Please Don’t Shoot (Indianapolis 2015)

If you see my (black) son

any time of the day

or in the evening

riding his (red) bike

please don’t shoot him.

He’s as free as the wind

loves his (diverse) neighborhood

knows it block by (colorful) block

If you glimpse him whizzing by

on his bike

or weaving side-to-side

on his (new) roller-blades

– which are the only things he really wanted

for his thirteenth birthday – and candy

please, please don’t shoot.

He’s really good at both

– bikes and roller-blades –

and I assure you he’s not trying

to get away from you or from anything

nor is he coming at you

he’s definitely not dangerous

even though he’s

moving very quickly

and he is making his way home

enjoying the last few weeks of

summer.

How we treat each other is of paramount importance.

When we respect each other it provokes wholeness, goodness in our communities.

Treasuring each other begins with me, where I live, and with you, where you live.

If it goes “viral” that will be wonderful, but that is not the point. It’s not the goal. Respecting each other is an end in itself.

Treating each other with highest-good love, absolute respect, with a commitment to mutuality, equality, justice, is not only good for those on the receiving end. It transforms anyone who seeks to make it a way of life.

While humankind has messed (to put it kindly) with each other forever, hurting and disrespecting each other is not normal. It is common. It’s not normal.

Hurting, using, deceiving each other is not natural to our design.

This is why every time we violate another (even benignly – if there is such a thing) we know it.

Every time we lie, cheat, disrespect another, we know it. Our internal black box registers it, sends us a signal. An alarm goes. Do it enough, override the alerts until such overriding becomes routine, habitual, and the alarms will dampen. Only in pathological circumstances, will they disappear.

Resets are internal before manifesting externally for we love others as we are, not as they are.

Join me, please, even if it’s for “selfish” reasons. Even if we fail things are still likely to improve.

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You are the common denominator in all of your relationships.

You get the joy of teaching others how to treat you. You get the daily job of guiding others how not to treat you. You get to determine how and where you spend your energy and you decide hour by hour who and what gets your love and attention. There is no escaping it.

Your levels of anger and resentment, levels of grace and forgiveness, are all in your hands. Actually, they are driven by your thinking and are filtered through your heart and come out in what you do with your hands.

You are responsible for your relationships and it is so unless you are severely incapacitated. You are the center of your circle and you set the tone for how you will respond to all that transpires outwardly from you. Divine Grace is available to you, but even then, you have to be willing to embrace it. Many don’t and won’t.

It all starts within you. It really is all about you.

This is true even when it comes to your faith, your children, and to your most intimate or most casual relationships.

Before I am deluged with resistance, this is not selfish thinking. To think any other way about it probably is!

So, let’s be kind, take responsibility for ourselves, serve others, and do no harm.

---

The Mercury / Monday

There’s a lot of writing – whole books – about “love languages” and finding someone who speaks and understands yours. You can attend seminars to fine tune and understand your love language if you so desire.

Let me save you some money.

The following can (I say “can” because people of course use language to manipulate others) express love in any language:

• I love you. I am proud of you. You make my life richer. You make everything nicer.

• There is so much I respect about you. Would you like me to go into some detail?

• We have so many beautiful memories together. Would you like me to go into some detail?

• What would you like to tell me? I will give you my complete attention and I won’t interrupt you.

• How may I assist you today to make life a little – or a lot – easier for you?

The following do not express love in any language:

• I am tired of you saying the same old things.

• Life would be so much better if you would just….. (insert pet peeve).

• You should, you need, you ought….. (insert your subtle or gross form of control).

• I could forgive you if…… (name long-held grievance).

• No matter what you say I have heard it all before.

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To my treasured audience of younger men and women.

How do you know you are growing up? 

• You clean up after yourself so others don’t have to. You are aware of the impact your life has on others and try to ease their load.

• You are interested in other people and what they do and how they spend their days. You express that interest and listen when they tell you.

• You are saving as much money as you are able. You have done some research into the best ways to save. You have a plan and you are sticking to it.

• You are learning to monitor what you say, what you agree to do, what you agree not to do. You know words have consequences and you are trying to monitor how you use them. 

• You are learning to “switch places” with others in your head. You ask yourself how this other person feels, thinks, sees life. You assess how much or how little you’d like to be this other person – whoever he or she is – and behave accordingly.

• You know how to take responsibility for yourself and are quick to offer a sincere apology when necessary.     

The Mercury / Friday

You may not be an expert in ancient biblical languages (I am not) but you are probably an expert in the Beatitudes, if you have heard (of) them or not.

The Beatitudes refers to the prologue in Jesus’ best known sermon.

Meet them wrapped in a real person and you know it immediately.

The finer nuances of “poor in spirit” may elude you but the counter – brashness, arrogance, haughtiness, are obvious.

Humility and gentleness are attractive, easy to discern, comforting to experience. Their opposites are jarring. You may not be a biblical scholar but in seconds you recognize meekness, and its absence.

You know who among you is exerting unnecessary power just because he or she can. Such people can’t hide from you. Same goes for mercy, truth, purity – you know it when you meet it.

Peacemakers, and men and women who have lived a little, salt-of-the-earth types who know they are not perfect, feed your soul on every encounter. But, in a nanosecond you know who is hungering for fame, power, recognition and who will go to any lengths to get it.

As rare as they perhaps are, may you encounter those whose lives are shaped by the Beatitudes, no matter what their faith tradition or the absence of one.

Better still, may they live and breathe in you.

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It’s your longest relationship. You might as well enjoy it. 

Given that you are “fearfully and wonderfully made” what’s NOT to love? You are a highly complex and powerful person, capable of so much. 

Besides, rejecting yourself is draining, tiresome work and naturally flows into rejecting others. 

Love all-round rejuvenates all-round.

Loving yourself will give others a fighting chance to love you. Someone has to lead the way. Besides, if you don’t love who you are how will you possibly expect me to? Loving yourself makes you nicer and easier to be with. It is so much more fun to be around a self-assured, self-aware person. Loving yourself makes you safe. 

Self-loathing people are short fused, quickly triggered.

Loving yourself will help you see others more clearly, especially your immediate and extended family. Your family traits, urges, passions,  will become clearer to you and you will want to embrace them, not fight them off. Appropriate self-love transforms your every perception and how you see and treat everyone and everything. Inner conditions are contagious and others reap the benefits or feel the sting of what’s going on inside you.  

Loving yourself is a prerequisite for loving anyone and anything.

Losing your glasses or wallet, keys, or phone can be distressing but they can all be replaced. 

I ache we not to lose the following: 

Distinctness

That which separates you from others. Don’t permit the erosion of what makes you distinctly beautiful. Finding your unique form after submitting to the pervasive and grinding pressure to conform can be a tough task and, once you lose it, you may forget it ever existed. It may be impossible to reclaim.

Voice

Don’t lose your voice, not for love or money. Express your unique take on the world, let others know what you think, keep saying what you see. If you ignore or stop using your voice others will write their script into your avoidance or silence. 

Humor

Your sense of humor, hold onto it. This is the invaluable asset to laugh at yourself. Healthy humor spreads wildfire grace. It’s among your most powerful attributes for your own sake, let alone the joy it can bring to those who love you.

Backbone

This is your capacity to show up, stand up, and speak up for yourself and for those who, for whatever sad reasons, cannot speak up for themselves. Don’t lose it. Spineless-ness abounds. Filleted men and women run countries, corporations, and churches, and are often paraded as examples of humility.

Internal Battles Worth Fighting: To Spend, To Retaliate, To Impress, Self-pity, and To Eat – this is longer than usual. Those who are interested will plough through it all:

Spend

No matter how much money (or time) you have you will never spend your way from disappointment or loss or heartbreak to happiness. Spending won’t free you from what is causing you to feel down or let down.  

Identify, locate, isolate, that urge, and fight it. 

Try to see what is really going on in your life that you think at this moment will be corrected or satisfied by buying yet another something. 

It is an urge worth combatting and, if possible, defeating. 

If you surrender to it it will, over time, exact ever-greater demands. 

These powerful and understandable urges to find short-term relief will lead to stronger feelings of dissatisfaction than first ignited urges. 

Getting stuff and more stuff (and then even more stuff) provides a high that is almost certainly temporary. The crash, when it comes, will be accompanied by bills or debt that you probably don’t want.

Placating dissatisfaction or disappointment with short-term quick-fix acts of relief is a diversion, a diversion that will steer a person inner-miles from potential solutions. 

Spending is seductive. It seduces the spender away from the very issues it feels promised to solve. 

Fight the urge by trying to uncover what is under the dis-ease driving the destructive urges to spend a path out of discomfort. 

Go there, take a close look at the urge, rather than let it whip you into another spree of short-term quick fixes. 

Retaliate 

If you have been insulted or rebuffed or cheated, any expressions of retaliation, as understandable as they may be, will probably not lead you to the outcome you are seeking. It’s an urge worth isolating and fighting. Fighting back escalates. Retaliation seldom and solves. As understandable as it is, it means you assume you are correct, that the other is wrong. Retaliation suggests you have nothing to learn but only to teach or reason to punish. 

I know it is a tough pill to swallow but our adversaries, or those whom we perceive as adversaries, are often our best teachers, if, indeed, we are willing to learn. Often the lessons adversaries teach are not available from our allies and are the lessons we most need. 

Try to see what is beneath the insult or offense that is hitting its target within you. 

Try to understand why it is that some insults or offenses run off you like water off a duck’s back but others stick. 

What is the difference? 

Go there, rather than assume a boxer stance. 

Go there, rather than try to satiate the get-even inner drive which will only lead you into a life-style of getting even and one spent against the ropes.

Impress

Combat the often-impulsive urge to impress, save the day, be the hero. Of course there is nothing amiss with living an impressive, heroic life. It’s good to deploy your skills which may result in your saving the day for someone, and I hope you do. We are all called to do the right, next good favor. We are called to look out for each other. May we all be alert to others and as a result find ourselves in occasional heroic circumstances as a result of going about the business of daily life. 

What I am referring to is the urge to be noticed, the urge to be the good, nice person who wants to save others, to be the hero, all in order to be noticed. 

Fight the driving force or insatiable urge to be the ever-present hero. 

If you are going to be a noble it will be an outcrop of your natural and daily living. You will not have to go out seeking it. Find that urge, go there, and quell it rather than be in constant search for the opportunity to don your cape. 

Good, strong, authentic people don’t have to put on their capes or prove anything about their strength. 

Their capes are just normal everyday dress.

Self-pity

The inner urge of self-pity; fight it, no matter how tough your life has been. Try to avoid the pit of self-pity. It leads to no destination worth going and no pondering or analysis worth following. 

I know, I know, it may feel good for a while, even a day or three, but the best analogy I have is that it can become a pathway in a forest that, if you walk it frequently, it becomes visible and then it becomes a well-worn track and then the default until it seems and feels unavoidable, even normal – and the only way to go. 

A personality shaped by self-pity is tough to live with, and tough to be around, and tough to shed once it makes its way into a person. 

The antidote? 

Personal responsibility. 

Asking questions of oneself like “What is my role in this?” and “What about my behavior landed me here?” and “What is it that is convincing me that I am a victim right now?” and “What is the truth about what is leading me into the waves of self-pity?”

Self-pity is a dead end and when you get to the end it is rather lonely.

As tough as it may be, finding where and how you can be responsible for yourself, even if it is in quite minimal ways, will lead you out of the dead-end and into a world of new and attractive beginnings. 

Eat 

There is not enough food available or opportunities to eat it if you succumb to your inner-urge to eat your way out of a problem, a conflict, an undesired mood. 

The urge, the drive, the compulsion, to eat when you are anxious or troubled is understandable and the rewards, as we all know, are almost immediate. Of course, the rewards are short-lived and do not address the issue that propels the drive. 

Rather, seek out the driving issue, the genesis of what stimulates the urge.  

Eating provides a temporary quick-fix. It provides a way to avoid whatever it is that brought you to the fridge or pantry or the fast-food franchise in the first place. 

Try to find the source and work with that. 

Such short-term comforts are fine as long as you know what they are. Consuming comforts are fine as long as you know such behavior will not address the root causes that are driving you to consume and are likely to trigger more of what you want eating to address.  

There are other primal and physical drives that can lead a person down a track not worth pursuing and really mess with a person’s real and living relationships. Again, they are temporary fixes to unrelated issues. 

#internationaldayofthegirl

10-11-2020

Part 1:

Run from men (and boys) who are more interested in your body than in your brain. Your appearance may be, in some settings, the first point of mutual attraction but if things don’t move beyond that within the first three minutes, forget it. Move on.

Dump the thought that you are a “half” waiting to become “whole” because some man will “complete” you. You are a person, not an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. You are a full person, partner or no partner. You are not lego.

Relationships are not a game to be won or lost and flee those who treat them as such. If you (or he) treat relationships like a game of Chess, Risk, or Monopoly, you will probably end up rather lonely. At the first indication of a check-mate situation (whichever way you choose you lose – or you have no choices at all) cut your losses no matter who he is or how much money is on the board.

It’s not your job to train or to teach men (and boys) how to treat women. That’s what parents do. If his parents were unsuccessful, hope life itself teaches him. Don’t take it on. If you assume the role of teacher or guide or therapist to him and you marry him, you will be signing up for an exhausting lifetime of parenting and guiding and counseling your spouse.

Enjoy your friends. The “right” man (or boy) for you will make you even more thrilled to be yourself than you already are. He will selflessly love your joy, encourage your freedom, and embrace everything about you. Please, please, settle for nothing less.

Part 2:

Without exception every one of you is gifted, talented, uniquely curious. Believe your parents or care-givers or teachers when they express something similar.

It’s not just “adult talk.” It is not said just to get you motivated. You are to be treasured, never exploited.

Talent, power, and bravery are divinely endowed. They are yours.

They are in your bones, your soul; in the very depths of your spirit and your being.

In the best of company your uniqueness, your talent, and the power within you will be encouraged, respected, and deeply valued.

But, some will try to exploit, ignore, or squelch you, and do so often in the “nicest” of ways, and even in the name of God.

Don’t cooperate. Not ever. Not for money, fame, recognition, or even to belong.

Stay out of control.

Arm yourself by chasing education (the only thing worth chasing), rejecting the foolish, pervasive belief that beauty is skin deep. Use your strong voice as early, quickly, and as loudly as possible.

Stand up for yourself.

Speak up.

Express your views. Don’t hold back.

Do it now so it becomes a way of life.