Life has three rules:

Prior to my departure to France last month, Mom asked us to have a family meeting.  We talked about her desires and wishes for the time ahead and spoke about her life-philosophies. 

She was someone who led her life caring for the here and now and the people in it and never expecting reward of any kind.  She was not religious but she did have a spiritual side that she would share with us, especially in these last few years. 

She had decided that she wanted some of her spiritual philosophies to be conveyed, come the day of her Life-Celebration.  She asked that we work together to find a spiritual story that expressed the way she felt and we agreed I would pull a collection together for her to choose from. 

I found it a difficult task; it was hard to know how she would feel or react to the stories.  Choosing something like that for someone else is really an impossible task. 

What I did do is send Mom a handful of excerpts and quotes from those books to see if any one of them might be something she was looking for.  After a couple days, Dad sent me an email to say that Mom had read all of them several times, and could not choose just one, so she chose them all. 

Because Mom passed sooner than we expected, we didn’t get to talk about the best way to include the passages she had chosen, so I decided to incorporate them throughout the things we would do to honor her.  We placed some of quotes in the videos we shared, I spoke about a few passages at her service and we used a final quote in a set of cards we made in her honor.

These cards have another special element to them; something that followed one of Mom’s better known philosophies, which was: why buy it when you can make it or build it yourself.  (And Mom could pull this off with anything from cuisine to furniture.)

So it turned out that our dear friends, Bill and Lisa Bosworth, recently acquired an old printing press and they offered us the use of it, along with lessons on how to do it right.  It was an impressive process; something I am sure would have taken half the time had I not been involved, which was reminiscent of every time I did a handmade project with Mom.  It seemed that she had to spend more hours un-doing what I had done than it would have taken her to actually make the thing herself (especially if a sewing machine was involved).  But she loved creating together and taking the time to teach and to share.  She got pure joy out of producing anything we could put our personal stamp on. 

And so after almost seven hours, Bill, Lisa and I managed to complete our cards with the last quote I will use that Mom selected.  And we were also, in the literal sense this time, able to put a personal stamp on them.

“Life has three rules: Paradox, Humor, and Change.

• -Paradox: Life is a mystery; don’t waste your time trying to figure it out.
• -Humor: Keep a sense of humor, especially about yourself.  It is a strength beyond all measure.
• -Change: Know that nothing ever stays the same.” 

By Dan Millman

CROOKED TALE X BACK CORNER PRESS