 Family Life
Personal Journey: Find the Gems
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Audio/Video Script:
Dr. James Marshall
Family Life
[Title Slide – Personal Journey: Find the Gems;
Dr. James Marshall – Family Life, U of A Division of Agriculture. The Personal
Journey, Life is a Journey Full of Choices.]
[Picture of Personal Journey publication showing the Find the gems in your
past] One of the recommendations from the personal journey is that we ought to find
the gems in our past. [Dr. James Marshall] Now what this has to do with is that all of us have had
many good experiences in the past and some that didn’t seem quite so good when
they happened.
What we need to be willing to do is identify those great experiences, write
them down, make note of them and retell those stories. And another helpful thing is to go
back and look at those experiences that maybe when they happened, seemed like a
lump of coal experiences, but over time have turned into real diamonds in our
lives.
One example of a story like that is what I’ll call the mile high bed. Years
ago when my wife and I were first married, much like many newlyweds, we didn’t
have much money. And so we went shopping for furniture at neighbors and discount
stores and things like that. Anyway, we bought a bedroom set from one of my wife’s
neighbors for fifty bucks. It was a king size bed that had been around for
probably two decades when we bought it. Anyway after about ten years of
marriage, my wife and I decided we were finally in a position to afford a new bed.
In the meantime, we had purchased a bed frame that was raised up quite a bit
from what the frame was that we had. And so we went out mattress shopping to a
department store and we laid on all sorts of different mattresses and finally we
picked out the one we thought was just right for us. And so the day came when
the department store was delivering our new bedding and they took our old bedding
out and they set the new bedding down into our raised bed frame and we didn’t take
into account how much thicker the new mattress and box springs were than the one
they removed. And the guys who delivered it were kind of chuckling as they left
with our old bedding because the new bedding, literally, the top of the mattress
was about half way between the floor and the ceiling. And my wife and I were
thinking what are we going to do, we’re stuck with this thing, we can’t return
it. And we were a little bit upset and distressed, wondering what are we going to
do?
Rather than get mad at one another and point the finger and say it was your
fault, you wanted that mattress. We decided to just joke about it until we could
figure out a solution. So we said things like I hope you don’t get a nose bleed
from sleeping at such a high elevation, or I hope you don’t hit your head on the
ceiling, or I hope you don’t break your leg when you have to get out of bed in
the morning. And that allowed us to decrease the tension level while we figured
out a solution.
We eventually figured out that we could take out the support beams on the bed
and just lower it down to our regular bed frame and that worked just great for us.
So that’s one example of how finding the gems in your past, even when things
did seem difficult, is important to our well being.
[Narrator] To learn more, contact your county extension agent and follow
the links in this section. [U of A University of Arkansas Division of
Agriculture]
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