You may recall a story that I told you about when I was a young child, merrily skipping barefoot through the orchard.  I stepped on a bee, got stung, and came into the house saying, “I just got stung by a bee.” To which my dad angrily replied, “You watch out for those bees!”

My dad was a lover of all animals, and he certainly wasn’t going to have a flat-footed, clumsy brat stepping on a bee, thereby killing it.  So I wasn’t in the least bit surprised this morning to see a bee sitting kind of dazed on my chest of drawers.

I shook my head and chuckled to myself, as today is the twenty-year anniversary of his death.  Only my dad would take the trouble to remind me that every stinking bee on Earth is important.  So of course I grabbed a glass and a piece of paper and risked life and limb.  I got the bee into the glass, took it outside and away it flew.

Another really influential male in my life has been Dr. Wayne Dyer.  In the 70’s I read his book Your Erroneous Zones and it really helped me a lot.  I saw him on public television last night, and he did it again.  That man is a raving genius.

Here is something he asked us to ponder.  He said you know how easy it is to face a task and automatically think to yourself, “this is going to be hard.”  But he suggested that we should practice thinking differently.

 As an example of why we should give it a try, he said to remember times when something unexpected happened.  He asked if any of us had ever been thinking that we really would like to get some money when something unexpected happened and we received money.  Many peope nodded as they could relate to that.

He said when you’re pondering some task, consider the unexpected in that you have a fifty-fifty chance of it going either way.  In other words, it may indeed be hard or easy, but you don’t know in advance because we can’t foresee the future.  You can think, “this is going to be hard” or “this is going to be easy” so he said why not pick the second thought and go with that.

Hence as I look at the basement kitchen and try to cajole myself into baking, I’m going to have to think, “this is going to be easy.”  Experience tells me that it’s not, but what the hey, there’s no harm in trying a new approach to things.  Remember Julie Andrews singing “just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down?”  Now where is that bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream sherry that I bought the other day?