What Have You Done With Your Moment

By Richard Bootle

A person can have one traumatic experience in life, and that experience can determine the course of the rest of his or her life. One experience gave the author the idea for this manuscript. When the author saw people demonstrating at the Michigan State Capitol during the pandemic when the governor ordered lockdowns, that is when he asked the question, "Is this what they will be telling their grandchildren and great-grandchildren thirty or forty years from now?"

Is this what they did with that moment in time? Then he looked at famous people who went on long before us, and he asked them what they have done with their moment. Some great entertainers, some great sporting figures, some great African American inventors, and current famous politicians.

Then he concluded that our lives are filled with moments. This author concludes that your moment is your life. However, you don't go up to someone and ask them what they have done with their life because people might not be satisfied with how their life turned out. This question causes them to rationalize. Ask them what they have done with their moment, and they will talk to you all day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662475092

Book preview

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What Have You Done With Your Moment

Richard Bootle

Copyright © 2022 Richard Bootle

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

Front cover and title page design by

Photographer Sean Williams

ISBN 978-1-6624-7508-5 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-7510-8 (hc)

ISBN 978-1-6624-7509-2 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1

Your Lemon Tree Moment

Chapter 2

How Do You Recognize Your Moment

Chapter 3

Planting That Lemon Tree

Chapter 4

The Entrepreneurial Spirit

Chapter 5

Where Is Your Moment

Chapter 6

Don't Concede and Don't Give Up

Chapter 7

Get Your Moment

Chapter 8

The Moment Is the Future

Chapter 9

Jealousy

Chapter 10

Life Is Not Fair

Chapter 11

Your Moment Should Not Be a Selfish Act

Chapter 12

Black America, Did You Meet Your Moment?

Chapter 13

Women, What Have You Done with Your Moment?

Chapter 14

A Reckoning in the Moment

Chapter 15

The Pandemic Gave the World Its Moment

Chapter 16

An American Moment

Chapter 17

When You Got Talent

Chapter 18

White Supremacist, What Have You Done with Your Moment?

Chapter 19

Donald Trump, What Have You Done with Your Moment?

Chapter 20

Don't Let Anyone Kill Your Moment

About the Author

I asked this question, What have you done with your moment? I have used this moment to dedicate this book to the memory of black history. This year will not escape me without honoring black history. What have you done with your moment? I remember black history. Every time you pick up this book, you will think of those slave ships traveling the angry ocean and bringing our people to an unfriendly shore. No matter the odds that were stacked against them, they had a moment. What have they done with their moment? They had their own moment. What have they done with their moment? They persevered, they stood strong, they sang songs. They produced some of the most talented, the most gifted, some of the brightest minds, and great inventions. We know what they have done with their moment. They paved the way for all of us so that we could have a moment.

Preface

In this life, everyone who comes into this world is here for a purpose. Everyone has one moment. From the time you enter this life until the time you leave, between the time you are here until the time you leave, that is your moment.

Here I ask a chilling question. What have you done with your moment? I could have asked the question another way. I could have asked, What have you done with your life? If asked that way, it could be more chilling and foreboding.

People don't want anyone walking up to them and asking them, What have you done with your life? The reason is many people are not happy with the way their life turned out. Many are not satisfied with their accomplishments in life and are not happy with how things turned out for them, so don't ask What have you done with your life?

When you ask someone What have you done with your moment? people begin to think, and they will invariably focus on the wonderful moments they embraced in their lives. However, they never focus on the bad moments.

After reading this manuscript, the reader will have traversed the entire terrain of his or her entire life. One's life is really only one moment filled with many moments, some good and some not so good. However, in life, we take the bitter with the sweet. All the things that happen to you in your life is your moment. Your moment begins when you are born and ends when you die. Death is a moment. That is the only moment in a person's life that they will never ever tell anyone about.

This book takes a journey into politics and famous political figures. It takes a telescopic view of some of the late great singers and athletes because we want to know what they did with their moment. When you are done reading this book, maybe you will be able to answer the question.

RLB

Chapter 1

Your Lemon Tree Moment

When I wrote my first book, The Art of Decency: A Life Choice, published on Amazon on the thirtieth of April 2020, many started telling me that I needed to begin looking at my next book. It took me seven years to write the first one. I am sixty-four years of age. In the next seven years, I would be seventy-two years of age. Well, maybe it would not take that long to write another book. After I wrote The Art of Decency: A Life Choice, I said, We are all walking around with a book inside of us. Then I said, But I do not have another book in me. I said, There is no way I can go through that again. Well, if you have done it once, you can do it again. Do you know that we all are walking around with at least two books in us? Well, there I go on book number two.

They say necessity is the mother of invention. No one saw it coming. It is here, and we have to deal with it COVID-19. My mother is ninety-three years of age. She was around for many of the world's great torments. She is here for COVID-19 and does not even know it. She suffers from a certain form of Alzheimer's disease. It is my hope and prayer that she is spared from this dreaded disease.

I never see myself as being bored. There is always something to do. Then COVID-19 came, and all of a sudden, I had so much time on my hand. Then I started thinking about all those people that have all this extra time on their hands; what do they do with it? Think about it, you do not have any more time than you had yesterday or the day before or the year before. It is the same time. So what is time?

I have a copy of Webster's New World Dictionary that my friends gave me when I graduated from the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma in 1984. The beauty about books is they might look old, but they never get old. So I am using it to look up the meaning of time.

Time is the duration in which things are considered as happening in the past, present, or future. Every moment there has ever been or will ever be. The entire period of existence for the world or humanity. The period between two events or during which something exists.

Now! I am certain you heard all the old sayings You are wasting my time, Time lost is never found, stealing time, throwing away time, even songs such as One Moment in Time, or Time waits for no man. This time will never come back. This period we are living in at this time in our history will forever be remembered, but we don't want this time to stand still. This period will forever be remembered as the period that everybody had so much time on their hands. This will be looked at as the time when the crime rate dropped. This is the time when there were not many murders, there were not many traffic accidents, there were not many rapes, there were not many armed robberies. This will be looked at as a period of innovations, inventions. This will be remembered as that time when the creative juices flowed.

I always wondered what I would do with all that time I had on my hand when I went to England. I never forgot that night in Miami, Florida. I was on my way to England. My flight was with British Airways. I remember it like it was yesterday. That was the largest plane I flew on in my entire life the Boeing 747. At about 9:00 p.m., that huge jet thundered down the runway, and I watched as it climbed into the night sky. It felt as if that huge plane was not going to make it into the sky, but in a few moments, we were into the clouds, and all I count see was the dark of night amid the Miami night lights.

I left Miami at 9:00 p.m. I arrived in London at 10:00 a.m. I was very much looking forward to this nine-hour flight from Miami to London. I was so excited and asked myself, "What I was going to do for nine hours?

The question is, what do we do with our moments? After having a good supper, I was out like a light. My moment on that 747 was spent in dreamland.

What do we do with our moment?

As we journey through this life, we have some great moments. What do we do with them? We squander them away. How good it would have been if I had documented that moment when I took off from Miami International Airport to London Heathrow International Airport. It was a wonderful moment, but I did not document it. In the latter part of the year 1967, one of America's rising rhythm and blues stars, Otis Redding, only twenty-six years of age, died in a horrific plane crash. He had a good number of hit songs, but he had not lived to see any of his songs reach a million seller. Then they recorded and published his first million seller Sitting on the Dock of the Bay. Many of us miss the moment because we are sitting on the dock of the bay just wasting time. You have to catch the moment.

For many of us, our moment is here. COVID-19 might be your moment. Some of the most creative things can happen in this moment. I said in The Art of Decency that when life hands you lemons, don't make lemonade but plant lemon trees. What will your lemon-tree moment be? How many lemon trees have you planted since this pandemic? How many have you planted in your lifetime?

I was sitting down thinking. I was sitting on the dock of the bay, but I was not wasting time. I asked myself, what am I going to do with all this time I have on my hand? What are you going to do with this moment? Then I came up with this topic, What have you done with your moment? Wow, that is the title for my new manuscript. Wow. This is a road we have not walked before. We are not coming back this way again, even if this COVID-19 virus returns. Life is filled with moments. We all have moments.

I was thinking. Some people can't stand the thought of solitude,