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.
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.
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.
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.
I devised a list of how to participate in the healing of men and women who have been hurt:
Be willing to listen, even if what is being said is what you’d prefer to not hear. Try not to re-engineer (re-frame, recast) what you have heard so it is more fitting with what you’d really like to hear.
Resist understandable attempts to short-circuit growth by trying to ease necessary pain, by offering false affirmations, and by accepting empty excuses for irresponsible behavior. Pain is a very good motivator for change. Resist the urge to remove it when it appears to be helpful.
Offer your presence, not your answers. “I am with you” is more helpful than “let me help you fix it.”
Welcome silence. There are ways to communicate that do not include words. Resist the understandable urge to chase healing and learning away with the incessant use of words and stories.
Avoid minimizing (“it’s not so bad!”) or rationalizing (“What else did you expect?”) or normalizing (“Anyone would have done that!”) the issues that resulted in pain. Do not rob necessary pain of its usefulness.
Promote “future thinking.” Ask questions focused on future wellness and success.
Try to avoid searching for the genesis (the cause) of what has led to pain. Where something comes from is not nearly as important living your way out of it.
Dad owned the tearoom near the top of Blackburn Road next to the Dutch Reformed Church up the road from Park Hill Soccer Club.
You may or not have known him by name but you may have been a woman in need of milk for her baby. He would have given it to you “under the counter” as if defying the boss which, of course, was himself. When you tried to pay he may have whispered “take the milk, my dear. No baby should go without food. Keep your money for something else the baby needs.”
Or, you may have wandered into the shop and said you had no place to stay for a while and he may have said “we have plenty of room here” and given you a bed for a week, a month, even longer.
Perhaps you knew him because you faced addiction to alcohol and he was your Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor and he said “just for today” to you and told you he’d decided he’d no longer drink “just for today” until his pledge spanned decades of sobriety.
Did you know my dad?
You may not have known him by name but perhaps you went to his tearoom where he served bread, milk, kindness and good humor and wrapped the goods with the feeling that you were known, you belonged, you were important.
As well-intentioned as we may be in desiring to avoid conflict and “keep the peace,” we create more problems we must face later by running or playing hide and seek. Then, when we do face matters, we’re not the people we once were.
Avoidance is a quick-change artist! It changes us in ways we are likely to regret.
We cannot solve or improve what we will not face. Denial gets us no place worthy of the journey or the unintended, unwanted destination. Until we gather the courage to look difficult situations directly in the eye and expedite what is necessary to face the difficulties, conflicts will stay as they are and they’re likely to deteriorate.
What we avoid shapes us in ways we may never notice. We modify our habits in order to sustain our denial and avoidance. We change our friendships in order to sustain our patterns. We go out of our way to keep the peace but the new path is one to further avoidance. Our defensive habits defend us in unhealthy and unhelpful ways and make us into people we’d rather not be.
Avoidance of necessary battles creates unintended distance from others — even those we truly love.
There is no worthwhile substitute for early honest approaches to family or business conflicts.
Avoidance makes the heart grow harder.
Ours.
I enjoyed this side-walk art…… 49th and Penn in Meridian Kessler, Indianapolis
Not everything is proceeding as you’d prefer. You notice you are starting to avoid and resent some members of your team and some people in your organization. You’d rather not pick a fight so you’re managing your day (week, month) around who you do not want to encounter. You notice, on occasion, there’s a dictatorial edge lurking just under your calm exterior and you hope it is not going to take you by surprise.
Find a leadership coach.
You find yourself taking sides on issues and recruiting those who are on yours. While you know that surrounding yourself with YES men and women is probably not good for your organization it feels good. You know that the people who hold counter opinions are good for you and for you and for your organization, you’d like them to ease off a little.
Please, find a leadership coach.
Your family is getting in your way and there are times you want to stay at work rather than go home. At the very same time, when you are home, you want to work from home to avoid some of the underlying conflicts you have to address at work. Nowhere feels completely comfortable right now.
Please, for everyone’s sake, find a leadership coach.
There are no blue-birds of happiness seeking nests.
It will not take us by surprise, arrive unannounced, and it won’t be ours because we read FaceBook memes or read anything inspirational or challenging anywhere, even the Bible.
And, no Podcast will do it – not even that.
Happiness has no victims. Happiness is an inside job, it is an internal state and it requires our willingness, our cooperation, and hard work.
Our happiness will be a direct result of what you and I do with our days.
Do we serve others?
Are we generous?
Do we accept and embrace and enjoy people who are different from us?
Do we look for beauty that is all around us and within everybody?
[If you think there is no beauty around you and there is no beauty in all people, well, you’ve already unearthed a major happiness blockage.]
Answering these questions with our lives will hold a few of many codes to unlock happiness and let it into our lives. And, this is a big one, our levels of happiness are never, not ever, up to others, no matter how much we may love or not love others. Happiness is not something another can provide for you at least for enduring lengths of time. Neither you nor I will be happier, or less happy, based on who or what we love or who or what we reject.
While I concede having money does make life just a little easier, our happiness levels are totally unrelated to money.
Some of the wealthiest people on the planet are clearly some of the most unhappy people.
Jesus of Nazareth said what comes out of people’s mouths reveals the state of people’s hearts or inner-beings.
Is there a millionaire or billionaire you’ve heard on TV with whom you’d want to share your daily life?
Happiness requires action and appears to play hard-to-get with those who persistently whine, “I just want to be happy.” It appears to play hard-to-get with complainers and those who seem entitled. Happiness and Laziness are not buddies. Laziness repels of Happiness. Happiness and Blamingness – I just made a new word – are not friends and, as far as I can tell, cannot co-exist in the same brain.
Finding a useful cause, a cause larger than oneself, and engaging in it with others who have the same or similar causes, and offering it zeal will quite often spark some thrill-for-life aka happiness.
While you and I are influenced even a tidbit by what others think of us (or what we think others think of us) we dead-bolt access to happinesses.
How and what we think and say of others is far more important than concerning ourselves with what “they” think and say of us.
“There are two sides to every story” is a common belief.
I am of the opinion that things are usually more layered. It is probably more like 7 or 9 sides to every story.
Motivation – the “inside story” – is similar.
What drives me – or holds me back, demands I succeed, or prefers I don’t – is usually more than one or two identifiable factors. People have mixed, often confusing motivations. Hidden, often unknown internal compelling swells drive people to surf historic and aspirational waves.
Getting to the bottom of motive can be like any journey, beautiful, pleasing, satisfying, sometimes uncomfortably revealing.
Time spent with a wildly successful person who donates to great causes and is appropriately honored for doing so led him to inform that very few people know how angry he really is at extended family who unashamedly live off him.
“I have to,” he said, “I have to support them. My wife knows it makes me angry. Everything is for my (deceased) parents.”
Motives are cloaked, mixed bags, driving from deep within, often yielding incredibly beautiful results.
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