In a couple of hours Nolan Smith (former Beachwood Boys’ High School) will drive the few blocks from his house in Indianapolis to mine and we’ll head together to the airport.

My sister and Ursula, Nolan’s mother, are waiting at their departure gate at JFK in New York. They will arrive in Indianapolis after a long night over the African continent and  the Pacific before descending into the Big Apple.

Both women have visited numerous times but this time they are flying together.

The joy of their coming is not in the sights as wonderful as they are.

Ursula’s grandchildren will be so excited to see her. My sons, while budding adulthood may get a little in the way of the sheer joy they once expressed when Jenny arrived, really love their aunt.

Visiting family is expensive. Long-haul flights are hard on the mind and hard on the body, but such visits keep us sane. They keep us hopeful and service the invisible loyalties that come with being family.

We will laugh a lot, talk a lot, and spend hours spinning old family stories but what we are really doing is paving and repaving the platform on which our children will build their beautiful lives long after such pleasurable visits have ended.

The Mercury / Wednesday / Volunteer or Victim?

I am all for loyalty, commitment, and seeing things through. But, some loyalty can be horribly misguided. This is especially evident in churches, schools; organizations where there’s a high need for volunteers. It can also happen in a job, especially when someone has been employed to “help out” and where there’s no specific job description.

Here are symptoms that you may be too loyal, too committed. It might be time to jump ship or throw in the towel if only to preserve your sanity:

• You are discovering that your level of commitment seems to exceed what you see others offering. You are taken by surprise at the discovery. You thought people were equally invested.

• You seem to get landed with the tasks and responsibilities it appears no one else wants to take on. You thought everyone was willing to make sacrifices for the good of the organization.

• Your areas of responsibility seem to be growing, and growing, and growing. You can’t find it in you to say no. Even thinking about it evokes guilt. Others seem to be able to say no quite easily and apparently experience no guilt.

Is even one out of three true for you?

It may be time re-evaluate, time to speak up, or ship out. Your loyalty may be transforming you into a victim.

A significant problem with disdain, contempt, rejection, or downright hate is that it impacts the source more than it usually does the victim.

If you (or I, of course) harbor negative thoughts and feelings toward a former spouse, in-laws, parents, or neighbors we poison our own wells. We damage ourselves, and the self-damage usually outshines the impact on our victims.

Hate (or contempt or disdain – people usually like to euphemize hate with “softer” terms):

• Poisons our view on the world and on all other people, even those we love.
• Even the beautiful things and beautiful experiences life has to offer get contaminated if we harbor hate for even one person.
• Hate has trouble being contained and its power infects everything we do and see and experience.
• Makes us cynical and we become cynical for so long it becomes a way of life making us contemptuous of those who are hopeful and who express optimism.

Love, forgiveness, grace, and goodness are better than hate – yet hate has quite a following.

Grace, goodness, kindness will lift our spirits and open a world of fresh and wonderful possibilities.

Love is courageous and creative. It’s always the best option.

“My boyfriend doesn’t agree with me when but he shows off when he’s in a restaurant or dealing with people who serve him.  It embarrasses me. Sometimes don’t even want to go out with him. He says he’s earning good money and paying good money and so he expects high quality and good service. I tell him he doesn’t have to be so demanding and make the waiters feel so small. Please help.”

(Transcript from “live” conversation)

Your boyfriend is a bully. If you want to be with him and you want this relationship to endure you have to repeatedly point out when and how he’s being publically inappropriate. You have let him know as clearly as possible the impact his behavior has on you.

Here are certainties:

·      If you remain silent you are complicit in his behavior.

·      How he treats people who serve him is a litmus test, a window into his character. How you respond is a window into yours. While his behaviors show who he is, your silence reveals who you are.

·      The manner in which a person can treat anyone is the manner in which he or she can treat everyone. What he’s doing to others he will soon be doing also to you.

If you are looking for love:

·      Resist the urge to buy it though gifts or paying for meals or through loaning money or giving resources to someone whose love you desire.

·      Resist the urge to pay back every compliment or downplay every positive thing that is said to you by someone whose love and attention you desire.

·      Give up the jesting and the jousting in conversations, especially when talking with someone whose love and attention you desire. It gets old and it puts up intimacy blockades and stops the very closeness you desire.

·      You won’t find it if you seek it through sexual contact when you haven’t had the time (yes, months or even years) to get to know the person whose attention and love you really want. If you think sex will keep him or her close or that it will “bond” you together as “soul mates” then you have some really tough lessons to learn. It won’t.

·      Drop your playacting, be yourself. Firm up your boundaries. Know what you want from life, with or without a partner. People who know what they want and who are set on achieving their goals give off an attractive air to similarly motivated people.

I hope you find the love you are looking for. Really, I do.

Are you planning to get a great education? Do you want to travel the world? Perhaps you want to land a great job or buy a house. Are you planning, actively planning, these things?

You do know, I am sure, they won’t happen without you.

They won’t happen without the development of a blueprint.

Unless you sit down, plot, assess what you will need for the journey and what you will need to sacrifice in the immediate in return for what you want in the future, the future will be here before you know it and none of your plans will have come to fruition.

The upside of planning is that even if your plans don’t all work out as you’d hoped, something close or something better may greet you in the future.

The results of having no plan at all, or thinking and believing things will just happen or fall into place is that they usually don’t.

The default, that which will happen if you just go with the flow, which will always take the path of least resistance, will be a journey to a place of inertia, laziness, and a life of regret. 

Get planning, it’s worth it.