Farewell. I shall miss you, but our special friendship need never end. If you wish, you can keep me close by as long as you live, providing you learn and then put into practice the Rules for a Better Way to Live. I’d like that very much.
I hope that you have enjoyed your visits with me as much as I’ve enjoyed having you here, in my studio. Byron wrote that all farewells should be sudden, and maybe he was correct, but the truth of the matter is that I really don’t want to see you walk out of this room for the last time. We have accomplished so much together … and of course there’s more to be done.
I’ve always had a terrible time, through the years, leaving precious friends behind or having them move away. It took many months for the pain to subside when my sons, first Dana and later Matt, finally flew away from the nest.
I’m afraid I anguish almost as much about parting with inanimate objects to which I have become attached. I still have an old Stereo-Realist camera that takes three-dimensional slides no photography studio will any longer process, golf clubs with wooden shafts, some very wide neckties, and an old 1974 white Cadillac Eldorado convertible that has been my primary set of “wheels” for the past fifteen years.
And so, like a scene from an old black-and-white movie, here I am standing in the station, still waving at your vanishing train and thinking of so much more that I could have said to you. Yet I know so well from experience that in the final showdown your future is strictly up to you. No book, no lecture, no seminar, no teacher, coach, priest, minister, or rabbi, and no motivational tape, can do anything toward altering the way you live unless you are determined to pay the price in time and effort and sacrifice and pain. The choice is yours … and yours alone.
What is past is past. You can do nothing about yesterday and last month and the failures of last year, but you can do everything toward making tomorrow and the rest of your life what you have always dreamed it could be. For you, the best is ahead, providing you follow the Rules, and now that you know about my past, I’ll wager you will agree that if Og Mandino can make it, anybody can make it … certainly you! No more excuses and alibis, okay?
There is indeed a better way to live … and now you have the keys. Use them. Don’t let me down. More important, don’t let yourself down!
Good-bye, my special friend. May the Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent, one from another.
Mizpah!
