The game of life and how to play it

For most of my working life I toiled in an environment best summed up as 'survival of the fittest' and 'dog eat dog.' I constantly struggled to understand the rules of the game they were all playing in what we aptly refer to as the Rat Race. Finally the pennies dropped - in fact, they disappeared - and I lost everything including my second marriage, home, freelance business, car, savings. For 5 years I lived in a friend's old caravan parked by the roadside in the Aussie bush with everything I owned stored inside.

It was during this time of soul searching that I found a little book which revealed that the game of 'survival of the fittest' isn't the only game in town. There's another game, with completely different rules based on spiritual rather than materialistic rules, rules created by what she referred to as Infinite Intelligence rather than Darwinism. Okay, maybe Darwin was right about birds and turtles and plants, but human beings? I don't think so.

Florence Scovel Shinn's small but precious book, first published in 1925, contains gems that could change your life. It certainly changed mine - as well as my ideas about the meaning of my life. Having established that her topic is a very down-to-earth physical one she then goes on to explain her views of how spiritual laws affect our everyday lives. I personally have put into practice what she has to say in a time of terrible upheaval and uncertainly. I used her affirmations daily.

"In reality," she writes, " it is man's [/woman's] true destiny (or destination) flashed to him from the Infinite Intelligence which is within himself. Many people, however, are in ignorance of their true destinies and are striving for things and situations which do not belong to them, and would only bring failure and dissatisfaction if attained." I have experienced this idea of finding myself on the wrong path with dire consequences. Thankfully that situation has changed, thanks - at least in part - to Florence Scovel Shinn.

"There is a place that you are to fill and no one else can fill, something you are to do, which no one else can do." It's true. I recommend this or any of the other 3 books she wrote some 85 years ago. It's the part missing from many success and self-help philosophies.

Illustration by Jeff 'Wizard of Draws' Bucchino at Cartoon Clip Art