Journals- What are journals for? On a personal level, a journal is like a diary. Every day you write what you have experienced so that you can 'see clearly' what is important to you and if you follow the dictum, 'Examine yourselves,' a diary is the very best way to do that.
A sister once said to me... I need to make changes in my life but I just don't know how to do that.
I responded, well, I keep a day- to- day journal. Why don't you do that?
I can't do that, replied my sister, I am way too negative and I wouldn't even want to read what I wrote with the negative attitude I have.
Once again, I responded with... that's how you change, though. Read your own journal and ask yourself; Do I want to keep being like that or would I rather make a change to help people and be the 'positive change I want to see in others?'
. . .
Have you ever been tasked with 'cleaning up an estate?'
After the death of a loved one, people often look for clues as to the meaning of that persons' life. If you are lucky, maybe the person kept journals. Journals are such great evidence of what a person has thought about, what a person thought was important, what a person put their hand to, in life.
Well, I know that I would want my journals to reflect my values.
In the last six years I cleaned up paperwork from two (well, it was actually three 'sudden death' individuals) because there was a link between two individuals that had a business relationship. I will speak about them, separately, because the two situations had nothing to do with each other. It was just my bad luck that I was stuck with 'clean up' from families that should have done the work of this and took the money from the estate.
So, the business papers 'estate' was an eye- opener for me. The man who died had kept paperwork from his jobs and that proved he had been in a business relationship with a woman and, together, they were 'caught cheating.' They were caught cheating a business they worked for. The woman had died long before the man and I never met or knew her in any way but the paperwork detailed that she was, obviously, not an honest person. I met the man after he became reformed from his 'earlier- in- life' debacle. The man had been 'into' buying up cheap real estate. I found an email that transpired between him and the ethically confused partner he had cheated with. The email laid out such a convoluted diametrically opposed value system that I could hardly imagine that people could so lie to themselves as to imagine that they were providing 'good living housing' for the general public. The one statement I had a real problem with started with, "I believe... everyone should have decent housing..." I am grateful that I never met that woman because the 'rental' properties that they purchased were from people who had lost their houses to the bank. As I read the 'confused thinking' values of these people, I thought, you must be forgetting about the people who lost these houses you are buying. Your are worse than duplicitous. You think if you rob from Peter to pay Paul, you are a good person. That's ludicrous. So, fast forward, a few years to test their theory of helping others. The man was still alive, in this partnership, but the woman had died over ten years previously. What situation did the man find himself in? Well, he had a renter that had not paid her rent for a whole year. I kept reading the paperwork. Hmm, he was considering taking the renter to court and I thought, Well, that doesn't seem very much like he wants to help those people live in a decent house. Now the real estate buyer seems to be in the same situation as the 'first' family who lost their house and he certainly didn't think about or consider them when he made his buy and he and his partner pretended they were some kind of rescue heroes. So, that was all the 'unveiled' estate values corruption, or should I say corrupted values that I sorted through for one, reformed individual.
Next situation
A woman with no estate had died years previously and left paperwork to test the values system of this individual. A total stranger, it was hard to tell if this person had any values system beyond a reactionary victim status that she seemed to be building a case for that she took to court in a newspaper reporting feature. From the paperwork, I surmised that the venom within this individual had ruined any chances for leading a productive life. All of her actions seemed to be focused on 'getting back at the man who had victimized her.' There were transcripts of doctors' appointments. I truly had never seen a transcript of any doctors' appointment in my entire life and I wondered why anyone would collect such personal information. I can't even venture a guess as to why a person would collect such information. If these transcripts had been from a victimization, it would have made some sense but they weren't. Then I wondered why she went to so many doctors. So, transcript after transcript were discarded as her husband had no desire to keep any of this paperwork. Finally, I got down to her journals and that is where her true personality problems became clear. She despised everyone, in her life, who challenged her. After skimming over some of these writings, I threw all but one journal in the garbage. I really didn't think her children would want to know how much she hated people.
. . .
So, what have I learned about 'what we all leave behind' when life is over? Well, my Dad left behind a suitcase of paperwork as well and the day he died is the first time the four Guenter daughters got to see any of it. Woah, were we surprised at some business information but you know what I was even more surprised at... the one daughter who said, 'We shouldn't even be looking at this." Then I thought,
Well, if not us, then who?
Coming tomorrow...
Order Protection... It's scary in a small town when people walk through my gate, when they don't have permission to do so. Trespassing, I believe it's called.
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