Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

New year, new beginnings, a new page of blank paper on which to write.

May your page be written with dreams fulfilled, hopes realized, and abiding peace.

Happy 2007!

****

It's been awhile since I've posted.
Again.

I could roll out the usual excuses...
the holidays,
going back to work,
drama in the lives of family and friends,
(you can take your pick of whichever excuse sounds the most forgivable to you!)

But basically,
I guess it just boils down to a lack of time spent with
my bottom in the chair
and my fingers at the keyboard.

Pretty simple.

But it's a New Year.
My bottom is in the chair.
My fingers are at the keyboard.
A good start. :-)

I'm not a poet...prose is much more my thing...but in the spirit of new beginnings,
I give you a poem for the new year:

Listen to your heart.

Listen to your soul.

The words they murmur
 in those brief shining interludes
of silence and light
Are truth.

Heed them.

Other voices will shout, cry, command, and complain,
Insisting upon their right to be heard.

Loud, angry voices,
With their opinions and rules.

Just turn away.

Don't argue.

Don't try to teach or correct.

Some things are a lost cause.

Simply let them be.

Lean in close to the voice
 that echoes softly in the deeps.
Give that gentle voice your rapt attention.

Listen.

It is the voice,
the only voice,
That truly knows.

Be Kind

Someone close to me is going through a painful breakup right now. It hurts to have to watch helplessly from the sidelines, knowing there’s nothing I can do or say to fix things.

The worst fall-out from any break-up is all the wrenching, cruel, and downright mean things that people say to each other when they’re in the process of ending a relationship.

When people are in pain, they lash out and try to inflict the same pain on the one who hurt them.

They hurl words, carelessly and impulsively, like a two-year-old with a bucketful of hand grenades.

Those words scar for life. They erode self-esteem. They shatter confidence. Poison words are truly lethal weapons. The wounds they create may be invisible, but they’re far more crippling than a lost limb or shattered bone could ever be.

Words can’t be taken back. Ever. Sure, you can apologize or blame your words on stupidity, anger, or the heat of the moment, but still….the words have been said. They’re out there. A bell cannot be unrung.

And even if you later claim you didn’t mean what you said, both parties know those words came from some deep core of resentment. They know, no matter how vehemently the offender may deny it, that at the time the words were spoken, the speaker meant them.

Hurtful words fester in the memory for a long, long time. They linger in the mind and tear at the heart. The damage they do can never fully be repaired.

If people would only practice one thing, the universe would be a dramatically different place. That thing is…

Kindness.

Kindness is the most underrated virtue in the world. I am absolutely certain of it.

Quite honestly, I never used to think kindness was such a big deal.

If you had asked me, as a bright eyed young newlywed, to name the most important quality for a successful relationship, I’d probably have said communication.

Back then, I thought it was important for couples to express their thoughts and feelings to each other. Every thought. Every feeling. Nothing was too trivial to be discussed, examined, and analyzed.

The problem with such open and honest communication is that by voicing every thought that passes through your mind, you end up saying a lot of mean and unkind things. Stupid things. Things you regret saying later. Things that will come back to haunt you.

Although I still think it’s important to communicate, I think it’s more important to communicate with kindness. Yes, express yourself, but always with the feelings of the other party uppermost in mind. If something can’t be said without being cruel, vindictive, or petty, then it shouldn’t be said. Period.

Relationships don’t lack for “honest communication”. Not by a long shot.

What they desperately need is kindness.

There was an interesting study done by the Family Formation Project at the University of Washington. The researchers set out to study relationships. They wanted to find out what makes a relationship successful and to see if they could discover predictors of divorce.

After years of study, the team was able to predict which couples would divorce within four years of testing with a 94% rate of accuracy! Wow.

And guess what they found out? Healthy relationships are not based on communication, shared interests, or common backgrounds, but on one key ingredient…kindness.

The couples who were nice to each other, who spoke to one another with respect, who treated each other thoughtfully…those were the ones who were able to make their marriages work.

Couples whose interactions were filled with even “minor” instances of contempt, belittling, or disgust were the ones more likely to separate.

Little digs and cutting “jokes” may seem insignificant when they’re spoken, but, like trace amounts of toxins, they build up over time, polluting and eventually killing a relationship

How many times have we unleashed poison in the name of “honest communication”? How many times have we heard someone excuse a cruel remark with the words, “Hey, I was just being honest!”

But the “honesty” thing is a cop-out. It’s an excuse to pass off a cruel dig as a stellar virtue.

It seems like common sense to treat the people we love with the same courtesy and respect we show the people we work with. You wouldn’t dream of insulting a friend with the same flippant sarcasm you’d hurl at your spouse. But we do it every day without even grasping the dark irony.

If we all began to speak with genuine kindness to our spouses, our children, our coworkers, the cashier at the grocery store, and the customer service representative on the telephone, the world would become a vastly different place overnight.

And it has to start with each one of us. Right where we are. With the people who are in our lives right now. Even those people that we feel aren’t deserving of kindness.

We can’t wait for our spouse or significant other to be kind first; we can't decide to be kind only if other people notice and appreciate our kindness.

We must make a decision to be kind no matter what.

Any time we make a conscious choice to be kind, we heal and nourish our own hearts.

That’s the lovely irony of it all. By making a concerted effort to pour kindness into the world, we ourselves end up reaping the biggest benefits of all.

Be kind. Be kind. Be kind.

Reflections of Ourselves

Wise men say that if another person annoys, upsets, or angers you, it’s because you see in that person a reflection of yourself.

The things we tend to dislike the most in other people are the very qualities that we ourselves possess.

“Oh, no,” we usually protest. “I’m nothing like so-and-so. I hate his personality so much that I would go never be like that!”

But if we’re honest with ourselves (truly honest), and examine our hearts deeply, we’ll discover that the qualities we despise the most in other people are a reflection of what we carry inside.

I remember a man my husband used to work with…something about him grated on my nerves.

Outwardly, there was no reason I should have disliked him so much. He was always very pleasant. Extremely nice. Very accommodating. Everyone who knew him liked him.

But he bugged the heck out of me.

Finally, I was able to put my finger on it. He was always too nice. Nice in a passive-aggressive kind of way. You always got the feeling he was straining to smile and be pleasant, while on the inside he was covering up a lot of his true feelings.

In short, he was a big phony. He thought he was fooling everyone, and maybe he was, but I saw through his veneer.

Once I was finally able to articulate to myself what bothered me about him, he annoyed me even more.

It got to the point I wanted to scream at him whenever I saw him. “Be yourself!” I wanted to shout. “Quit pretending to be Mr. Nice Guy with that fake smile and forced friendliness act!”

Then, one day, I started thinking, “Why does his phoniness bother me so much? Why does he always provoke such a strong negative reaction in me?”

And then it hit me. Hard. Like a fist to the stomach.

I was exactly the same way.

Gulp.

I find this little test holds true in any situation where I have an unusually strong reaction toward another person.

If I’m honest, I’ll always find that I’m reacting so strongly because the other person is reflecting back an unpleasant part of my own personality.

Sometimes, it can take a very long time (years, even) and a lot of soul searching to find the connection. It's hard to acknowledge that we have the same qualities that we so despise in others.

But if we dig deep, the connection is there.

Scary, isn't it?

Contentment...

May I a small house and large garden have.
And a few Friends, and many books, both true,
Both wise, and both delightful too.

-Abraham Cowley

Excuses, Excuses...

Perhaps no one even visits here anymore, as the posts have been so few and far between as of late.

But I have a good excuse. :-) I spent two weeks of the last month at this beautiful beach. Without internet access.

And then, of course, there was Thanksgiving, and all that entails. Before I knew it, a month had passed.

But I'm always thinking of things I'd like to post here, even if I'm not actually posting. They need to invent some kind of gadget that feeds thoughts directly from the brain to the computer.

Hmmm...on second thought, maybe not. There would probably be some really boring and weird posts up here if that was the way it worked. (Not that there aren't anyway, but, oh well.)

Most of my brain's ramblings are pretty mundane and repetitive:
"let dogs in"
"let dogs out"
"I'm hungry"
"let dogs in"
"let dogs out"
"wonder which dog just threw up on the carpet?"
"where are my keys?"
"let dogs in"
"what smells so bad in the fridge?"

You get the idea.

And if my brain isn't being boring, it's being sort of stupid. Like when I'm asleep.

I had a dream a few nights ago about a girl whose foot got stuck in some fresh cement when she was a little girl. She grew to womanhood with her foot stuck in this concrete slab.

Her family would come and visit her and bring her food every day, but mostly she just lived out on this concrete slab, all alone.

When I met her (in the dream), she'd been living like that for years. I went out to the slab with her family to say hello and drop off her food. We left before dark, but later that evening, I decided to go back out to see her.

As I approached the slab, it suddenly dawned on me that all I had to do was grab a sledgehammer and break the concrete around her foot, and she would be free!!

I immediately grabbed a sledgehammer (which, coincidentally, just happened to be lying nearby) and smashed all the cement.

For the first time since she'd been a small girl, the woman was finally free! Her foot was deformed from having been embedded in concrete for so many years, but she was still able to walk, and she was so grateful to be released from the slab.

In my dream, the idea of smashing the concrete seemed so brilliant. Radical. Inspired. Genius.

But when I woke up .... well, duh. Apparently, everyone in my dreams (including me) is pathetically stupid. It took that long for any of us to think of breaking the concrete?

Yep, it's just as well my brain isn't hardwired directly into the computer. The computer would pull its own plug.