FAMILY AND FRIENDS ARE BLESSINGS
Good Day –
Hello, Its Dan and my 18th day hunkering down. When we lived in Florida once in a while we had to hunker down when there was a hurricane coming and certainly during one year when we were in a mix of three in succession in a short span of time. However; we did take a short break in between but we never had these many days in a row. How are you all doing?
I’m dedicating this blog piece to my family and friends for all the blessings that you have shared. You all have been through the ups and downs, good times and bad, and have truly been the WIND BENEATH MY WINGS, Dan and I could not have gotten this far without you.
As I sit and read and go within my mind, a thought came such as, that everything happens for a reason and people come in and out of your life. The ones that are everlasting are there for a reason. I am blessed to have my best friend by my side every day and through Dan also my second gift my daughter.
I came across this article that I felt was something worth sharing:
How we can find friends who encourage and strengthen who we are.
Posted Oct 27, 2016
What makes a perfect friendship? How do we find and keep friends who encourage and strengthen who we are? How do we maintain friendships with the demands of our jobs, family, and other responsibilities?
Reflect on the most meaningful friendships in your life. Think of that person you can call at any time of the day when you need some advice, are feeling down, or when you just need a good laugh. Although Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter allow us to be constantly updated with our friends’ latest posts, we have to remember to sign out of our accounts and pick up the phone and call each other.
We need to make a greater effort in our very busy lives to find ways to connect face to face with friends. Although the demands of life will call for constant attention, friends are the ones that provide both spiritual and mental renewal. They are the ones who give hope in life’s most difficult situations, help to de-stress your life, and provide affirmation of your life’s path. When you and your friends are investing in a conscientious relationship, meaningfulness often follows.
7 Traits of Friendship That Affirm a Conscientious Life
1. Friends who are empathetic. Being empathetic is the ability to actively try and take yourself out of your own shoes and put yourself in someone else’s. Too often we listen to a friend’s struggle and immediately make it about ourselves by adding our own experiences. Sometimes, the greatest thing friends can do is just actively listen to each other.
2. Friends who are selfless. Our friends who are the most happy and positive are the ones who are grounded, who care, and who do not always think about themselves. They are able to understand their own life experience but are not consumed by their own problems. Instead, they take action to help solve the problems of others.
3. Friends who are trustworthy. Being trustworthy is a trait that is essential for understanding that the deepest relationships are the ones in which we can confide in each other. Trustworthy friends remind you that you are not alone and empower you to be a better person.
4. Friends with shared interests. Whether this pertains to hobbies, sports, goals, education, values, or religion, we often prefer spending time with people who enjoy the same things as we do. This allows for immediate connection and ultimately strengthens our relationships.
5. Friends with different perspectives and backgrounds. The time you can truly grow as a human being, both professionally and personally, is when you have the opportunity to listen to people who are different from you. Sometimes, you remain in a fixed mindset when you hang around people who just agree with you or who do the same things as you. Friends who offer new perspectives, ideas, experiences, and advice can help you learn more about yourself and will help you grow as a more well-rounded human being. Friends of diverse backgrounds have the ability to transform a fixed mindset into a growth mindset.
6. Friends who are humorous. The best friends are simply the ones who know how to make you laugh and who are full of life and spirit. They are the ones who bring you joy, hope, and comfort even in the midst of life’s most difficult situations.
7. Friends who are team players. A trait we learned as children but one in which we often forget. Being a team player and putting the needs of others before ourselves for a shared goal is what friendship is all about.
Communicating, collaborating, and active listening are all essential traits that make the most successful teams unstoppable forces.
Contacting friends should not be a burden or put on a to-do list. Make a conscious effort to integrate communicating with friends a part of your routine. Whether it is calling a friend on your way home from work, setting aside one evening a month to get together, or designating at least once a year to reconnect, even these small changes can have a profound influence on your overall mood and well-being. Friends help you to maintain and strengthen healthy relationships as you balance those with your co-workers and family members who may demand a lot from you.
So, put down your phones in the presence of your friends and sign out of your social networks. Surrounding yourself with friends who embody these traits will allow you to step away from the mobile social notifications of life and find solace in each other to create meaning in the precious time you have together.
The more we are invested in our relationships, the less we become single-minded and forget about the things that actually matter. Find friends that affirm a conscientious life; who uplift your soul, who are full of life, and who are excited about your new ideas and want to see you through.
When you struggle with the many obstacle’s life will throw at you, know that you are not alone. Remember the people in your life and actively reach out to them. The investment you make with a friend will enrich both of your lives.
I remember when I was in my late teens this saying, friends can be lovers, but lovers can never be friends.
I have this plaque that was given to me from a dear friend that I met in Mexico. Right before I left, she gave it to Dan and I, it’s a treasure of the memories that we shared and will continue to share. Thank you, Maureen, for the unconditional love.
WHO AMONG YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY HAS TRULY BEEN A BLESSING TO YOU?
In the dictionary family means, a basic social unit consisting of parents and their children, considered as a group, whether dwelling together or not: the traditional family. A social unit consisting of one or more adults together with the children they care for: a single-parent family. The children of one person or one couple collectively. Any group of persons closely related by blood, as parents, children, uncles, aunts, and cousins: to marry into a socially prominent family.
We all come from roots, but our family are the ones that spend your whole life with that share unconditional love without any questions. I have been blessed with a family that may not agree on different topics, but share this unconditional love and are always there when needed.
This song goes out to my grandson- Jonah
Sesame Street: Family Song
Love these quotes from famous people related to family.
Rich or poor, we will keep together and be happy in one another. ~Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, "Burdens," 1868
I don't care how poor a man is; if he has family, he's rich. ~Dan Wilcox and Thad Mumford, "Identity Crisis," M*A*S*H, 1981
Poor Folks have neither any Kindred nor any Friends. ~Italian proverb
It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons. ~Johann Schiller
The family is a haven in a heartless world. ~Christopher Lasch
The truth is maybe we are just average. But the way I see it — families where parents get up every morning and go to jobs that are hard so they can get their kids through school and through life, and struggle to make it all work and manage to do it with dignity and a little humor — well, that's not average. That's extraordinary. ~DeAnn Heline and Eileen Heisler, The Middle, "Average Rules," 2010 [S1, E24, Frankie Heck]
Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation. ~Margaret Mead
Families are like fudge — mostly sweet with a few nuts. ~Author unknown
Across the range of diverse experiences and traditions that have been written into our Nation's story, family has remained a steadfast and common foundation. Every day, families offer comfort and support to one another with enduring and unconditional love and they contribute to their communities and our country. During National Family Week, we uplift and honor the families that give so much to forge a brighter future for themselves and for America.... As we reminisce on warm memories and share in the joy and love family can provide, let us also pledge to lift up our loved ones and recommit to the family bonds that have strengthened the fabric of our Nation. ~Barack Obama, 2015 November 23rd, quoted from The White House Office of the Press Secretary
The thing about family disasters is that you never have to wait long before the next one puts the previous one into perspective. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
If you don't believe in ghosts, you've never been to a family reunion. ~Ashleigh Brilliant
We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors’ dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies. ~Shirley Abbott
Family: A social unit where the father is concerned with parking space, the children with outer space, and the mother with closet space. ~Evan Esar
A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold. ~Ogden Nash
The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together. ~Erma Bombeck
When you look at your life, the greatest happiness’s are family happiness’s. ~Joyce Brothers
In some families, please is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was sorry. ~Margaret Laurence
Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
In good times and in bad, 'til death do us part isn't just for marriage — it's for family too. Lifelong vows coursing through our blood. ~Terri Guillemets
Be polite. Perhaps your family won't mind if you practice upon them. ~Minna Thomas Antrim (1861–1950), Knocks Witty, Wise and —, 1905
You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them. ~Desmond Tutu
An ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship. ~Spanish proverb
It's nice to have friends, but it's better when your friends are family. ~The Middle, "Meet the Parents," 2017 [S9, E3, Frankie Heck]
The happiness of the domestic fireside is the first boon of Heaven; and it is well it is so, since it is that which is the lot of the mass of mankind. ~Thomas Jefferson, 1813
To us, family means putting your arms around each other and being there. ~Barbara Bush
When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. ~George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House, 1919
Family: love is in our DNA. ~Terri Guillemets, "Time loses, biology wins," 1995
Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one. ~Jane Howard
In a houseful of toddlers and pets, you can start out having a bad day, but you keep getting detoured. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
There is no cure for laziness but a large family helps. ~Herbert Prochnov
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go by any rules. They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald
Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family. Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead our daily life too often as if we take our family for granted. ~Paul Pearshall
The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness. ~Nancy Mitford
Having a place to go — is a home. Having someone to love — is a family. Having both — is a blessing. ~Donna Hedges
The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family. ~Thomas Jefferson, 1790
And thank you for a house full of people I love. Amen. ~Terri Guillemets
The family — that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to. ~Dodie Smith
Family life is a bit like a runny peach pie — not perfect but who's complaining? ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
The great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you. ~Kendall Hailey
In time of test, family is best. ~Burmese proverb
Family is just accident.... They don't mean to get on your nerves. They don't even mean to be your family, they just are. ~Marsha Norman
The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works is the family. ~Lee Iacocca
Friends are God's apology for relations. ~Hugh Kingsmill
A preoccupied family: they none of them threw themselves into the interests of the rest, but each ploughed his or her own furrow. Their thoughts, their little passions and hopes and desires, all ran along separate lines. Family life is like this—animated, but collateral. ~Rose Macaulay, Daisy & Daphne, 1928
At the end of the day, a loving family should find everything forgivable. ~Mark V. Olsen and Will Sheffer, Big Love, "Easter"
If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable — each segment distinct. ~Letty Cottin Pogrebin
In a household of toddlers and pets, we discover this rule of thumb about happy families — that they are least two-thirds incontinent. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
The informality of family life is a blessed condition that allows us to become our best while looking our worst. ~Marge Kennedy
The family is one of nature's masterpieces. ~George Santayana
A family is a bunch of people who keep confusing you with someone you were as a kid. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
We cannot destroy kindred: our chains stretch a little sometimes, but they never break. ~Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné
The advantage of growing up with siblings is that you become very good at fractions. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Other things may change us, but we start and end with the family. ~Anthony Brandt
There's an awful lot of blood around that water is thicker than. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future. ~Gail Lumet Buckley
If minutes were kept of a family gathering, they would show that "Members not Present" and "Subjects Discussed" were one and the same. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
The house of the childless is empty; and so is the heart of him that hath no wife. ~Hitopadesa
Are we not like two volumes of one book? ~Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
What greater blessing to give thanks for at a family gathering than the family and the gathering? ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Go home, find a wench, raise fat babies, live a good long life. ~R. Scott Gemmill & Gil Grant, NCIS: Los Angeles, "Brimstone" [S1, E10, 2009, Hetty Lange]
The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people — no mere father and mother — as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born. ~Pearl S. Buck
Thomas Jefferson, apostle of equality, wrote (1771) to his agent in London: "One farther favor and I am done; to search the Herald's Office for the arms of my family. I have what I have been told were the family arms, but on what authority I know not. It is possible there may be none. If so, I would, with your assistance, become a purchaser, having Sterne's word for it that a coat of arms may be purchased as cheap as any other coat." A little later Jefferson was prophet of a party laying its axe to the root of every family tree. ~Moncure D. Conway, "The English Ancestry of Washington," in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, May 1891
Even in the last generation exceptional young people who betrayed any interest in their ancestors were apt to be snubbed, and old family papers were abandoned to the mice. But gradually interest in genealogy crept back. Some families began to suspect that the mice had eaten their titles to English estates; the new science of heredity had attractions for a people disgusted with vulgar plutocracy. It is now pretty well understood in America that a family tree is no Upas, but a good fruit tree. ~Moncure D. Conway, "The English Ancestry of Washington," in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, May 1891 [Upas is a poisonous tree. —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]
Family history is a history dramatized.... If the history of a particular family is searched, it is because it is searchable, not because it is great. Great and small are terms of ignorance, in regard of historic causation.... To tell the story of one family is to tell what is essential in the story of all.... All families are equally ancient. ~Moncure D. Conway, "The English Ancestry of Washington," in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, May 1891 [a little altered —tεᖇᖇ¡·g] #genealogy
In this genealogy, there has been wondrous diversion. Let no man fancy he knows sport unless he has family-treed an ancestor of George Washington. ~Moncure D. Conway, "The English Ancestry of Washington," in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, May 1891
I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap. ~Fred Allen
Would love to hear what your quote is or meaning of a family or your best friend.
Until tomorrow, be safe.
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