Dear President-Elect Trump:
Happy New Year!!
It’s a big year for all of us, and so much of it rides on your shoulders.
A few months ago, I was introduced to a piece of graphic art that moved me. I loved it so much; I determined to find a copy of it for our home. An artist named James Fedor had created it. With significant help from the internet, I found James Fedor and telephoned him. He lives in a modest Kansas City neighborhood. I had occasion to be in Kansas City, so I made an effort to find James.
We met in his Kansas City home, and he sold me a print of his work and then gave me several more gifts. I hadn’t expected any of them. “I like to under promise and over deliver,” he told me.
One of the gifts he gave me was a book that he had compiled and published—the lesser known works of James Allen. James Allen’s work As a Man Thinketh is well known. What is not generally known, is that James Allen wrote considerably more about the power of the thought and intention. James Fedor gave me a copy of his compilation of James Allen’s other writings, which Fedor named: As a Man Thinketh, Volume 2.
I’m grateful for my brief interaction with James Fedor. His gift to me has been precious.
Because today is New Year’s Day, I want to give a brief quote from James Fedor’s volume on James Allen. I’m confident that if we implemented it in conjunction with our new year’s resolutions, we’d have more success.
“As the fruit to the tree and the water to the spring, so is action to thought. It does not come into manifestation suddenly and without a cause. It is the result of a long and silent growth, the end of a hidden process which has long been gathering force. The fruit of the tree and the water gushing from the rock are both the effect of a combination of natural processes in air and earth which have long worked together in secret to produce the phenomenon; and the beautiful acts of enlightenment and the dark deeds . . . are both the ripened effects of trains of thought which have long been harbored in the mind.”
Changing our thoughts will eventually change our behavior.
That’s an important principle to understand.
I’m grateful to James Fedor for passing it on to me.
Happy New Year!
Sincerely,
David O. Leavitt
