In July 1967, I escorted my girlfriend back to her dorm. On the front porch of University Hall, I handed her an envelope and asked her to open it. In it was a greeting card. The cover read, “Life is just a bowl of cherries.” On the inside was written, “Full of pits. "However, below that, I wrote, “Would you grow old with me?” and taped a diamond ring to the inside of the card.
     Life is a bowl of cherries with pits. And, I can say truthfully that my life with Beverly has been just that crazy. Pits? Of course, plenty of them. Yet, despite that inauspicious beginning, we’re still married. Allow me to explain why I think our marriage has worked.

First, We learned to Enjoy the Cherries of Life.
 
     When I turned sixteen, my mother told me to get to know as many girls as possible. “Have a lot of dates with many different girls,” she said. Discover the qualities you like in the girls you meet. “So, I dated more than three dozen girls for the next five years.
What did I discover? I quickly realized that many of the girls I dated didn’t accept a second or third invitation to go out. And I also discovered that many of them were looking for someone to marry as soon as possible. Those I quit seeing as soon as I found out.
     It took me several years to realize that I was looking for someone who was fun to be with. And that person turned out to be Beverly Rodgers of Black Oak, Arkansas. I met her after transferring from McNeese State to Arkansas State, where she was a student. The school was located about four miles outside the small town of Jonesboro, Arkansas. You had to have a car to go anywhere. Neither of us had that privilege. So, we would walk all over campus just to be alone. Every so often, we would walk the quarter-mile to a small eatery called Jack’s Diner across the main highway on the north side of campus.
     At Jack’s, we would order two small Cokes and one order of onion rings. Then, we would sit together and share our time and abundance of food. Sometimes, she would borrow her best friend’s Volkswagen Beetle so we could go to a movie or a nice restaurant for dinner. I dated her best friend and sorority sister before I dated her. During the next year, I realized how much I enjoyed being with her. I recognized that she was the sweetest cherry in my life.

Second, We Recognize the Presence of Pits.
 
     We first met when I helped a girl I was dating move into the dorm the day before classes began that fall term. Beverly was one of the girls that lived next door. She and several others came into the room to meet the new guy on campus. Later, we met again when she showed up to be a walk-on in the fall theatrical production, for which I was the lead actor. This girl would tease and flirt with me during the performances, attempting to make me break character in front of the audience. I held my own but never quit trying.
     Later, I asked her out on a date. I never dated another girl after that first date. We would sit in the lobby of her dorm and play a card game called “spit-n-cuss.” We would laugh and enjoy the game and one another’s company. Then, one evening, she told me how much fun she had spent time with me.
     Despite not being able to take her places on our dates (a big pit) and dating her best friend before I asked her out (a super big pit), she decided that I was worth having in her life. And we have been loving and laughing our way through cherries and pits for over fifty years.

in conclusion
 
     So, have I discovered the big prescription for a successful and lengthy marriage? I honestly don’t know. But I can say that if you want to live and have fun with someone for many years, you first must accept that there are a lot of pits in the fruit bowl of life. But instead of focusing on the pits, learn to enjoy the wonder and beauty in the flavor and fruit of the cherries.

My dad died at a time in my life right after I had begun to build a family. So, at 33, I buried one of the most influential people in my life. That was probably the most traumatic event that I had ever experienced. I also included the year I spent in combat in Vietnam. I never realized that thinking negative thoughts often lead to a person being thought of as depressed.
I spent the next 10 years trying to figure out why I was having problems with being so negative. I asked myself these questions: “Why am I having these struggles?” “Why do I seem to be negative all the time?”
Finally, my wife insisted that I talk to my doctor about it. That conversation resulted in a prescription, but the negative thinking continued. That's when I decided to get some help from a counselor. What I learned during the following year helped me turn my life around. The counselor guided me through the negative thoughts into a positive outlook. Now that I'm turning seventy, I have started a new career.
I want to share some of the insights I gained with you. If you incorporate these two simple suggestions, you may not solve your negative thinking, but you'll positively influence yourself and the people around you.

First, don't hold your problems inside.Perhaps a story will help illustrate what I mean by that statement. When trash compactors were first developed, the instructions said that you had to follow the directions carefully. The compactors must be emptied at least once a week because if you let them sit for several weeks, even a month, the trash keeps getting pushed down to the bottom. Eventually, that garbage turns into gaseous materials that could explode under pressure.
I think this illustrates what happens to us emotionally. Have you ever said something to somebody that you knew well and got so angry at you that they started blurting negative things? And you think, "Whoa, wait a minute. What did I say?"
It probably wasn't anything that you said. It seems that you just lit a small match to something already festering inside the other person. The outburst resulted from years of holding in much negativity that eventually had to come out. You happened to be the poor sap standing by when it happened.
To avoid this, take time to talk to a friend, a mental health professional, or a counselor. As I mentioned earlier, I spent about a year with a counselor. He helped me to realize that I was spending too much time trying to deal with the pain that I felt from losing my dad. Understand that this was my problem, and I needed to get over it and move on. He helped me to recognize that I was spending the last ten years of my life trying to please my father, who was already dead.
You can talk to a friend, of course. But I would suggest that you spend time with people you trust. You know they won't go blabbing it out to everybody around. Just talk it out. Don't hold things in. Let it go before it festers.

Second, take time to express gratitude to other people.What do I mean by this? Just thank people. Tell people how much you appreciate them. Several years ago, Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, did a major study on the architecture of emotions. In this multi-year study, he discovered that “… our brains have a built-in negative bias." In other words, the brain constantly seeks for negative things to defend ourselves. It's constantly looking for the bad things we must notice and deal with. The problem, he noticed, was that too many people end up focusing more on the negative than the positive.
In the study report, he said, "We need to work a little extra hard to overcome this problem because most people have a negative tendency in their thinking." So I say, start by showing gratitude to other people. Express your appreciation. Look for the good in people around you. As you continue telling other people how nice, kind, or polite they are …, perhaps your brain will start applying those same thoughts to yourself.
You might start seeing the good things in yourself and believing you’re not as bad as you thought. Speaking gratitude, speaking good, speaking positive—eventually, your brain will catch up with those words and start thinking, "Wait a minute, maybe I'm pretty good myself."
These are two small suggestions. I'm not here to offer you a big, broad understanding but to share two little things that you can do. So, I challenge you to commit today to being just a little more positive in everything you do and say. Listen to how you’re talking to other people and, of course, how you're talking to yourself.