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    What Seasoned Women Have That Everyone Needs: Celebrating and Learning from Wisdom and Grace
    What Seasoned Women Have That Everyone Needs: Celebrating and Learning from Wisdom and Grace
    What Seasoned Women Have That Everyone Needs: Celebrating and Learning from Wisdom and Grace
    Ebook92 pages1 hour

    What Seasoned Women Have That Everyone Needs: Celebrating and Learning from Wisdom and Grace

    By Brian Smith

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    About this ebook

    This short book is, before anything else, a celebration of the Seasoned Woman. She is a treasure of wisdom and grace who needs to be observed for her beauty and for the abundance of sagacity and benevolence she has quietly demonstrated to those willing to open their eyes and observe. It is she and her students who have kept humanity's careening ship, often manned by drunken sailors, afloat.
    It is she who has historically been most responsible for the proper nurturing of the hearts, minds, and spirits of both males and females as they have grown and evolved in a world fraught with physical, intellectual, and moral dangers.
    Of course, the book generalizes. Not every word applies to every seasoned female on the planet. But the model and the true examples are familiar to all of us because the Seasoned Woman has been our mother, grandmother, sister, lover, or friend.
    We are arguably living in the most dangerous time in human history. We are destroying the earth that sustains us, ignoring the pollutants and microbes that may decimate us, building the machines that have the capability to extinct us, and reveling in the societal and political animosities that harden our hearts and souls to it all.
    Frankly, most of this is the legacy of a ubiquitous succession of patriarchies that have produced a rather prickly world for most of it's human inhabitants and an existentially dangerous world for all of us.
    So now, in a time when women of all ages are asserting themselves with increasing power and are being listened to in ways that are long overdue, this short book offers a heartfelt, often poetic celebration of who the Seasoned Woman has been and is and the place she ought to take in our hearts, minds, and spirits - and the exigencies of our daily lives.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateJul 31, 2018
    ISBN9781543938586
    What Seasoned Women Have That Everyone Needs: Celebrating and Learning from Wisdom and Grace
    Author

    Brian Smith

    Brian Smith was born in Australia, where he developed his love of surfing. A chartered accountant, he studied at the UCLA Graduate School of Management, and with $500 of start-up money, he founded UGG Imports to bring sheepskin footwear to America. After seventeen years, as sales reached $15 million, he sold the business to Deckers Outdoor Corporation. The UGG brand has since exceeded $1 billion of international sales several times over. A passionate innovator and entrepreneur, Brian is one of the most sought after business leaders in the country today. As a media guest and inspiring speaker, he is committed to teaching his breakthrough business strategies to entrepreneurs and translating personal vision and spirituality into company culture. Brian spends his time with family and friends in Southern California, still surfs, plays golf, and attempts to improve the planet a little every day.

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      Book preview

      What Seasoned Women Have That Everyone Needs - Brian Smith

      Conclusion

      Introduction:

      Wisdom and Grace

      This short book is written first and foremost to and for the Seasoned Woman. It is essentially a long essay expressing my sincere conviction that she is a treasure whose value is often underappreciated.

      It is a celebration. Or, to say it another way, it is a love letter. A love letter to you, the Seasoned Woman. It speaks from the heart about what is real and what is true and what too often remains unspoken.

      But this text is also written for anyone wise enough to learn from the example of the Seasoned Woman. Everyone needs her wisdom and grace, and anyone can benefit from understanding a bit better who she is.

      To this end I have concluded Chapters Two through Seven with specific and practical ideals the Seasoned Women in my life have taught me to strive for – suggestions that, if sincerely pursued, would lead us all toward a better world.

      To make this distinction clear I have broken each chapter (starting with Chapter Two) into two parts: Celebrating and Learning.

      Finally, we are currently living in perilous and disturbing times. We seem to have elevated the crudest of alpha males to lead us in what ought to be a quest for a better world rather than a hunt for riches and power. We could not have made a more profound series of errors.

      To correct our course on this sad and destructive path, we clearly need the guidance of the Seasoned Woman. (And younger women as well – those, in other words, on the path to becoming Seasoned Women.)

      Most of Chapter One and all of Chapters Two through Five not only celebrate the Seasoned Woman but also provide a case for why we need her to assert her place in the public square, why the wisdom and grace that she embodies ought to govern our world.

      ***

      I will not define you, the Seasoned Woman, within a precise age range. We all season at different rates. But you are surely not twenty-something or thirty-something. You might be forty-something or fifty-something or ninety-something. But you have been there and done that – more than once.

      In this text I will discuss five aspects of who you are: your heart, your mind, your spirit, your body, and your sexuality. And I will celebrate what it is about you that I find to be authentically beautiful, sexually compelling, intellectually appealing, spiritually fulfilling, and ultimately life-affirming.

      My intention is to do all of this with appropriate respect for and humility toward that which I can never fully understand but wish not, as so many have, to misunderstand – the Seasoned Woman.

      What I know is that right now, at your age, the way you look and the way you are, for anyone who really looks at you and who really sees you, you are absolutely beautiful.

      You are full of light. Full of softness. Full of strength. Full of the ideas and thoughts and experiences which have made you wise. Full of passion and compassion and love. Full of those parts of your spirit that can create joy, that can feel pain. Full of optimism and happiness in the face of the sorrows you have faced and the realities you know life presents to you.

      You are that for which all the world yearns, though often it does not fully understand its own desires or needs. Which ought to include, near the top of the list – you.

      Of course, not every sentence in this book will apply to every seasoned female on Earth. But every example has been taken either directly from my own, personal experiences or from the experiences of individuals close to me. These experiences and my reading and research have taught me that while no one is perfect, there are more models among Seasoned Women than among any other group of people.

      Clearly, the model and the examples are more common than rare. Essentially, we have all known the Seasoned Woman, and this essay reveals her truth.

      Perhaps I have seen what some others have missed because I have taken the time and made the effort to see clearly and truly. And because, to paraphrase Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whom I will quote later, I have looked with my heart.

      What I regret is that too often there are those who are blind to the treasures that lie before them. So perhaps my mission is simply to let you know that many of us have seen and have not just respected, but have appreciated who you are.

      We are in your debt.

      ***

      Regarding the names, anecdotes, and examples used here, they have been changed as necessary to protect the anonymity of the people whose stories I have shared.

      Chapter One:

      What Do We See?

      What Do You See?

      A 2009 study at the University of New Mexico Anderson School of Management found that, not surprisingly, most men feel that their bosses underestimate their job performance, while most women feel that their bosses overestimate theirs.

      How do you see yourself?

      A few years ago I was in a restaurant and while waiting for my meal I struck up a conversation with a woman sitting at the next table. She had hung something up on the wall in her bedroom, I don’t remember what. But I remember what she said. It’s helping me to accept with grace my body becoming disgraced.

      She was a Seasoned Woman and was neither disgraceful nor disgraced in any eyes other than her own and those of the blind leading and following the blind, but I could see in the most powerful way how she had been absolutely convinced of her lack of beauty and grace.

      And I was angry. Not at her, but at the forces which could so color perceptions of her, including her own. The forces that would attempt to convince all of us that signs of aging such as wrinkles are disgraceful. Because what I saw when I looked at her was a beautiful woman with wrinkles – and grace.

      What Do I See?

      A woman I know told me of a time when she had worked in a nursing home. The patients were separated into wards by circumstances of health, ambulation, etc.

      In one ward lived a man and a woman – they were both very elderly. They had met in the nursing home several years earlier and had developed a beautiful, loving relationship.

      Both the man and the woman were in reasonably

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