Feel good stories

Everyone reads them at some point and many are so influenced by a good story that they adopt life changes to match. True stories are obviously the most inspiring and biographies of people as leaders and consumer goods are among the best. But there are also fictional stories that can be just as inspiring. Some of renowned authors like Dickens or Mark Twain will live inside your psyche forever.

The question is how many of your stories are made up or just adapted from life? In the case of Samuel Clemens, who took the pseudonym Twain, he lived the life he wrote about. His two classic novels’Tom Sawyer Adventures’ Y ‘Huckleberry Finn Adventures‘are those who live in the hearts of those who relate to them.

In my case the novels of John steinbeck did that for me. Highlight a particular book ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ as his best piece. Here was a family struggling with life’s worst challenges after the Great Depression and then the horrible drought and windstorm that hit the American Midwest. Their journey led to homelessness, hunger, and the death of family members.

Perhaps what attracted me to this story was the constant struggle that had so impressed me as a child. In order for me and my generation to understand what depression, homelessness, riots, and other things mean, this book needs to be read.

In my younger years we passed ‘humpbacks’ or ‘swaggies’ on the road with their bundles slung across our backs while a billy was always pinned at the end.

Still marching from place to place in search of handouts, this was years after the depression ended, but not long after World War II. It taught me to respect what we call homeless people and some written stories from the time reinforced that.

Feel good stories are those that teach a lesson in addition to warming the heart with something spiritual. As someone with a reincarnation memory and a link to Spirit, fiction is something I try to avoid now, but when I was little, many things came to light through such stories that would not be known otherwise.

Twain and Dickens produced stories that touched history while throwing you into the mood of the time. Color, even smells, come to life when one flips through the pages of his books with enthusiasm and an urge to finish it and bring it to the final conclusion. Sometimes the ending is happy, but even when it’s tragic, you know it has affected you.