. But he saw an announcement of a contest for the ten best rules for safe driving. The announcement flashes a light on the panel of his mind. Here was something he knew about. He interrupted his job long enough to get to a library and study up. He wrote 250 words. He turned in his entry in his own typing, not wanting to stop his stenographer from the bigger job. Months later that obeyed impulse netted him an award of $25,000. The project from which he turned aside for a moment brought him $600.

  Or consider the young college instructor who sat listening one day to a commencement address by Woodrow Wilson, then governor of New Jersey. The instructor had written a book on political science, but had sought a publisher in vain. It embodied his innermost convictions and its apparent failure had caused him to despair of the future of his teaching.

  Something Mr. Wilson said made the instructor feel that he ought to seek the governor’s advice. He had heard that Wilson was cold and hard to approach; but at the end of the address he let his impulse carry him forward through the crowd; he grasped Mr. Wilson’s hand, and said rapidly, “Your speech was wonderful! I’ve written a book maintaining that . . .” In a few pithy sentences he stated his theory.

  Wilson shook his head. “No,” he said. “You’re wrong. I’ll tell you why. See me after lunch at the Faculty Club.” There for two hours Wilson talked earnestly. And under the inspiration Wilson gave him, the instructor wrote a new book. It sold more than 100,000 copies and launched him on a distinguished educational career. The first vital impulse, half-hesitantly obeyed, was the starting point.

  The life stories of successful people are chock-full of episodes that have marked turning points in their careers. True impulses are intelligent. They reveal the basic interests of the unconscious mind.

  There is in all of us an unceasing urge toward self-fulfillment. We know the kind of person we want to be because our impulses, even when enfeebled by disuse, tell us. Impulsive action is not to be substituted for reason but used as a means of showing the direction reason is to take. Obviously the path is not without pitfalls. To start suddenly throwing ourselves around on impulse might be hazardous. But at least we can begin responding oftener to inner urges that we know we can trust.

  We know that in the midst of reading we ought to stop and look up a word if the meaning is not clear. We know that we ought to speak more words of unpremeditated praise where they are due. We know that we ought to wriggle out of selfish routine and take part in civic activities, that we ought to contribute not merely money but time to the well-being of the neighborhood.

  Such separate moments of achievement are cumulative and result in enriched living, a consciousness of daily adventure, a long-term sense that life is not blocked out and cut-and-dried but may be managed from within. The man whose philosophy is summed up in the feeble and indecisive motto, “Well, we’ll see about it,” misses the savory moments of experience, the bounce and gusto of life.

  Thumb back over the pages of your own experience and note how many of your happiest moments and greatest successes have followed spur-of-the-moment actions and decisions. They are reminders that only from the depths of your inner self can you hope for an invincible urge toward accomplishment. So, obey your best impulses and watch yourself go!

  Hometown Hero: A Fine Bouquet

  Nancy Lawlor collects bouquets—flowers from hotels and weddings and corporate events, in cities like New York and Los Angeles. Then she gives them away to people in need, often breaking down larger bouquets so there’s more to go around.

  Lawlor was inspired to start her nonprofit organization, FlowerPower, in 2003.

  Sitting in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, she was riveted by its towering floral displays. Where did they go at the end of the day? After getting her answer—a Dumpster—Lawlor volunteered to take them away instead. Once the hotel agreed, Lawlor delivered $2,000 worth of large pink bouquets to a New York City hospital. “It all started with one person saying yes,” she says.

  FlowerPower has distributed more than $2.5 million worth of flowers to hospitals, rape crisis centers, and rehabilitation clinics. The bouquets last several days, giving patients a healthy dose of good cheer. “I’ve seen thousands of people trans
formed,” she says, “all over a simple bouquet of flowers that originally would’ve been thrown away.” Now, that’s a beautiful arrangement. Natalie van der Meer

  In Search of Heaven

  By Gail Cameron Wescott

  December 2005

  In an unadorned room deep inside an Israeli maximum-security prison, a handsome Palestinian youth sits at a small wooden table across from television newscaster Barbara Walters. At age 17, the young man, who is now 21, attempted to set off a bomb on a crowded street to massacre as many people as possible, including himself. The bomb failed to go off. Now he will never leave this desolate place.

  Walters, who is Jewish, wonders if he ever wanted a different life—to get married, have children, live normally.

  “I thought about it,” Jihad Jarrar answers matter-of-factly, “but I wanted to kill Jews.” He believes his reward in the end will be to enter paradise—where he looks forward to joyous sex on silken couches amid rivers of milk and honey.

  Walters’s chilling encounter with the failed suicide bomber took place midway through a yearlong search for an answer to a question that has tantalized mankind from the beginning of time: What is heaven like, and who gets to go there? Even before beginning the project, a two-hour special called Heaven that aired on ABC, Walters had realized one indisputable fact: Most of us, regardless of our religious persuasion, do not think that life on earth ends here. We do not believe that this is all there is.

  There are some 10,000 religions in the world, and nearly all incorporate teachings of an afterlife. In America, nine out of ten people believe that heaven is a real place—and most have faith that they are going there at the end of their lives.

  Ask many of the faithful’s children to describe heaven, and you will likely hear of angels perched on puffy clouds playing golden harps. But Walters does not remember ever thinking about heaven. Growing up in Boston and New York, the daughter of an impresario who launched the famous Latin Quarter nightclubs, she was raised in a secular world. “I didn’t go to temple, and I didn’t go to Sunday school,” she says, “partly because my older sister was retarded and it would have been one more thing that Jackie could not do.” Her family did not celebrate Yom Kippur—“the holiday that everybody we knew celebrated”—and at Christmas there were presents and stockings but never a tree.

  While she unfailingly prays on planes, Walters spent little time devoted to spiritual matters as she carved out her iconic career. Dubbed “the alpha female of broadcast news,” she spent 13 years on The Today Show, becoming its first female cohost. She then moved to ABC as the first woman coanchor of the network Evening News, commanding a then-unheard-of seven-figure salary. She spent 25 years at 20/20, where she interviewed everyone from Presidents to Fidel Castro to Paris Hilton.

  When Walters stepped down from the post, she agreed to produce specials for ABC. She set her sights first on the big story she had not done already: God and heaven. “It seemed the right time,” she says. “There’s so much interest in spirituality. Why are we here? Where are we going? We have e-mail and cell phones and the Internet, yet we see life whirling out of control.”

  For the special, Walters approached the subject with her signature candor. Sitting with Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Archbishop of Washington, D.C., in the ornate cathedral of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, she asked, “Is there sex in heaven?” He barely blinked. “That was a question they asked the Lord, and the answer was no.”

  In New York’s famed Abyssinian Baptist Church, Rev. Calvin Butts, who has had multiple visions of heaven, revealed that his grandmother had spoken to him during her own funeral. “What did [she say]?” Walters asked. The grandmother explained why she once gave Butts’s chicken and dumplings to the town drunk. “By doing good works, she was sending up a little timber for her heavenly home.”

  Whatever our vision, most of us expect heaven to be a better place. Evangelist Billy Graham has said he can’t wait to get there. “I look forward to the reunion with friends and loved ones who have gone on before. I look forward to heaven’s freedom from sorrow and pain.”

  Some, like Anthony DeStefano, author of A Travel Guide to Heaven, believe that in the afterlife we’ll be able to go fishing with Hemingway, study piano with Mozart and painting with Michelangelo. Provided, he adds, that those folks make it to heaven.

  To be sure, there is sometimes ruthless—even bloody—disagreement on exactly who gets in. When Walters asked the suicide bomber in Israel if she, as a non-Muslim, would be welcomed into paradise, his answer was swift and blunt: “No,” he said. “Of course, you are going to hell.”

  On another day, in Colorado, Walters sat down with Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals. They are the most vocal force in U.S. religion today, with 40 million members. Walters asked if a person who did not accept Jesus Christ as his Savior was destined to go to hell. Haggard’s answer was equally unambiguous: “Yes.”

  The interviewer herself, who purposely did not argue with her subjects, allowed afterward: “There are so many ways of looking at life and death. You just cannot say this belief is right and that is wrong. I think one of the major problems today is people saying that only my religion is right, and if you don’t agree with me, you are not going to heaven.”

  At least for now, that view is not predominant in the United States. According to a recent Newsweek/Beliefnet poll, 79 percent of Americans believe that someone of another faith can attain salvation and go to heaven. But views of what heaven is vary widely among religious groups.

  The world’s 2.1 billion Christians believe that the purpose of life on earth is to get to heaven, a place of unending peace and tranquility where all tears and mourning cease. They believe that in heaven there will be an actual resurrection of the body. “We will look as we would want to look,” says Cardinal McCarrick. Christians fully expect to see the people they loved on earth who preceded them. There will be no need for earthly pleasures there. Joy will come from being at one with God, roaming the universe in another dimension.

  Muslims have a different, but equally rapturous, vision of heaven. In the Koran, paradise is described as a place where there will be lavishly comfortable homes with beautiful gardens and servants to attend to Islam’s followers. (There are currently 1.2 billion of them.) Food and wine will be plentiful, and sex will be enjoyed by both men and women. Other Islamic texts promise that martyrs will be among the righteous Muslims who will be rewarded by sex with 72 virgins, a misunderstood concept, according to an Islamic scholar. The number was never meant to be a precise figure, he says, but an indication of “a surfeit of this kind of delight.”

  But not all religions have such a specific view of heaven. For most Jews, the idea of an afterlife is less important than what you do on earth. Still, almost all of the 14 million Jews in the world believe that there is life beyond death, when the body and soul separate and the soul goes off to be with God. The resurrection of the dead will occur at a time when the Messiah initiates a perfect world.

  Buddhism doesn’t teach that heaven is the soul’s final resting place. Instead, the world’s 350 million Buddhists believe in different heavens that lead you not to God but to nirvana, a place of enlightenment. Buddhists are born again and again, living many different lifetimes. Their behavior on earth determines the quality of their next life, and whether they return as a lowly animal or a person. Tibetan Buddhists believe that the Dalai Lama is godlike, the 14th reincarnation of a semidivine being.

  To meet him, Walters traveled across the world to the village of Dharmshala, on the edge of the Himalayas in northern India, where the Dalai Lama settled when the Chinese took over his homeland more than four decades ago. “It was raining, and I was chilled to the bone for four days,” says Walters, “but I was deeply affected by the Dalai Lama.” Charming and charismatic, with a childlike giggle, he assured her he was not a go
d. Gods, he pointed out, did not get eye infections like the one afflicting him that day. “He said the purpose of life is to be happy,” Walters remembers, “and the way to happiness is through compassion and warm-heartedness.” In a world where wars are fought over religion, it struck her as a stunning concept. “For days afterward,” says Walters, “I didn’t have an angry thought or a competitive bone.”

  After her interview, Walters was moved to do something she never does. “I asked if I could give him a kiss on the cheek,” she admits. He cheerfully agreed. Then he said he wanted to show her how it was done in New Zealand. In a misty rain in a distant corner of the world, the Dalai Lama and Barbara Walters rubbed noses.

  By the conclusion of her journey, Walters had talked not only with religious leaders but with people whose near-death experience had convinced them that they’d had an actual glimpse of heaven. She also met with Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists, who believes that religion is superstition. “Heaven does not exist,” Johnson says firmly. “Hell doesn’t exist.” She sees her acceptance of that fact as a means to make her life on earth more fulfilling because it is the only chance she’ll have.

  “I was deeply impressed by the sincerity of everyone I met,” says Walters, sitting in her corner office at ABC, where a shelf is lined with Emmys. The newswoman declines to offer her own take on whether heaven exists. “I may not be certain what heaven is,” she says, “but I do have a personal vision of hell. It’s finishing a program and having someone come up to me after to say that I forgot to ask the most important question! And the person is usually right.”