Allow yourself to experience your emotions – even the extremes. Don’t cover or hide from your grief. If you are feeling joy, express it. Avoid constructing a wall or barrier between you and your emotions. The day may come when you cannot see over the barrier, let alone climb the wall.
Take time to hear as many “sides” to every story. Don’t rush to judgment. There are usually 7, 8, even 10 sides to every story. Hear them all. Things are often not as they appear. Listeners take all the time needed to hear things out.
As far as you’re capable, go back and make right where you have failed. Often, this may be impossible. Make a list of your regrets, determine never to move in those directions again. Learn, recover, learn recover.
Even if it’s not in your usual habit, try to talk more to people you care about about the things you care about. Don’t rehash hobby horses. Let people into unexpressed parts of your thinking.
Notice your indifference. This is where you’ve been unmoved, unaffected, by things that ought to move everybody, ought to affect everybody. Allow the world about you, near and afar, to have its impact on you.
One corner of my home office……. you’re welcome here.
I know competition is tough, really tough, but I think I win the International Best Sister Award. My Australian brother would win a parallel brother award but today I’m celebrating my South African sister, Durban’s own Jennifer Arthur.
As I’ve previously written Jen is the original Facebook. She remembers everyone she’s ever met, be it for 7 minutes on a train or plane somewhere in the world, and somehow gets them a birthday message. She keeps contact with people for years despite the brevity of a first encounter. There’s always a way to stay in touch and Jen finds it.
Jen’s adored by her 9 grandchildren and 1 great grandchild and by my adult sons. I’ve heard children, seen their longing, as they request she be their grandmother. My sister is widely known as Granny Goose.
This week, in fact 3 days ago, my sister landed in the USA for my son’s wedding, a journey booked without awareness that I’d be in need of assistance following my joust with salmonella. My kitchen is organized, my house has beautiful new touches, and recuperation feels 100 times easier.
Even Duke my Lab has switched allegiances and is under her feet as much as possible.
You may earn more than I do and live in a nicer house – but our loneliness is probably the same. When it rips us apart it doesn’t really matter who has the most cash or the nicest home. Loneliness doesn’t care where we live or about our financial status. Invite me in – perhaps we can be friends and ease our common pain.
You may be more educated than I am and you may have graduated from a respected university – but I know that if you regard anyone, anywhere with contempt, your education has given you little worth knowing. I may not be very bright by your standards but I do know that truly educated people never use it as a weapon. Talk to me – I might be able to teach you a thing or two.
You may be more travelled than I am and can talk about places I have not heard of or could afford to visit in my wildest dreams – but if travel has made you contemptuous of your homeland and its peoples then travel has not done its finer work in you. Citizens of the world find beauty and wonder everywhere. Come to my house – my culture is as interesting as any you will find on any distant shore.
Who are you? You don’t matter. I don’t care one way or the other. Your life, your existence means nothing. Get out of my way.
While such sentiments are usually unspoken they drive behavior.
Sometimes, mine.
Headlines? I don’t read them. Who wants bad news? What goes on Gaza and Israel and South Sudan and Ukrain and Russia and wherever else on the planet is too far removed for me to care, too complicated for me to understand. Let’s watch something feel good. What’s on Netflix?
The shooting on the street leaving a young man dead and his body in the street is an inconvenience. I am going to be late for work. The congested traffic gets more attention than the death of a young man and the pain his family must now face.
Indifference. Zero empathy. No room for cross-over human care. What’s that?
Perhaps it has always been this way.
I think not.
This is surely sin at its finest? The acceptance of the idea that I can be indifferent (unaffected, untouched, devoid of empathy) to the suffering of others.
As long as it does not inconvenience me, I don’t care.
Your “spirituality” is not measured by how much you (or I) read the Holy Scriptures, sing hymns, pray, clap your hands, run around a sanctuary with a purple flag, dance to contemporary religious music or reject those who do.
It’s not determined by how much you visit your place of worship or how much money you donate to its causes.
It’s not affirmed by your title (if you have one) or the ornate design of your robe (if you wear one) or the position you hold in the hierarchy of your faith tradition (if you’re part of one).
But, it is affirmed by your willingness to take responsibility for your life, your choices, and the good use of your skills and talents.
A biopsy of the validity and integrity of our faith and spirituality is revealed in how we treat people, especially loved-ones and strangers; how we love our enemies, offer hospitality, respect, regard, love those who reject our beliefs.
Do you clean up after yourself? Are you wisely generous to a fault? Do you love those who are different from you, whose lives might be in direct conflict with what you believe? Do you love others by listening?
If you take full responsibility for yourself, become extraordinarily generous with what you have, embrace diversity, and love others by listening, you will fast-forward your “spiritual” growth. Actually, you will put it on supercharge.
It’s not your title, the reach of your authority, or the crowds who respect and adore you. Rather, it’s how you respect and love and respond to those who don’t.
Lead yourself, first. Lead yourself, only. Everything else will fall into place and grow.
Regard leadership for what it is. It is a function, something the leader does. Know what it is not: a place of power or status. The “leader” who seeks power or status will take himself/herself and the organization (church, hospital, school, political party, soccer team) nowhere worth going.
Authentic Leaders develop leaders without even trying. The authenticity is so novel and attractive others find it compelling and will naturally want to follow and learn.
Authentic Leaders give away, delegate, spread opportunities so others may grow without fear of being outdone by those to whom they delegate.
Authentic Leaders have a set of pre-decided principles and values that are in place before they are needed.
Authentic Leaders are constantly engaged in doing their homework and self work and family work because they know all sectors and compartments of life spin off and influence and drive each other. A leader can fake it for only so long until the parts of his or her life that are “out of integrity” will come crashing and cashing in.
Authentic Leaders are focussed on strength and freedom, not on anxiety and weaknesses (of self and others).
Authentic Leaders select their emotions, choose their responses, and are in charge of their reactions. Those who are not are a danger to themselves, their families, and to the organizations which they claim to lead.
“I am in my early thirties and my parents’ only child from my biological mom and dad. My dad left my mom and fathered three sons with three women. Those boys are 25, 21, and 18. My mom has three sons, now 24, 22, and 16, by two men. The first two are from the same dad (not my dad). I am a ‘big’ sister to six brothers. I live away but I go ‘home’ to my mom and dad and I know all the boys. They all live near each other but are not as familiar with the brothers from ‘another mother and father.’ I feel responsible for my brothers. How can I be a good sister in such a complicated set-up?”
Your question reveals the beautiful truth of invisible loyalties. Loyalties run deep in families and can escape reason. You can be a great “big” sister by being responsible to your brothers, not for them. They are indeed not your responsibility but you probably can build unique sets of relationships with each of them. A text and a call here and there. Birthday cards. Inexpensive gifts. Reach out to them not as a group but as individuals. Seek friendship at their pace. These efforts they will treasure and remember.
I think my disdain for the sheer evil was discerned early on in my military basics when a breath-reeking dirty-mouthed two-striper screamed into my face from such proximity that I could smell and see his back teeth.
Mixing Afrikaans and English he proclaimed with anger that by the time he was finished and done, “finished and klaar,” with me, me specifically, I would be a real soldier, an “ordentlike soldaat.”
He said I would be able to march, not walk, march, in those shiny boots right over my mother’s dead body and feel nothing, nothing at all.
I gathered my thoughts.
He waited.
He expected the routine.
He waited for me to jump to attention and scream, “Ja, Bombardier. Bombardier is always correct, Bombardier,” in Afrikaans.
This response was expected, an individual response when addressed as an individual, or blurted in unison if addressed as a group. There were times it reminded me or 7-year-olds singing their times tables for a teacher.
“Do you know that you are stupid, and you are for nothing good?” would be said to all of us.
“Ja, Bombardier. You are correct, Bombardier. Bombardier is always correct, Bombardier,” we had to reply but in Afrikaans.
Agreement was essential no matter what insults were hurled.
This particular insult, that we were for nothing good, I found amusing. The “for nothing good” is a direct translation from Afrikaans and the bombardier would have had no idea how stupid he sounded in his desire to parade comfort in both official languages.
This time was different.
This was no routine insult.
He was screaming at me about my Mother, a woman he did not know, a woman about whom he knew nothing.
He was addressing me, a man he did not know.
A man about whom he knew nothing.
A man he had spent no time trying to know.
He was shouting so all could hear and be impressed by his evil aspirations with words tailored for me.
I waited.
I did not jump to attention and scream “Ja, Bombardier. Bombardier is always correct, Bombardier.”
I did come to attention and yelled, “Bombardier!”
Then, rather quietly, having now gained his full attention, I told the depraved man, in my faulty Afrikaans, as faulty as his English, that despite all of his efforts, I would indeed never, not ever, not in a thousand years, would I be that soldier.
I talked quietly and I was clear.
The bombardier appeared taken aback that I would dare reply with an unanticipated response.
He backed off.
In his retreat he did not send me or the whole squad running to the fence or make all of us do 30 push-ups. He moved away, stepping backwards, losing eye contact for brief seconds as his eyes darted seeking back-up from fellow bombardiers.
I did not drop my gaze.
I gave him all the eye-contact he ever could want.
Somehow, waiting to reply had knocked him off balance, stopped him in his tracks.
His peers made no moves of support.
He was alone in this and he knew it.
Perhaps it made him think of his mother but I will never know.
A violation had occurred and I refused to cooperate with pure evil.
He kept his distance.
He limited his involvement with our particular squad and seemed to forever regard me with suspicion mixed with a dose of fear and healthy respect.
That’s all I wanted; a lot of respect for my Mother and a little respect for me.
And, I wanted not to be that soldier.
Not ever.
So, I told him.
I wanted him to know I would never be that soldier.
When people discover I was “in the army” they usually express disbelief.
I’m perfectly fine with it.
If a war-story is told or I am asked directly about military service in the SADF my default reply is that I was a terrible soldier.
It is true.
I was.
Even visualizing myself as a soldier is a stretch.
But, I was one, really.
I was conscripted into the South African Defense Force like all white South African boys my age.
There is a lot more to my year in the army which I usually reduce to “terrible soldier” but I do avoid when-I-was-in-the-army stories.
I will not pretend it was a good season for me.
Real war stories told by real soldiers and sailors who fought in brutal wars can be tiresome and there is already enough that is tiresome, told, and retold, and exaggerated, without my adding my two bits.
On the occasion I seek reminding about the horrors of war and the evils of which we humans are capable, I open Wilfred Owen’s 1920 poem, Dulce et Decorum est and I’m satisfied.
Fully.
Owen warns against the glorification war and I never came close to one.
Like Owen, I too have seen human evil, thankfully not to the degree he recounts, but I do know it requires no uniform.
I’d rather leave war stories to war heroes and those who are able to hold an audience.
My dad was a war hero.
For him it was frighteningly close.
Extraordinarily personal.
How much closer, more personal can it be than knowing your two best friends (my brother has their names) were killed in an upper-deck explosion while you scrambled off the side of a kamikaze-wounded destroyer into the Indian Ocean in the hopes of finding safety as your ship disappeared from beneath you within 8 minutes?
Able Seaman 67799 EWG Smith was 19 years and 4 months old when he took to the water searching for life and safety.
There is nothing like a good listener for feeding the soul.
A good listener determines there will be no distractions — no phones, text checking, no dings or app notifications or glances to see the time — and will offer complete and uninterrupted and undiluted attention to the speaker.
A good listener listens, says very very little except may offer occasional brief words of encouragement like “tell me more” or “go back to the beginning if you want” or “go into as much detail as you think will be helpful” or “could you tell me that again so it’s clearer for me.”
The good listener knows listening and any attempts at multitasking — even the most subtle — distract the speaker and obliterate listening. A good listener gets all the potential impediments to listening out of the way before sitting down to listen.
The good listener knows a listener’s inner-noise —- things the listener is refusing to hear or address from within — will emerge and sabotage attempts at hearing others and so addresses unresolved personal matters as much as possible so others may encounter a clear-headed listener.
The good listener does not formulate replies or develop counterpoints while listening and does not one-up the speaker with the listener’s own experiences whether they may appear to the listener to be helpful or not.
A good listener sees, hears, knows, acknowledges the speaker by listening — the most powerful and tangible expression of love.
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