There are seven keys to happiness in Elliott Robertson’s inspirational SAY YES TO LIFE, and not all of them are about being perpetually happy. Besides saying yes to joy and to knowing what you want, for instance, there are also keys for saying yes to expansiveness and the new (even if this provokes acute feelings of discomfort…or reactions from others!), as well as saying yes to realities like grief. Part imaginative fiction, part non-fiction self-empowerment, part reminiscing, part parable, this book is an interesting, hard-to-neatly-categorize blend. It opens with a heartbreaking recollection of the author’s mother so unable to focus on what goodness she had when she had it, life eventually devolved to being alone on the streets lost in a fog that allowed her to walk right past her son without recognizing him.
Why do humans often seem to be waiting for the next great experience to come along instead of appreciating whatever moment of goodness they are currently alive in and whatever blessings are in that moment? According to the author, such in-the-Now focus on what good already exists only serves to help along the process of creating more: “The time has come for us to release measurements and timelines…comparison and judgement, and…gather with sister, brother around the campfire where we can take joy in the love Source has for each one of us and for all of us as a whole.” How is this done? By trusting that God is all and only goodness, loving flow, the cause of all creation, and therefore the only Reality that can ever exist.
There is much to enjoy about this unusual, concise, spiritually-based volume that insists on a God of Goodness while pointing out that humanity has never been so ready for a new arrangement of — social, political, economic — systems based on integrity and compassion. Though the mythical conversations between the author and characters from, for example, Antoine de Saint Exupery’s classic tale The Little Prince sometimes read a bit oddly, the technique is reminiscent of Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations With God which was certainly able to find an audience.
Filled with hands-on, you-try-it exercises and meditations and announcing itself as a book for anyone longing for the day when modern-day corruption will be replaced by God’s goodness, the succinct, creative SAY YES TO LIFE by Elliott Robertson should appeal to many.
~C.S. Holmes for IndieReader