How To Turn Strangers Into Members Of Our Community

I just saw the below video on CNNMONEY.com.  It talks about a small pharmacy in New York which still thrives even though a Walgreen has moved next door.  The owner who is also the pharmacist attributes his success to customer care and his true interest in being personal and helping others.

In this age of pre-recorded messages, employees hiding behind corporations and greed, we are all starved for simple courteous daily connections.    I’m not referring to relationships with friends and family, but am discussing brief relationships we have with almost total strangers.

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Does Love Conquer All?

A friend of mine forwarded to me a couple of days ago, an email from her new girlfriend.  In this email her new friend listed ten things they had in common.  My friend wanted to share the email with me because had been pleasantly surprised by her new friend’s disposition to concentrate on the similarities rather than the differences.

I then thought about a friend of mine who is Muslim Turkish and came to the US to learn filmmaking.  While here she met a Jewish Turkish man and they fell in love and wanted to get married.  Her family threatened to disown her if she married him even though the two of them had so much in common.  My friend was forced to make a choice between the man she had fallen in love with and her family.  She chose her now husband but she still hurts for the loss of her family.  Her story is one of differences where families’ believes were so frail and non-inclusive that they couldn’t tolerate any differences. Read more

Learning To Take Responsibility For Our Life Choices

Taking responsibility for our lives means being clear about what we want and don’t want.

Many of us prefer to leave life decisions to the world; we know a situation is going on, we know we need to take a stance but we don’t because it would mean standing up for who we are and what we believe in.   So we show up and hope life will make the decision for us, but when we allow for that to happen, we become victims of chaos and become powerless.

I believe the reason we leave some decisions to the gods is 1 – because we are afraid to make a wrong decision and then have to live with the fact it was us that made the choice 2 – we are afraid that we will seem harsh and 3 – that others may not like us as much because we can easily say “yes” or “no” 4 – we have to deal with the fact that others don’t take ownership for their choices and will so prefer to blame us for seeing things clearly.

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Sexual Encounters And Intuition

Any sexual encounter requires some unveiling of ourselves.  Even the one-night stand does. We become physically naked, open about our desires, and often feel the pressure to perform; men to show off their skills at lovemaking and women to show their pleasure.

Adding to all of it are such questions as: What does this sex mean to this relationship? Will this last?  Is this right for me? What is he or she going to think of me?  And when the lovemaking ends and our excitement subside we find ourselves living in a completely different relationship than the one we had before.

How can we navigate these waters without having the feeling of losing our balance?

1      – inner-equilibrium.  Being in touch with ourselves and knowing we all have the ability to take care of our limitations, fears and expectations will allow us to enter a relationship with a full commitment to the experience.

2      – Intuition.  Listening to our intuition is like listening to an internal alarm.  When the experience feels good and we are comfortable our intuition is subtle. When something is amiss or we have crossed our comfort zone it becomes louder than a samba school on the first day of carnival.  It is up to us to be connected enough to listen to it.  And it is up to us to be respectful and courageous enough to act on it.

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Learning To Set Limits

Now that’s a hard one if you are like me.  Setting limits without anger or fear means we respect ourselves enough to say “yes” to certain things and “no” to others.

I’ve always had a hard time doing that because I have always preferred to suck it up than to confront others and risk arguments or ill feelings.  And because I am someone with a great amount of personal resilience, I’ve done some heavy duty sucking up.

But as I dig into who I am and the life I want to live, I realize that at the bottom of my sucking up is a deep seeded feeling that I have no rights.  It doesn’t matter where that comes from.  It matters how I am going to deal with the feelings now.  So I ask myself, why the needs of others – right or wrong – take prevalence over mine?  And I realize that if I don’t look out for myself (read: respect) why would I expect others to do so?

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Are You Really Ready For Love?

Most of us say we are looking for love.  But are we really?  Or are we looking to cast someone in a role we have developed in our imagination?  Are we looking for the classy man who will defend and saves us?  Or the beautiful woman who is nurturing and sexy?  And once we’ve cast the part, we’ll live happily ever after without ever having a fight or a problem? That’s not being open to love that’s being ready for a casting session.

Loving someone means loving them for who they are; strengths and frailties.  It is respecting them as people who like us struggle to make sense of life’s complexities.  It is also living in the present.

The first step to really being able to fall in love and be in a good relationship starts with loving ourselves.  No knight in shinning armor can rescue anyone and no super hot girl can compensate for a bruised ego.  We rescue our own selves and we build our own egos.

As we learn who we are and embrace all parts of ourselves we learn to love others as well.  Being there for ourselves and having our own backs allows us to be whole and able to truly share with someone else.

So take the time to get to know you.  Feed your heart and soul with small pleasures that give you contentment, ask yourself what is really important to you, slow down and concentrate on life as its happening not as you imagine it should be,  laugh as much as you can, and as you are busy living, life will happen to you.

Don’t Forget To Put Your Own Oxygen Mask On First

Years ago I heard for the first time the flight instruction of “put on your oxygen mask on first in case of an emergency before helping others” applied to “normal” life.  Since then I have thought of it often. 

At first there is the reaction, ‘How selfish! Saving yourself before others” but than the realization comes that if you don’t save yourself you can not save anybody else.

Mastering this concept and walking the fine line between it and actually being a selfish person is a life time effort.  We are often pushed into situations where exercising our rights and space is put to the test on a regular basis.  Let me give an example of an extreme case, like illness.  Someone we love is sick and needs us.  How much of our time and energy do we give before we have nothing left?  What about “if you love someone you should be willing and able to just give and give”?  The first thing a social worker tells a caretaker is to make sure they take care of themselves because if they don’t they will run out of steam and won’t be able to care for their loved ones.

And what about in our daily lives when we’re not in a state of emergency and its not so clear how much is too much?

If you are like me, you think “I’m really strong and I can take more than most people, so it is easier if I just make it okay for the other people while I take on whatever needs to be dealt with”.  My thinking might sound noble for about half a second because in this thought process what I’m leaving out is; what about respecting myself?  What about the fact that eventually I’m going to burn out?  And what about that for sure sooner or later I’m going to start resenting the people and/or the situation?  What about what I need?

I don’t think there is any fast and bullet proof equation to deal with this conundrum except to listen to oneself.  Quiet down and if something doesn’t feel okay it is because it probably isn’t.  If you are on a quest for a deeper more meaningful life your inner self will always give you the right answer.   And guess what, as you feel more content you will be able to impact others around you in a much more positive way than if you were exhausted from saying “yes”  and “what can I do for you?” all the time.

So join me on respecting the law and putting on our own oxygen mask on before putting it on others.

Self Love…

Last night I had a small interaction that reminded me of when I was first putting this site together.

I asked a few friends of mine to write essays or post blogs for this site.  I have many friends that are writers and I thought it would be wonderful to launch with these very well written pieces. 

They all said yes but as the deadline approached, I started to get the “I’m sorry but I’m so busy can I write something next time around?” or the “I tried but I just had no inspiration to write about love”.

At the time I was reading Arianna Huffington’ book about blogging and one of the things the book describes is the process of reaching out to others to contribute to the blog. She was able to get commitments from many people including some of high visibility.

So I thought is the subject of politics more interesting or important than the subject of love? Or is Arianna more important than me?

Right about now you reading this could say that I have a complex of inferiority – maybe.  But the point I’m trying to make is that if I was highly successful it would be easier to get others to want to do things with me but I would still be the same person just with more money and maybe more self assured but basically the same person. What would be different would be outside of me. 

My point in discussing this seemingly small point is the fact that we/I can’t have a sense of worth or self love based on others as their interaction with us/me sometimes is based on things that are outside of us and not really about whom we truly are as people.

I for one will try to keep remembering that the truth of whom I am and my own value as a person is independent from how others see me and react to me.  And to those friends who have contributed to the site, to my life and love me for whom I am my deep thanks.

To laugh often and much…

To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch…to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.  This is to have succeeded!

Ralph Waldo Emerson,  (1803 – 1882) whose original profession and calling was as a Unitarian minister, left the ministry to pursue a career in writing and public speaking. Emerson became one of America’s best known and best loved 19th century figures.