The realization of how sacred a resource time is came to me on a rainy afternoon in a movie theater. The newly released film was horrible. The plot was thin, and the animated characters from a popular cartoon were now silly as “real” people.
Even so, I was torn about leaving. It was raining outside, and there was not much else to do on the gray Saturday afternoon. Plus I’d paid for the ticket and still had some popcorn.
Recently my 91 year old father went into a local grocery store. As he was leaving he found the flat crosswalk at the store entrance blocked by a huge pick-up truck that parked illegally right in front of the doors. My dad saw a man get out of the truck and decided to say, “Excuse me, this is a no parking zone. Can you please move your truck so we can safely go around?” The guy responded, “You just take care of your groceries old man and I’ll take care of how I park.” My fragile old father was forced to go over a big curb with his shopping cart because the man would not move his truck.
I am certain my dad thought about saying much more to the man but he did not. My father was very proud of himself when he told me, “I did not ego-box with him. I just did the best I could to stay safe. I refused to let that rude man upset me.”
No matter how young or old, we always have a choice NOT to engage with people who don’t respect themselves enough to respect others. In 91 years my dad learned what I am also grateful to now know. We cannot reason with unreasonable people. Being a rude ass is a choice but so is refusing to stoop to the behavior a rude ass chooses for himself. Way to go dad!
The human body has three primary layers of skin. Beneath the epidermis, the outermost layer of skin, that provides a waterproof barrier and creates our skin color, we’re basically the same. So, I believe as human beings who’ve been to the moon, cured diseases, shot a telescope into outer space, we are perfectly capable of collectively moving ourselves forward on the emotional evolutionary scale by honestly admitting we do not have a race, homophobia, or gender relations problem. We own up to the fact we have a respect problem.
We do not respect one another’s differences. We do not respect one another’s sameness. We do not have compassion for one another’s challenges. We do not listen to one another to understand each other. We do learn about other cultures and religions, about the biological causes of sexual orientation and gender dysphoria, so we can better relate to one another in intelligent and informed ways. We do not learn about the endless things that make us, other people, and the world tick. We do not press pass the boundaries of our comfort zone.
We are not critically looking at the limiting, judgmental beliefs we were taught about one another that we are choosing to perpetuate. We are not assuming responsibility for the different choices we can now make as adults to create the world we say we want.
We’re talking a good game about our faith and religious beliefs while judging one another in the name of God and looking for someone else to lead the way to peace on earth. But, leading the way, to be responsible for our choices, is exactly what walking a spiritual path or following a religious faith is all about. If we are truly a world of believers in a power greater than ourselves, the time has come for us to walk our talk and choose to treat other people as we want to be treated.
I am white but I did not choose my color. You may be black or brown but you did not choose your color. I am gay but I did not choose my sexual orientation. Most likely you are straight but you did not choose your sexual orientation either.
I was born in the U.S. to an unwed teenage mother but I did not choose my mother or my birth country. You may have been born in a different country but you did not choose your birth country either. I was adopted. Maybe you were too.
I was raised Christian. You may have been raised Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or Atheist. Growing up I had friends from different ethnic groups. Maybe you were raised to accept others too. I was encouraged to learn and to ask questions about the world. You may have been taught to be inquisitive too. Getting a good formal education, exposing myself to difference to find sameness was encouraged in my home. Possibly these were encourage in your home too.
As children we do not come out of the womb knowing how to navigate in the world, to gather facts before making decisions, and to weigh the consequences of our actions. We are not born with the values that shape us into respectful, responsible, and contributing members of our family and social units. We must learn what to value and how to behave so we get along as a human family, how to care for, nurture and preserve all life, and how to help one another on this journey called life.
Everyone on the planet desires to have belongingness, status, recognition, and personal power. If we grow up without a sense of belongingness or without feeling support and acceptance, we seek groups with whom to associate where we do get support and acceptance. If we do not feel we have status and recognition among our peers we seek to find those elsewhere. If we do not have the power to make our own decisions to be an active participant in the direction of our life we seek to find power by other means.
Children do not enter the world as harbingers of hate, prejudice and ignorance. When a child lacks healthy exposure to a variety of people and experiences, to an education which excites the imagination, to a family unit and friends where he feels like an important part, to values that result in positive behavior, he will look for somewhere to belong. Without the skill of discernment any port becomes a refuge from the storm of an abused, uninteresting, tough, and neglected life. Children are sponges soaking up what is around them. They either absorb love, acceptance, and a sense of belongingness or they feel abandoned, unworthy, and unimportant.
If we do not grow up being exposed to the vast wonders of the world and to the beautiful tapestry of our different human being’s colors, beliefs, cultures, and customs we only trust what we’ve been allowed to see. If we do not grow up encouraged to associate with people of other religions, other races, other socio-economic groups, as adults we tend to associate with those people who look like us, believe what we believe, and interact with those who have the same standard of living we do.
We must be taught to value others, to have compassion, to be respectful, helpful, and kind. We cannot find sameness in our differences if we’re being taught to judge, to elevate ourselves above others, to fear difference, to disrespect who other people are, and to devalue what they care for.
White people who hate and judge are ignorant. They are run by a fear-based, narrow minded, and victimized view of the world. Black and brown people who hate are no different.
Regardless of skin color people who chose to participate in animosity and divisiveness are ignorant. Their ignorance is a result of refusing to open their eyes and hearts to anything other than their narrow and biased point of view. Those with a closed heart and judging minds will always be part of the problem while deluding themselves into thinking they are being the solution. The solution they see is one-sided, based upon what they were taught to believe. But, narrow-minded prevents a big picture view.
All of this is to say prejudice, hate, homophobia, xenophobia are learned behaviors. People are taught how to behave and what to believe. Those who are disrespectful will never win the respect they so desperately seek. Respect, like trust, is earned. And being respected is not the same as being feared or liked.
To move our collective emotional evolution forward, to have our heart be an equal partner with our technological growth, we must teach ourselves and our children to love. I know this sounds like a spiritual guru’s pat answer. But only because it is the right answer; one enlightened teachers have been sharing with the world for millennia. But now, to walk the talk, we must listen.
Hate and prejudice will only be solved by elevating the emotional consciousness of the planet. So yes, this is a spiritual responsibility but one that has been supported by all the emotionally conscious heroes among us. Albert Einstein wisely said, “Problems cannot be solved with the same level of awareness that created them.”
That means discernment is different than suspicion. Self-protection is different than instigating violence. And increasing exposure to the best of what different cultures, genders, ages, and races has to offer is setting children up for an open-minded and open-hearted attitude about those who are different.
Along with instruction on how to protect themselves, how to stand up for what’s right, we need to give children tools to do so in a peaceful and productive manner. We must show them how to deal with anger in constructive ways and how to turn off hate-filled propaganda. We can only teach what we know and practice.
We are human beings who must learn to live together as one big, often dysfunctional, but always respectful and non-violent family. Devoted to the heart-evolving path of finding sameness in our difference.
This is an origami Koi fish created by a friend of mine who works in the medical field. She is an expert at origami as a hobby and creates many beautiful things. She says creating this Koi fish takes her the longest amount of time and it is the hardest. About six hours. WOW! Such patience and dedication for something she does just for fun.
I asked why she spends so much time doing these when her other creations take much less time. With a huge smile she replied, “Because they are the most challenging and take the most time.” Simple yet profound wisdom from an artist who reminded me satisfaction and joy come from putting our heart into what we enjoy; no matter how long it takes.
You’ve heard the saying anything worth doing is worth doing well. No matter what you do in life put yourself into it. Be passionate about your hobbies, the everyday chores you must do, and the times you play just for fun. The quality of life truly is found in the moments we are fully immersed in what we are doing. We feel life move through us to create, to enjoy.
I was walking my little dog Ruby when we came upon a shattered glass bottle. Sharp shards of clear glass were strewn several feet across the entire width of the sidewalk. I carefully picked her up and went around. When we finished our walk and returned to the apartment I got a broom, dust pan and paper bag. I lined the bottom of the bag with a thick newspaper and in big red letters wrote “Careful broken glass,” on the outside of the bag. Then I headed back over to the next block with my clean up tools in hand.
I bent down and picked up the big pieces. Then I spent 5 or so minutes carefully cleaning up the small shards that had fallen into the grass. I finished by sweeping up the length of sidewalk and stairs leading up to the apartment building where the bottle had broken.
As I returned home I felt a great sense of peaceful satisfaction. In taking time to clean up the glass I realized the majority of my contentment with life comes from doing what I can to make a positive difference. It makes my heart sing to think I may have prevented a person, or child, or pet from being hurt.
Each and every time we do something positive we feel good. And the truth is, feeling good from lending a helping hand when we see something that needs to be done is addictive, in a very heart-healthy way.
Have you ever seen a dog with a plastic collar? Sometimes they must wear it after surgery or when they have an injury so they do not lick a wound. But the collar severely restricts their vision to only what is directly ahead of them.
For many years I went through life wearing an invisible collar. My focus was so narrow I could only see my point of view. My thoughts, preferences, desires, and goals were the only ones that mattered. What other people thought or felt was not important because I was always right. My egocentric tunnel vision view caused me to believe I was the center of the universe. But living alone with my personal importance was not satisfying or easy. It seemed I was always in conflict. I had to defend myself against people who challenged me. I found fault, tore other people down in a need to be better, different, and special. It was a lonely and angry way to live.
One day someone close to me had the courage to tell me how self-absorbed and narrow minded I was. At first I was defensively angry. Later I realized I was hurt and embarrassed. Eventually I became grateful because she was right.
It was the painful wake-up call I needed to take off my “it’s all about me” collar. Only when I was free from the narrow view of “me” did my heart open so I appreciate the greater wisdom and power of “we.”
The only time I ever find fear useful is when it gets me moving out of the way of physical harm. For the rest of life’s unknowns and challenges, being fearful actually keeps us stuck. Living in fear of what we cannot know or change is being shackled to the heavy weight of dread. The chains of fear actually prevent us from moving on.
By bravely facing what we are afraid of we begin to realize much of what we fear is actually under our control. Like the stress I experienced from too many bills because I was not financially responsible. Or the anxiety that came from a relationship where my partner refused to work on us. Or the fear that arose when a loved one got a negative medical diagnosis.
It is times like these when the most positive action we can take is to stare fear directly in the eye. By realistically looking at what the situation is, rather than fearing what may be, we eliminate the idea we can control the uncontrollable (loved one gets a cancer diagnosis), know the unknowable (when we will die), or change the unchangeable (the past). When we accept a situation for what it is we can take the actions necessary to address life’s challenges in the most productive and positive ways.
Facing our fear is the way we stop getting stuck in the negativity and inaction of worry and dread. Life is not meant to be lived in fear but in the faith that comes from believing we are strong enough to successfully get through whatever challenges we face.
When I was 21 I was briefly locked up in a psychiatric hospital. I became severely depressed. At least that is what I was told I was. Deep inside I knew my depression was the result of no longer being able to outrun the personal issues I had struggled with all of my life. Without anyone to confide in and nowhere to turn for help, I retreated inward as an act of desperate self-preservation.
At the time I considered life too unbearable to continue. So the answer as professionals saw it was to medicate me and slap a variety of labels on my condition. But labels only served to further distance me from a real solution to my underlying problem – self-acceptance.
While I cannot speak for everyone, I have learned many things about the variety of reasons we get lost in the limitations of our mind. With our lives moving at ever faster speeds we are often too quick to reach for a drug, or to give up on ourselves, or to isolate ourselves in an attempt to cope. For me, healing began in earnest when I stopped looking for answers to repair my heart from someone or something outside me. As long as I continued to give my power away to other people to fix my life, to accept me as I was, or to validate my existence, my life remained broken.
While one size does not fit all when we speak about moving past depression and traumatic issues, I feel it is important to remember our soul is powerful. Within us is a loving force capable of helping us overcome the challenges we tell ourselves we cannot. While physical and emotional trials are very real, so is our soul’s power to move us past them. For me, and countless others who have taken our power back, we simply want to share our experience of how powerful we truly are when we believe in our soul’s power to help us heal.
Freedom does not mean we can do anything we want without care to the outcome of our choices. Freedom of choice is both a great privilege and an enormous responsibility.
If we choose to drink, text, or talk on the phone and drive, and cause an accident, we have created heart-break and chaos for ourselves and others. If we choose to keep loaded guns in our home and a child accidently shoots someone our choice creates devastation. If we choose to justify using substandard construction methods and a building collapses killing hundreds we have created anguish for thousands.
Everything we do is a choice and every choice we make has a consequence.
While our intention may not be to cause harm to ourselves and others, without forethought to consider the potential outcomes of our choices we are mindlessly rolling the dice. Life has so many variables we can never control. It makes good sense to want the best odds possible over each and every choice we can control – our behavior. We really are the powerful creators of our life when we exercise the freedom to think and care about the choices we make before we act.
When I was in my late thirties I drove a little pick-up truck. On the back I had a Practice Random Acts of Caring and Kindness sticker. One day I was at a full-service gas station and a young man in his late teens who was filling my tank said, “I like your sticker but I don’t understand why you would have the sticker and also carry a big stick in the cab of your truck?”
There is a saying, “Out of the mouths of babes” meaning profound wisdom does not only come with age. His observation was a soul opener. He was right. How could I profess to be a supporter of peace and kindness and carry a big stick as if I was looking for trouble? I reached in, took the stick out and put it into the trash can.
I was reminded of my big stick and bumper sticker experience recently. I was on an LA City Bus when a man wearing a cross and carrying a Bible started an argument with another man over a seat. I thought to myself, “What an amazing world we will create when each of us who professes to be a faithful follower of an enlightened messenger of peace actually behaves aligned with the kind, respectful, tolerant, and loving tenants of our faiths.”