A moment that changed everything

Yellowed pages stained by cigarette smoke, broken spine from laying open face down, curled corners and smudged fingerprints throughout, the book settled into my hand for reading just as I settled in most nights; alone, in bed, curled up to wait for sleep to come.

Reading along, the book made no sense.  It wasn't poetry, it wasn't a story; just a few paragraphs per thought, I suppose, and none seemed connected. I supposed that this, what I was reading, was what was called "prose," though I couldn't be sure. Seventeen or 18 pages in, I turned the page:

"Fuck it."

The opposing page was blank. I turned the page to find another blank page, and on the opposing page was:

"Fuck it."

In that moment, reading those few pages, everything changed.  Everything.  The world changed, life changed, I changed.  I wasn't confused, frightened, afraid, happy or sad; I was just changed. The veil was dropped, my eyes opened, and from that moment, that profoundly blank moment, I began. I began to live.

It was a moment of waking up, of discovery, of discovering that there was truth and discovering that truth had to be discovered. And that was beautiful.  And beauty was everywhere.  Beauty was everything. All you needed to do was blow the dust off, dig it out and open your eyes to see it.  Beauty was everywhere and everything.  Without beauty, there is only

Fuck it.

(Das Energi, by Paul Williams)

Test it out for yourself: the law of attraction

Positive thinking goes a long way in making the world a better place to be.

Having said that, my mind drew a blank. How can I prove it? I thought of a rainy day. Sure, rain puts a damper – on some things. Like, it tends to make seeing a bit difficult when trying to peer through rain-spattered glasses, and it makes for a Bad Hair Day. But, a rainy day means the air is cleaned, the grass will grow, and colors stand out brightly against the gray.

It’s the negative thinking that tends to suck the life out of even the brightest, sunniest day. The ugly thoughts spiral down until no amount of sun can brighten the mood. It’s the negative thinking that gets in the way of finding your way out of a difficult situation, and what might be just a difficult situation then becomes a full-blown crisis. Think of a teenager waking up in the morning of her prom with a huge zit on her nose. Yeah, there is nothing more traumatic.

How you think – positive or negative – has an immediate impact on everyone around you. Negative thinking nets negative responses, and visa versa. How you choose to think, negative or positive, is the framework for how you act toward others. The people you interact with, as a result, react to and act toward you in the same way. In essence, you attract to you what you expect.

Go ahead, test it out. Let me know what you discover.

Nature takes its course

Ah, the beautiful fall colors. So radiant, so vibrant, and here for such a short time! It’s that line drawn in the sand, the mark between an end and a beginning.

This time, I think to myself, I am not going to let the winter bring me down.

I had to make one of those huge, life-changing-or-not decisions, and finally made, I thought “that was that” and it would be done. I chose to stay the course, follow through with what has been a long time coming and that I’ve waited so patiently for. It means changes are ahead, but in the form of increasing the way it’s been instead of something totally new. I’m pretty happy with my choice, and the fact that I can change my mind later makes it the right one. Heh.

Reframing fear to get unstuck

My heart sunk when I looked at my screen and saw his birth year: 1985. A scant 25 years old he was, and hauling around 500 or so pounds. He came in with his mother, but he was the one that sat in my office chair, not really able to support his own weight for very long.

To the standard question, “Do you have any disabilities that limit your ability to perform normal job duties?” the most likely response, if affirmative, is back problems. When I clarified his answer to this question, his response was more an outline of his perception of self; his overall health was good, despite his massive weight.

Has winter got you SAD?

 
What is Seasonal Affective Disorder?

If you’re anything like me, this winter is starting to get on your nerves and get you down. As the season drags on, you wonder if you’ll ever feel “up” again. You could have a form of depression called Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), commonly called "Cabin Fever" or "Winter Blues". Research supports the causes of SAD to be an interruption of your body's internal clock, melatonin production increase, and a drop in the production of serotonin. SAD symptoms will start as soon as it becomes colder and the days shorter, but you might not have noticed them with all the demands of the holiday season going on. Here is a list of what to watch for:

Actions and reactions and on and on and on

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

If only an action were isolated; but once set in motion, the domino or ripple effect comes in to play, and the reactions are exponential. That is natural law. We live with it constantly, it is what life is, yet it’s forgotten as a matter of course. We forget life. How can that be?

My fingers hover over my laptop’s keyboard, waiting to spring into motion to hammer out what I hope is a coherent stream of thought. Fingers press down on plastic keys that strike a circuit board that in turn zips into the computer as input than then is spit out as output to my computer screen, all generated by electrical current and a series of 1’s and 0’s. But the magic is in the storage of every keystroke of my flying fingers, and once I press that “Publish” button, it becomes stored somewhere “out there” in the cloud, available for all to see and read.

Can you hear me now?

On the surface, that is an easy question to answer. We all talk. And talk, and talk. Sometimes, we actually have conversations, and other times, whatever we say falls on deaf ears. On a deeper level, what results from being unheard or misunderstood are feelings of devaluation, our self-esteem and confidence fall, we lose trust, and while we're licking our wounds, we are also then guilty of not listening.

A good conversation with listening is priceless. Heard, you feel valued, empowered, confident, and able to see new possibilities and potential. How far does the imagination have to stretch to envision a life where you listen and are listened to?

Listening is a skill. It is something that can be learned. And, as you go around listening to others, they start listening back. It spreads! You'll also find you do a good bit of the "do" list and not so much of the "don't" list already. A little bit of focus and monitoring and listening will become natural.

It’s simple, really…

…but it’s not easy. It takes a good, sharp knife to pare away the things that get in the way.

There’s a tendency to define value based on differences. When you get into a car, you expect the seat to feel a certain way, to line you up in the exact position you need to be in to drive. You expect the key to go into the ignition, and when turned, the car starts. You expect the car to start. You expect the wheels to turn the tires and move the car down the road. You expect the car to brake when you hit the one pedal, and go when your foot hits the other. You expect to guide the car safely along the roadways, and you expect everyone else will do the same.

But, what if someone else drove the car before you and moved the seat? What if the car doesn’t start when you turn the key? What if one of the tires went flat? What if nothing happened when you pressed on the accelerator – or the brakes? What if someone decided they weren’t going to obey that red light and plowed through the intersection?

You can save a life

He looked like he had the strength of an ox. Wide, muscular shoulders, thick thighs and corded neck made his sitting figure seem far too still and compliant. The gray hairs over his ears and peppered among the black of his moustache and eyebrows appeared more a sign of his years of struggles than of his age.

I’d seen him at work years ago, saw his back hunched in effort to pull pallets of product onto the store’s floor, watched him pull far more pallets out than any of his coworkers; and though his eyes would smile, he never stopped to talk.

When he came in to my office last week, I finally understood why. He stutters, and he is barely literate. It took awhile, but he explained his circumstances. He had a job that is now only working him one day a week, and he is about to become homeless.

At the end, he looked at me and fought with himself awhile before he finally dared to say, “I am thinking of ending it. There is nothing left.”

Does a horse feel? It doesn’t matter.

There's an ongoing, never-ending, ne'er-the-twain-shall-meet 'issue of debate' that just may never be laid to rest, and that is the question of whether the horse – or any warm-blooded animal that isn’t categorized as homo sapiens – has emotions.

My contribution to the debate is: It doesn’t matter!

No, it doesn’t matter if you believe they do or believe that they don’t. And that, my friends, is the key to the whole debate. You see, that’s all we can do is “believe.” We can’t know.

To throw another cog in the wheel, we also can’t know how another person feels or doesn’t feel. And, there’s even times when we can’t know how we feel – or don’t.

What it all boils down to is our ability to communicate. To nail our own feelings down, we first have to let ourselves feel, then we have to categorize those feelings based on past feelings. The last thing we do is find the words to describe those feelings. Once we ‘label’ the feelings, we have a better handle on it all because that is an objective act, which means our brains have kicked in to give a bit of balance to it all. In the end, we are only describing feelings, not feeling the feelings.

Filler or dipper?

The following is a snippet of wisdom sent to me by a person who felt it to be important enough to share. I agree! So, here it is for you...

You have heard of the cup that overflowed. This is a story of a bucket that is like the cup, only larger. It is an invisible bucket. Everyone has one. It determines how we feel about ourselves, about others, and how we get along with people.

Have you ever experienced a series of very favorable things which made you want to be good to people for a week? At that time, your bucket was full. A bucket can be filled by a lot of things that happen. When a person speaks to you, recognizing you as a human being, your bucket is filled a little. It is filled even more if he calls you by name, especially if it is the name you like to be called. If he compliments you on your dress or on a job well done, the level in your bucket goes up still higher.

Still Motion

I watched this young man work with his horse for close to an hour, and heard more coming from him than I have the words to express.

Opening the gate to let him into the arena, his eyes met mine, looking down at me from the back of his horse. His mouth didn’t move, but his eyes smiled in thanks. Young eyes, but wise somehow; a wisdom beyond what can only be 17 years of life.

Quiet, ever quiet, an inner stillness that his horse echoed. Yet, the pair was always in motion. Each movement was effortless, flowing and wild with potential.

In a relaxed lope, the horse’s ears back to listen, the loop swinging overhead melted into the launch with a flick of a wrist. The horse’s rump drops, planting his feet underneath while his rider steps off and down the length of rope.

Whole, Uninterrupted

As above, so below.

Positive and negative, black and white, on and off, up and down… and spirit and matter. All are conditions of each other; one can’t exist without the other.

Overly pensive and abstract?

Think about it this way, using one of those old, wise sayings: You are what you think.

The trick then becomes rather simple: Think.

The more you think, the more your emotions become relevant, appropriate, complete and in the end, the truth. It is what honesty, loyalty and integrity are built on.

It is the alignment that begins wholeness.

Yes, it’s abstract, but give it a few moments to mull around and alight on something substantial in your memories.

So many things are subjective, and they become moreso if what you feel happens without thought. This is everywhere and used mercilessly as a way to get you off the couch and move you into action. Like, a few headlines I just read: “1-year-old burned alive,” or “Floods wipe out homes, dreams,” or “Teacher found not guilty at ‘dirty dancing’ trial.” You are burned, wiped and dirty-dancing your way into framing the facts of those stories based on your initial emotional reaction.

Listen Close and You’ll Hear It

Years ago, I read this book called “The Other,” by Thomas Tryon. It was a strange story about this boy that had put a pitchfork into the hay pile that he and his identical twin used to jump out of the hay loft into. The twin brother died in that fatal jump that day, but you don’t know that until the end of the book. It’s a sucker-punch, compounded by the boys’ grandmother that teaches him to concentrate on and become a butterfly or a flower or a bird. I often wonder if that boy hadn’t been so mentally ill if he wouldn’t have grown into someone that was compassionate, empathetic and understanding.

A few days ago, I talked about anthropomorphizing, giving human traits to animals in order to increase our understanding of them, and in so doing, are more likely to be compassionate, empathetic and understanding to others as well as to animals. This is not to say that in order to understand the world through animals' eyes ignores the fact that they are what they are. You certainly don’t want to forget that a dog may be wagging its tail off its back end while all the while growling and snarling and that those teeth are sharp, no matter what message the dog is trying to send to you. And, no matter how close you feel to your horse, that’s not to say that horse will stop being a horse and mow you down if something startles it enough.

Doing a Duck Inventory

On the first day of my Abnormal Psychology class, the instructor said, “When people take this course, they automatically assume that they have all the disorders in the book. So, if you think you have this or that dysfunction, don’t worry, it’s normal.”

Huh? Do you mean it’s “normal” to be certifiably textbook crazy? Well, the instructor was right, I was back then, and since I remember that first-day-of-class statement often, I am now too. Normally crazy. Crazily  normal. Whatever.

I thought of it again today while making up a tub of macaroni salad. (Oh, I shouldn’t have said that. Just a second while I refill my bowl… Ah, there.) I may be busting at the seams and that tub just about licked clean by the end of the day, but I can’t help it. If there is macaroni salad, particularly the mac salad I make, in the refrigerator, I have to have some. I absolutely can’t control myself with this stuff, it’s so good.

OK, that’s not exactly a textbook disorder. When the macaroni salad is gone, it’s gone. No big deal. I may be a few pounds heavier as a result of pigging out on this wonderful stuff, but no harm done.

To Humanize is to Understand

You have to undertsand…

The 1,600 pound horse, red in color, ran around his fenced-in area. At a distance ranging from 100 to 500 feet, the sound of his gait was not always synchronized with the visual of his hooves hitting the ground. The speed at which the horse was traveling often blurred what he passed, unless he was headed straight at you.

Compare that with this:


Proud head up with a playful glint in his eye, with muscles rippling with power as his mighty hooves threw up clods of earth in his wake, the copper horse’s mane and tail streamed in the wind. He felt good, he was feeling his oats, and he was happy to include me in his play. I knew he wouldn’t run into me, he was always aware of me and my role of leader in our little herd of two, but still, his massive size coming at me full bore was enough to keep me on my toes, ready to jump to the side should he carelessly forget to respect.

Aside from the fact, I hope, that it is more enjoyable to read the second description of Odin coming straight at me at a dead run than the first paragraph, what is conveyed in the latter is more understanding. You now know more about what happened than what you could glean from just a statement of facts.

Forging Ahead With Social Networking: Is it Healthy for Us?

What affect does social networking have on us as individuals and a society?

The majority of people participating in social networking online fall between the ages of 25 to 54, according to a new study done by the folks at pingdom.com. If you take the numbers flaunted by the most popular of these online social networks, it’s easy enough to imagine that social networking now plays a significant role in our culture and our lives. Based on the chart above, it appears that each social networking service attracts certain age groups that may cater to specific developmental life stages as well:

Responsibility’s Reach, Irresponsibility's Toll

He was short, muscular, and on a mission. He had long since cleared his mind of the emotions of his situation and was now checking his facts before making a huge decision. It's a scenario I see over and over in my job, but with endless variations on just how clearly options are identified and weighed at an extremely stressful time. This man, however, had months to work through his circumstances and was now at a critical turning point. He confirmed the facts and his options with me and seemed set on which way he'd decide, then he stopped.

"Can I bring my wife in?  This affects her too and I'd like to see what she thinks."

In a snap of a finger, what I had thought was cocky bravado became confidence instead. What I had observed up to that  point seemed to be the self-centeredness of being single. Perhaps he knew that in order to be of value to another, he had to be true to himself first. But what came to the forefront above all else was his sense of responsibility to another person.

Break Into the Moment

It wasn’t until I stopped thinking about being around Odin that I began being with Odin, and that is when our relationship began. The result was a profound change in myself and my life because my interactions with people evolved too.

In the Thinking

Thinking is a constant thing, and it is a great, boundless power we have. It’s what we egoistically flaunt as our superiority over the rest of Earth’s life. Positive, creative thinking builds our world; negative, destructive thinking destroys it. Would we be so destructive if we could stop thinking long enough to notice how much we have lost?

Yes. And we know it. We meditate, pray, lose ourselves in a book, in music or making love; we scare ourselves out of thinking on roller coasters, and we sleep. Then we go right back to thinking, in a straight line; linear. We have a past and a future, but rarely do we anchor ourselves in the present.

A Moment to Listen

The elderly woman suddenly appeared in my office and darted behind the partition with her hands behind her back and an ear cocked to the doorway. It’s not unusual for people to pop in, nor is it unusual that when they do, I’m right in the middle of something. I glanced up from my computer screen to meet her eyes; the glance held only a bare moment before she looked away.

In the same way, I returned to what I was doing, but left it open for her to talk. I don’t remember what she was talking about, but the next glance I gave her told me that there was something on her mind.

“She makes me feel dumb,” she blurted out. A few sentences later, she elaborated with, “There are times when she’ll just butt right in and take over. She about knocked me down the last time.”