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.

The Mercury / Wednesday

You’d have noticed a theme or three if you have read my work for any portion of the 17 years I’ve been in your morning paper. I often strongly suggest people connect as regularly, authentically, and as deeply as possible with their “family of origin.” This means parents (if possible), brothers, sisters, then uncles and aunts and cousins and others who are not necessarily “blood family” but people who were, or still are, “part of the family.”

Intentionally relating, doing what we can to draw closer, establishing good, healthy boundaries, sharing our lives as adults with the people* who know us best, who’ve known us the longest, and who know our history and shared our space during formative years, provide for us a unique gravitational force (crucible, anvil….. use whatever metaphor is helpful) as do we also for them.

This force, this environmental field can, if we will allow, stimulate greater emotional health and growth for those who engage in these relationships and are willing to embrace what the gravitational force has to offer.

If you can hold your own, maintain your voice, agree, disagree, enjoy, love, fight clean, laugh and cry, work things out, with your family of origin and with those who were or are “as family” you probably won’t need too much in the way of formal therapy.

* There are extremes and circumstances where this is unadvisable and even dangerous.

For as much as I have traveled and for as much as my sons have traveled I am feeling anxious today. I am very anxious.

Nate, my youngest son (16) is setting off tomorrow for his first solo flight.

He’s headed to my niece and her husband and their family in Terrigal, Australia.

To eliminate possible complications I booked his journey to include only one plane change on both his outward and return journey and that change will be in Houston, Texas. I’ve photocopied his passport, checked and re-checked his Electronic Travel Authority, done his laundry, and I am in the process of packing his bags.

Every possible and reasonable travel snafu, like extended delays, cancelled flights, lost baggage, and inquisitions at borders, has visited my swirling head and it usually happens around three in the morning.

I will breathe a sigh of relief (as I know his brother will, too) when we hear he’s landed and safe in the home of beloved family.

So, the next time you read my work and I am getting on some parent’s case about anxiety or over-functioning for his or her children, feel free to drop me a reminder about what it was like for me to send Nate off to Australia – and I will back off.

When you’re annoyed and if you’re anything like me:

·      You probably can’t access the most thinking, helpful, objective, capacities of your brain in that very moment. I can’t, usually. That’s fine. Being annoyed occasionally comes with the human package. If you can just take a moment to tell yourself that it is in these moments that we are most positioned and most vulnerable to say the “wrong” thing, to express unnecessary cynicism, spread negativity, and to hurt people we need and people we love. Such results are not usually helpful. Hold onto yourself. This too shall pass. I try to do this. Occasionally I’m successful.

·      When you look back (hours, days, weeks later) on what it was that was the source of your annoyance  (if you recall it at all), know that you are quite healthy if it causes you somewhat of a chuckle. I experience this sometimes. Distance and time and objectivity are remarkable tools for growth and healing. If we are honest enough to allow it.

I try to learn from the things that annoy me. I try to see them as mirrors into what’s happening in the deepest recesses of my soul. Occasionally I have found some elements of growth and maturity. What gets my goat, I’ve painfully discovered, is NEVER about someone else, it’s always MY goat.

Sometimes I find I am as immature as ever.

Sometimes, on reflection, I can tell there’s actually been some growth.

The Mercury – Monday (getting ahead of deadlines)

Grace

While life as we know it is impossible without Divine Grace, Grace extended to all. I am particularly interested in the interpersonal grace we each can generously offer all other people, from intimates to total strangers.

Yes, we can be agents of grace.

I have seen it powerfully at work for many years.

It includes:

• Giving others a very wide berth, room to make mistakes, to be opinionated, to be socially clumsy, without my interference or my thinking, feeling I should offer my guidance, correction, or opinion.

• Extending “grace-in-reverse” by not allowing any person’s past errors, tough, dark, or even sordid history, to hinder my perceptions, my experience of who and what they are in the present. This acknowledges people really can grow and change.

• Allowing others to own their story and to tell it in their way, without interruption, without uninvited interpretation, and certainly without being “one-upped” by something from my own life, something usually bigger, stronger, better, or more dramatic.

• Forgiving from the outset, without necessarily receiving an apology or explanation, and for that forgiveness to be unconditional and complete.

• Exercising radical hospitality. This is embracing fully (not limited to a hug) others who are not like us!

How do I know about such grace?

It’s been offered to me, time and again. The challenge is to give it to others.