Anxiety will render you partially deaf to what others are saying to you and you will tend to hear what you want to hear. It will make you partially blind to what is going on around you and will see what you want to see.Anxiety will make you hyper-sensitive to what others are doing and not doing and you will become less and less aware of your own behavior.
You will reduce your levels of anxiety if you….
“De-triangle” yourself. This means getting out of the middle of relationships that do not directly involve you. For instance, stop trying to get your son to like his stepfather, or your mother to like your wife, or your boss to spend more time with his children. You are powerless over relationships that involve others and not you.
Re-connect appropriately with people to whom you are related, especially when it is by blood. It is virtually impossible to be enduringly emotionally well if you have severed blood relationships. We are designed for connection and healthy family connections can nurture like none other.
Step out of the role of being a peacekeeper – being the one who avoids and helps others to avoid necessary and helpful conflict. Be a peacemaker, the one who steps into the role of one who welcomes and facilitates necessary and helpful conflict.
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.
I recall noticing, even as a young child, that the unkind boys and girls in primary school were the ones who appeared to have endured little or no suffering.
They lived in palatial homes, had servants (whom they often mistreated) and parents who were at their beck and call.
Empathy, although I had no name for it, was missing.
I reasoned it was not something they felt they needed and therefore was not part of what they could offer.
A series of vivid enduring events underscored my observations.
As a chronic stutterer I could tell exactly who would and who would not make fun of my speaking. I could smell the lack of empathy from a distance. They would go so far as to challenge teachers to call on me to read to the class in hopes of enjoying my humiliation.
One of my peers was severely disfigured from an accident he endured as a very young child.
Those who pointed, laughed, circled him and tried to get him to smile or cry with their taunting were those who also derived pleasure from humiliating me.
Boys (my highschool was and is an all boys school) who appeared to have it all found it easy to victimize those who did not.
Empathy was not part of their emotional vocabulary.
It may be more subtle now (or not) but a cursory glance at the headlines reveals little has changed.
Will you permit it to take you down, halt your activities, zoom your mind back to a time when you were surrounded by people, a time when your children were young and you had no time for loneliness?
If you permit it will take up increased room in your thinking until there is not much room for anything else but the accentuated heaviness of your aloneness.
Like you (I concede there are always exceptions) people crave connection, recognition. People want to be seen, heard, play roles in the lives of others.
We are living pieces of a vibrant, multidimensional puzzle seeking our unique places – we have several – where we fit, where we give and receive and make our unique marks and contributions.
Something vital happens within us when we are part of a family, a team, a group, a gathering of friends, a community of worship, and combine our skills and resources for a unified effort.
So?
What will you do with your loneliness?
Will you allow it the upper hand to push you further into despair?
Let loneliness have its way and before long your mind will fill with victim thinking and you may begin to believe the world is against you.
My son’s name is Thulani….. (advertising campaign in South Africa)
I am neither superior nor inferior to anyone anywhere.
We are equals.
While it is true that we all have different roles, different responsibilities, vastly different experiences, we remain equals.
We are not the same, but we are equal.
My life is not more or less important than yours. No matter how educated or uneducated or wealthy or so-called poor, or “powerful” or “powerless” you or I may be or may not be – we are equals.
While the world around you and me may not, and does not, affirm this truth, I will embrace it and live it to the best of my ability and hope you will too.
Why?
Because it is good for us – you and me.
And, it is the truth.
I aspire to live this way so that I may be at peace and fully enjoy those around me without having to combat the inevitable taint and contamination that will result when people believe in their own superiority or inferiority, or in the superiority or inferiority of others.
Your (my) race, religion, ethnic background, culture, language, qualifications, bank-balance, list of assets, “reach,” influence, or being married, single, divorced, straight, gay, none of it, none of it qualifies you (or me) be claim superiority (to judge), or inferiority (to be judged).
May this photograph be a metaphor for your 2025…. My sons in joyful jousting.
– find authentic inclusion with a group of caring friends.
– enjoy significant connection and derive mutual satisfaction with members of your immediate and extended family and family of choice.
– have meaningful work, work that respectfully uses your talents, strengths your imagination, and where your responsibilities and your authority are in sync.
– have the capacity for humor that enriches – not diminishes or demeans – others.
– discover new and wonderful and creative things about yourself despite your years of experience.
– learn from past failures and have an increased and healthy awareness of your propensities and vulnerabilities rather than be weighed down by your failures.
– strive to be part of the solutions and not part of the problems in matters large and small. (Credit Dean Sherman)
– become even more skillful in knowing your limits, defining your boundaries, and therefore better able to love your enemies, friends, family, colleagues and strangers.
– resist urges, subtle or gross — all of which may be socially acceptable — to exploit others to accomplish your personal or professional goals.
– do no harm and may none come to you.
– truly understand you are superior to none, inferior to none and, if and while you think you are either, you are surely missing the joy of appreciating your own beautiful humanity.
– be an agent of love, healing, learning, empowering, and peace.
In his country hit “Don’t Let The Old Man In,” Toby Keith croons, “ask yourself how old would you be if you didn’t know the day you were born.”
When I give it serious thought I come up with 42 or 45, somedays 36.
I confess, birthdays (my birthdays) have never been easy for me.
The bulk of them were spent playing music at The Oyster Box Hotel or at T-Jetty or at The Edward or any one of the hotels in Durban and Umhlanga areas. When I was much younger, I spent them on the bandstand at the Parkhill Hall or playing at one of the many MOTH Shellhole functions for war heroes to sing “pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile” and “kiss me goodnight sergeant major” as they danced by.
A birthday is easy to avoid if you’re warming your audience with “Girl From Ipanema” with the finest drummer and bass player in the nation and seated at the the Oyster Box Hotel’s Steinway, or later, banging out “Crocodile Rock” or “Sloop John B.”
Enough about that.
[Please leave a comment if our band played at you wedding(s), 21st, whatever…….]
This year has been quite a year.
I won’t go into the details of the trips I have taken but they did include 5 “new” nations to me. My earliest “speaker mentor” taught me that as an international speaker I would have the best and worst experiences. He said I would sleep in stations and on dirt floors and in 5 star hotels. He told me I’d be delayed, denied, rejected, upgraded, downgraded, embraced and applauded, loved and hated. I loved YWAM’S Rudi Lack from the moment I met him (I was about 20) when I hosted him at Charles Gordon’s request for 10 days in my parent’s home on Blackburn Road.
“God is much more interested in your character than your comforts,” he declared.
Rudi is right.
“Always leave more than your teaching,” he said, “no matter where you go. Give more than you take. Go places that can’t afford your travel expenses.”
This year I have gathered about 25 people to empower through our nonprofit and have been able to leave thousands of dollars in scholarships for young men and women on four continents who aspire to serve and bring healing to our broken world.
Next year, God willing, I am going to do more and more and more until I’ll be at least 55 years old in response to Toby Keith’s beautiful question.
I am not a go-fund-me guy – although I happily give when I can to people and causes I believe in. I know I could post a link right here and ask for your gifts to my nonprofit – but I am not going to do that. Clicking is easy, it’s the human connection I want with you before your giving.
Thank you to readers around the world who read my columns – in 180 Nations – and in KZN’s morning newspaper The Mercury (Monday to Friday for 24 years) and readers of The Courier Times and for those who read my work on FaceBook and all that.
If you want to give me a birthday gift — large or small — make it to my nonprofit and I will pass it on, pay it forward, put it into serving hands and hungry mouths, and towards the education of some of the finest and most beautiful people I have ever met, many of whom most will misguidedly — simply because of where they live and their financial state — consider poor!
Contact me – I’ll send you the link or the address.
So, how old would you be if you didn’t know the day you were born?
I saw Santa at the Children’s Museum with a feather of a child pleading her case. They were locked in discussion, a confessional of sorts, as she entered into detail of her every Christmas wish. Hands, eyes, and all of her face enticed Santa closer lest he miss a detail living so clearly in her head.
“Oh, you want, oh, I see it. Why yes, of course. Perfectly,” Santa said, his voice tapering off into her ear, “I will see what I can do about that.”
Then she nestled into his side, her shoulders comfortably enveloped by his plush red suit as if to declare her mission accomplished. He was a perfect depiction of everything I imagined him to be and the sight easily immersed me in the voices and music of my own Christmases past.
Santa came all year round to our home. I’d look through the window in April or mid-August and Santa would be strolling up the driveway on his return from visits to every home on the street. He’d be wearing dad’s shoes and one of his ties underneath the tatty red coat, but I knew better than to expose his identity. I wanted to believe in Santa and he in turn needed me to believe. Such faith had rewards. I knew better than to dash my own hopes. I wasn’t ready to lose my trust in Santa for anyone and certainly not by my own hand.
He couldn’t resist visits to the whole neighborhood and would drop in from time to time and inspire children toward good behavior, perfect obedience at school, and remind them to count their blessings one by one. At every appearance in our home we’d sing “The Little Boy that Santa Clause Forgot” and we’d all have to cry. He insisted on it.
The lines “he didn’t have a daddy” and “went home to play with last year’s broken toys” really got us going.
It was clear he sang to all the children of the world who’d had to skip childhood and who had known poverty; children who’s fathers had gone to war or whose fathers or mothers had fled their families.
Donning the suit, surprising the children, was our Santa’s way of making the world right.
His visits created intrigue in the neighborhood, and to every child he repeated the promise that this Christmas, no child on this street would be forgotten. As far as I could tell none ever was.
The last Christmas we had together was in August of 1994. We were riding in a car and in the curves of Bluff Road when spontaneously he began to sing, “Christmas comes but once a year.”
The car became a holy place as I heard once more of the boy who “wrote a note to Santa for some soldiers and a drum and it broke his little heart to find Santa hadn’t come.”
The tears we both shed required no encouragement for we both somehow knew this would be the last time he’d sing this nostalgic hymn.
Now this old song is top of my list of Christmas songs.
The melody emerges randomly in my awareness, most particularly when faced with children who are in need. I have had to silence it at all times of the year.
It was the little girl’s confidence, Santa’s grace, and the loving parents looking from the side that caught my attention last week. She touched his flowing beard and told him her every Christmas dream and I found myself listing my own requests with childlike zeal.
It gave me renewed hope that you and I, the real Santas of the world, could deliver a more hopeful tomorrow for “those little girls and boys that Santa Claus forgot.”
(First published, December 9, 2000, Indianapolis Star) ———— Our home this evening….
Until then, if you so choose, I’ll listen as you tell me as much or as little as you want about your losses.
It makes no difference to me how much time has passed since your loss, your let-down, your crises. I know time passed makes little or no difference to your enduring pain even if you’re able at times to mask it.
So, bring it on.
I’m listening. I’m reading.
I will be as present for you as is humanly possible. I’ll listen to every word you say and listen for those you don’t say. I’ll read every sentence you’ve written and ask you to say more if there’s any hint of necessity to read between the lines. I’ll study what you present as though I’m preparing for an examination.
When we talk or as you write please note I’d welcome a thorough tour of the love you enjoyed, the way it was when it
was at its very best. If it’s a spouse, friend, job at the crux of the loss you’ve endured, please, tell me too, about the good times. This will allow me to more fully appreciate what you’ve suffered.
I know it’s tough to read (and it’s not easy to write, either) but if you lost a baby, a child (at any age), I want you to know I think I’m brave enough to hear you out.
If it scares me, I’ll tell you. If it scares you, let me know, and we can leave it be, or…..whatever you decide.
The invitation stands.
WhatsApp, email, FaceTime…..if we’re in the same area, we can meet face-to-face, once, twice or more.
difficultrelationships.com 