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First Edition Design Publishing - Elizabeth Stuart-Grimes

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59 pages

English

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Life lessons used to be transmitted from one generation to another through stories. While the internet-age has connected people, we are only concentrating on the here and now. Hindsight is needed to help us move forward. PRIORITIES... is about understanding what is essential for each of us, as individuals. Like reading someone's journal or having tea with an 'auntie', PRIORITIES... is filled with stories about the good ol' days and how people coped with difficult situations. PRIORITIES... was not written to give people answers. It was written to make people think: about the choices they - as individuals, or couples, or families - need to make to evolve and move forward.

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Popular psychology

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Publié par	First Edition Design Publishing
Date de parution	01 avril 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781622878482
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Priorities…

First Edition Design Publishing
Sarasota, Florida
Priorities…
Copyright ©2015 Elizabeth Stuart-Grimes

ISBN 978-1622-878-47-5 PRINT
ISBN 978-1622-877-48-2 EBOOK

LCCN 2015933957

April 2015

Published and Distributed by
First Edition Design Publishing, Inc.
P.O. Box 20217, Sarasota, FL 34276-3217
www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com

ALL R I G H T S R E S E R V E D. No p a r t o f t h i s b oo k pub li ca t i o n m a y b e r e p r o du ce d, s t o r e d i n a r e t r i e v a l s y s t e m , o r t r a n s mit t e d i n a ny f o r m o r by a ny m e a ns ─ e l e c t r o n i c , m e c h a n i c a l , p h o t o - c o p y , r ec o r d i n g, or a ny o t h e r ─ e x ce pt b r i e f qu ot a t i o n i n r e v i e w s , w i t h o ut t h e p r i o r p e r mi ss i on o f t h e a u t h o r or publisher .

Elizabeth Stuart-Grimes asserts her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

“ Priorities… ”was originally written in early 2003 but – due to the need to pay the rent and monthly bills – the author went back to work. It is now available to the public because the author has taken a much needed rest (known as a writer’s sabbatical) to finish this work.
Priorities…

Understanding the difference between
what we want and what we need.

Elizabeth Stuart-Grimes
“I am, no more, no less, the reincarnation of the collective voice of my ancestors put back on Earth to teach my children and my children’s children what is important to learn in the brief period that we all call ‘a life’. I have, however, taken advantage of this time to observe and learn by watching others and to interpret my observations and lessons into the tales told by those who have gone before me. ”
Elizabeth Stuart-Grimes
Thanks go to…

Well, first, thank you to my family: my husband and my children, and to my close friends who put up with me and encouraged me.
To my mother, Margaret, and my dad, Robert, who have always been and will always be proud of me…wherever they are.
To my oldest friend, Carol, the person who knows me better than anyone and who also happens to be the best editor a writer could hope for!
To my friends, friends of friends, and some family who have shared their stories with me so I could share them: thank you. All the names and places have been changed to protect your privacy.
To my ‘Supreme Beings’, my angels, my elders, my guides, for always pointing me in the right directions and for catching me when I have fallen. I know who you are and I thank you all; and I know you are there for me. ( And to those of you who had to push REALLY hard to make me understand: thank you, but could you push a little less dramatically? I promise I’ll listen more carefully from now on… )
My brief Introduction

This recitation, for that’s exactly what it is, is meant to remind you what it was like to sit and listen to an old auntie or grandparent. The transfer of information from one generation to another has lost its soul, its personality. Long before internet and social media, emails, faxes, computers, typewriters, or even pen and ink, life’s lessons were transmitted from our elders to the young through stories…and that’s what this collection is: stories.
There are stories about the young and the old; there are stories about the middle years.
You may like reading something that sounds like someone speaking just to you. You may not. I will not take it personally if you don’t. I do, however, hope you learn something because that’s what this is all about. It’s not Confucius or Lao Tse. It’s just common, day-to-day experiences about real people that may or may not relate to the world that you are currently living in.
This book is about finding the priorities in your life. It will try to show you the difference between what you want and what you need.

I hope you enjoy it.
Priorities…
Elizabeth Stuart-Grimes
Table of Contents

Priorities: Want or Need . 3
My Priorities 11
Daily Life . 15
Family Life . 21
Raising Children . 37
Education . 43
Life's Challenges: Great or Small 51
Money . 61
Work . 69
“Mother’s Work” . 77
Courtesy . 83
Sex . 85
Retirement 93
Life and Death . 103
Living in Society . 111
Priorities: On the dawn of a new millennium… ... 115
Something to think about… ... 119
Something to do… ... 123
Priorities: Want or Need

My world in 1980

“I grew up at the end of the age of the baby boomers. I went to school. I graduated from high school. I went to the college of my choice. My parents paid the bills. I went to work in New York City. I got my own apartment and I paid my bills as well as I could.

That’s life.

New York City – like any big city in the 1980s – was a world in itself. Everything was rush, rush, rush. If your bosses wanted something done, they wanted it yesterday. We were expected to be able to do everything and anything. When a client asked if something extraordinary was possible, our answer was always, “Of course; that’s not a problem” we would figure out how to do it after the client went back home.

We worked hard and we played hard. It was the era of nightclubs such as Studio 54, Limelight, and Area. We worked all day, danced and drank until the wee hours of morning, got a few hours of sleep, and were back at the office again. When we were too tired to go out, we became ‘couch potatoes’.

One of my clearest memories was sitting down in the plush conference room in my company’s advertising agency in one of the towers on Avenue of the Americas and watching all the executives file in; take out their chic leather daily agendas; place their expensive Tiffany, Cartier, or Mont Blanc pens next to their note pads; smooth their Hermes ties correctly; check their gold watches; and sit back to wait for the meeting to begin. The women executives went through the same routine except they readjusted their silk scarves and tugged at their suit sleeves so that everyone could see the elegant bracelets they were wearing. These were our marks: What we wore, what we carried with us, and how we behaved. Was it all necessary? Of course!

I was ever so surprised to find out that my account manager, a good looking young fellow in his early thirties, actually lived about two blocks from me on York Avenue in an apartment almost as small as my own. We had worked together for almost two years and we were neighbors! Yet that was work and our private lives didn’t enter into it. What amused me was that I wasn’t the only person, it seemed, in this enormous company that sold “Luxury” who lived alone in approximately 250 square feet furnished with old furniture that had belonged to the grandparents, a few things picked up at IKEA, and bric-a-brac discovered at tag sales. But none of that mattered. We got up every morning; put on our expensive suits, watches, jewelry, scarves and ties, our expensive black shoes, our elegant navy blue cashmere coats; and went to work, where we sold LUXURY. We sold diamonds, we sold cars; we sold dishwashers and dishwasher detergent. We sold vacation packages, we sold gourmet food…for a while we even tried to sell hamburgers. We made money… a lot of it…, which we spent, not on us but on presenting a way of life. We believed every slogan we wrote and we lived those words.

I had mastered the art of the “no problem” response and was nicely climbing the corporate ladder. I did what I was told and I didn’t make waves. I was given the responsibility for an important client based in a tiny town in Michigan on the other side of the lake from Chicago. They often came to New York for meetings with their prestigious advertising agency – “Of course,” I thought, “They want to get out of that little hole they live in and come to the REAL city.” How wrong I was.

Very soon after my assignment to this client, I was informed that I was to fly out there to meet the whole team so that I would get a better idea of how the company functioned. I flew to Chicago – business class – and then went to another terminal to catch the little twin-engine hopper that would take me across the lake. Other than the fact that I don’t like little planes, nothing had prepared me for this trip. I arrived and was greeted by one of my new “team” members who was extremely pleasant and helped me with my chic little MoMA black bag and leather briefcase. (Author’s note: in the 1980’s you could buy a black canvas and leather satchel at the Museum of Modern Art for a reasonable price.) She drove me in her little American-made car to my motel where my room was already paid for and then we went to the office – a red brick building that was remodeled from an old 1950s elementary school. Driving to the office, we passed houses that I thought should have been torn down decades ago – this was really the sticks – old cars decaying in backyards, dogs tied to doghouses… Everything I had been indoctrinated to dislike and avoid because I was selling ‘Luxury’.

The flaw in my education within the advertising and marketing world was that we targeted our work on what influenced the USA’s major market areas and assumed that the rest just followed along. If it didn’t happen in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, could it really matter? We assumed (wrongly, I might add) that the people who lived outside of these areas wanted to be just like the people who lived in them. What I discovered was that most of the people who lived outside the major target markets actually made a calculated choice to do so. They were highly intelligent, well educated people who simply didn’t want to live their lives being assaulted by the rushed, quasi-violent world of major industrialized cities.

My day-to-day client contact was a young woman named Sarah who had majored in Home Economics at Ohio State University. She was great. She was proud of her education, thrilled with her job, and really good at it.