Living in my Mother's Basement: WK 11 Cool Beans, Spiders, and Waterfalls

guess which temple?

The key to happiness lies in what you do.  Without doing you go nowhere.  Just thinking and desiring something is not enough.  You must get off your butt and do it.  Often the thing that you got to do is challenging and hard.  Hence, it takes effort and sometimes it takes going out of your comfort zone to accomplish the task.  In the moment of decision it may not seem like an enjoyable task to take on but in the end happiness will come, but not until the challenge is first overcome through sacrifice and effort.

I often hope for things to get accomplished that I have a hard time doing such as getting my car cleaned, finding a job, finding someone to give me a nice back massage every night for the next 50 years, you know just the usual.  These things probably as an end result will not bring happiness(except for the back massage) but the things that I had to do along the way to achieve the results will.  Take for instance the nightly back massage, it takes a lot of sweat and tears to find someone willing to massage my back every night.  Along the way I learn many things about myself and about finding such a person.  I have discovered which persons have the right hands and elbows to best perform the task.  I learn who has the right amount of patience, fortitude, and kindness. I learn to appreciate all those who try but just aren't there yet.   I now have valuable knowledge that will stay with me forever.  Because of all my hard work, those massages now will mean so much more.

Sometimes challenges are caused by yourself and sometimes they are caused by others and sometimes they just happen such as when lightning strikes you, or your house falls on you due to it being on a sandy beach, or maybe a bear eats you, just to name a few.  Challenges can cause happiness or can cause the opposite effect of unhappiness.  Interesting,  so if that is true what makes the difference.  How can a challenge bring happiness as supposed to unhappiness.  The key my friends who don't live in your mother's basement is knowing who you are/attitude.  Whats your attitude? Are you blaming others or yourself for your problems?  Are you working and wanting to beat the challenges in the face or are you trying to find a path around them?  Challenges are always in front of us, we just got to kick them in the face and enjoy doing it. So know who you are and then go and do.

I have enjoyed kicking the challenge of not working in the face.  I have been able to rest more and clear my mind.  I am learning new perspectives on life and enjoying the process for the most part.  I have read books that I otherwise would have never read and now I have new knowledge that I otherwise would have never gained, like what a Mocking Jay is.  The challenge of meeting new people is fun, I guess.  There are a lot of good people out there believe it or not. 

This is a spider that lives with me, he cool!

So I have a new pet spider and its name is creepy.  This particular spider lives in my bathroom, at night it loves to hang down from the shower.  Whenever I see it I say hi to it and it acknowledges me by not doing anything.  I can now walk right up to the spider and it will just sit there.  We respect each other.  My mom does not like it but whatever, nothing will come between me and my spider.

The "real" waterfall at Adam's Canyon

Yesterday I hiked Adams Canyon with the my Elder's Quorum.  Apparently. the last time I hiked up Adams canyon I did not go far enough.  In fact, there happens to be a very nice waterfall at the top of Adams Canyon that I seemed to have forgotten about.  I had been to the waterfall before but it had been so long that I had forgotten about it.  When I hiked up a couple of months ago I stopped at a waterfall that was small but it satisfied my needs and I accepted it as the Adam's Canyon waterfall.  So last night when we made it to the real waterfall I was really excited to be there and I went up to the waterfall and got wet and dang it felt good!  I may have to go up again, soon.

Being that it is summer I hope that everyone is doing fun things such as vacationing, having BBQ's, playing lots of sports, enjoying the outdoors, and basking in the sunshine.  This is certainly a great time of year, I wish I had a job and that I could afford to move out of my mother's basement but hey, it could be worst it could be winter.