Blog @ Work

Trading places & thought

Motivational Monday! Newspaper columnist Mike Royko , born on this day back in 1932, once said, "Hollywood is right. A good and strong movie can have a more powerful social impact than any and all political speeches or newspaper editorials and columns." Tell us about a movie that has had a more profound impact on you in terms of politics, social justice, morality, or just plain old "doing the right thing". {30-Day BC)

A very funny and totally non-political movie comes to mind I watch once a year for the past ten years because it feeds my feelings of social justice and morality is TRADING PLACES (1983) with Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy. It is the story of Louise Winthorpe III, who is a managing director at the Duke & Duke commodities brokerage. Billy Ray Valentine is a hustler. The millionaire-owner of the company Randolph Duke makes a wager with his brother Mortimer that the men can be successfully swapped.

It is a movie about the two separate worlds of the have and have nots and how close those worlds are. With a little effort the lives of the successful manager and the homeless bum can be swapped and turn around for good. In the end the millionaires are taken to the cleaners and the two main characters live happily ever after. Justice is done in this movie. Apart from a great cast, a good story line and a great setting it is the story I watch every year at least one time. It never bores me and it remains hilarious to watch.

Prompt: Use the following words for inspiration: spirit, dust, paradise, phoenix, cage, fruiting, love.(BCoFs)

When entering the Afterlife I dust off my spirit like a risen phoenix out of its cage and go about my fruiting business with love and understanding of my past life.

Prompt: “Miracles are thoughts. Thoughts can represent the lower or bodily level of experience or the higher or spiritual level of experience. One makes the physical, and the other creates the spiritual.” The Course of Miracles. What are your views on thoughts being miracles?(BC)

To me the mind is a kind of naturally- occurring computer -- an information-processing device. It comes with its own medium of computation, a system of symbols that constitutes, literally, a language of thought. Cognitive states and perhaps mental states generally, involve functional relations to token symbols in this system. To view these thoughts as miracles I find difficult. I prefer this biological-computing mode of thoughts. Miracles are something totally different.

Day FIFTY EIGHT "Give It 100!"