Encourage

Look at your stuff.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

stuff

Look at the stuff around you. Isn’t it neat?

Paper milled from trees, decorated, maybe even scented. Ink dispensed evenly and gently maybe with a little roller ball. Books mass printed for everyone. Glasses to help you see.

Look at the little paper clip folded around and again just so. Isn’t that clever? Where did that coffee come from? Maybe from beans grown thousands of miles away. Isn’t that amazing? What about your computer, able to connect you, literally, to any one in the world and even beyond? Maybe you’re reading this right now out and about in the world somewhere.

All these little astonishing things sitting right there on your desk or in your pocket or your glovebox.

Take a minute to be astonished.

And then treat yourself to this 3-year old’s performance of Ariel’s song above and prepare to be filled with joy and even more wonder!

This is today.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

yesterday's window

Do not lose heart. The challenges you see today are the ones you must face. You are strong enough to do your part, and you will find allies everywhere you look.

Do not be afraid.

You may feel you are riding on stormy seas, but look around you. In the words of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes:

Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless.

In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.

We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.

You do not need to do everything. Do what you can, where you can, with what you can. Your actions combined with actions from millions of like-minded individuals will make a difference for good.

Do not lose heart.

Feel sonder?

Posted on by Shari Swanson

sonder

Sonder. A made-up word for a very real emotion. In his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig defines it: “sonder, n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”

It’s a remarkable realization. We are all the stars of our own lives. We have our supporting casts filled with friends and families, maybe a foe or two, and then a whole world of incidental extras to our story. People behind the lit windows or sitting quiet on a shared bus or in some far off country. When we pause, we realize that they, too, have rich and complex stories filled with their own casts of characters. Their sorrows and joys are as real to them as ours to us.

Koenig has created a remarkable video to illustrate this notion of sonder. And his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is well worth your time. It is filled with profound insight and wonder.

But what to do with this realization, this feeling of sonder? It creates more than a passing fancy in us, doesn’t it? It leads to looking others in the eyes with respect rather than dismissing them as somehow lesser. It leads us to want to help ease their pain, as we realize that pain is as deep and biting as any we ourselves have felt, maybe even worse. It leads us to reevaluate our own centrality. Yes, we are central to our own stories, by virtue of our limited perspectives. But we don’t need to be bound in the fetters of our own subjectivity. We are central to our own stories, but not to the whole story, the world’s story, humanity’s story. There we are part of a vast cast of players, each at once both the star of their own story, and an extra in someone else’s.

Seize today.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

today

Tomorrow is such a complex word. On one hand, it is reassuring that there is always a tomorrow, a fresh start, a day to begin anew. But, on the other hand, the concept of tomorrow can be beguiling and seductive and keep us from starting what can be done right now today.

What is it you would like to start or do that may, frankly, take a while? What have you been putting off, perhaps for an endless cascade of tomorrows? Those tomorrows are now yesterdays.

Today is as good a day as any to plunge in and begin.

 

Laugh. :)

Posted on by Shari Swanson

 

vacationNeed to get away?

When cool tropical breezes and the gentle lap of ocean waves beckon but are not part of any realistic plan, try an alternate get-away.

Laugh.

Lose yourself in merriment.

Maybe you can rent a funny movie, or take turns telling the silliest jokes, or play a game that involves some degree of immaturity. Up the zany quotient. Find a way to laugh and lose yourself for a while at least in the funny.

To get you started, a joke:

You know why you never see elephants hiding up in trees?

–Because they’re really good at it.

 

What can’t you see?

Posted on by Shari Swanson

noflowers

Seeing what’s smack in front of your face is harder than it seems. We tend to take for granted things that we see day in and day out. We seek out the new novel thing and everything else becomes background. It is not that the sunset has dimmed in beauty; it’s that we have stopped pausing to watch the colors fade to black. It is not that the faces of our loved ones are any less dear and unique; it is that we have come to expect them to be there and our focus has shifted to what do we want from them now. It is not that the flower is less marvelous than when we bent down in awe as a child; it is that we have stopped bending down.

What is right there now, smack in front of you, its beauty just waiting to be noticed?

That’s revealing!

Posted on by Shari Swanson

birdmirror

When the going gets tough, how do you get going? Angry, frustrated, sarcastic, insulting, sulky, controlling, mean? How we respond to stress or opposition tells us a lot about ourselves. It is in these moments where we can evaluate if we need to do some growing.

Say ahhh.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Ahkindness

What if kindness were contagious? Spreading from person to person like the most virulent flu? How might that transform a community or, even, the world?

In this classroom, kindergarteners are spreading kindness all around:

Some people might say that kindness isn’t a characteristic as common to American society as it once was.

Nevertheless, it’s standard procedure for a group of young students in one little corner of Texas County, as Plato Elementary School kindergarten teacher Amy Hathaway leads her class in an ongoing project called the “Kindness Konnection.”

Execution of the idea is three-fold: Kids mail cheerful letters to people all over the U.S., take walks to visit elderly “friends” around the Plato community and pick up trash during their outings. The first two aspects allow the students an unusual opportunity to make peoples’ days better.

“We have heard from many people who said they were having a bad day and got a letter,” Hathaway said. “They ask, ‘why me?’ I say we just do it to be nice.”

These five-year olds are spreading ripples of kindness that are reaching out across the country and making other people’s lives better. Those ripples are causing other people to send out ripples and so on and so on and so on. Their teacher marvels at the results of her little kindness experiment:

“I don’t know how not to any more,” she said. “It’s one of the most fantastic things I’ve ever done in my life. Instead of just teaching the kids to be nice, we’ve learned what friendship really is.

“We can all make a difference in this world; even a small child has the power to influence others. Kids are the greatest thing in the world, and I love sharing them with people.”

We can all send out ripples of kindness into our world. Those ripples may well create a tsunami of kindness.

Got tact?

Posted on by Shari Swanson

tact

Stakes are high. Tempers flare. People disagree about many things. And to defend the vulnerable and protect our world, we need to speak out. But there is a wrong way to do it–to attack the person making the argument rather than the argument itself, an ad hominem attack.

It isn’t really about whether a particular person is stupid, for example; it’s about what will best help us make progress forward. So let’s say you are able to establish conclusively with all sorts of arguments, research and data that the person you’re talking to is an ill-informed idiot. Has that moved us forward as a united people? What if instead, you were able to convince that person of a need to join together for the common good, focusing on shared values, common ground, and individual power? That just might help us all.

Focus on the issues. Fight fair.

Choose truth.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

truth

We are in the midst of a slander epidemic. In today’s world, someone can publish fake news, and it can go viral, spreading around the world in an instant. People eagerly like and share derogatory information about people they don’t care for or political candidates they oppose. Companies can crumble based on the public’s wrath over a false bit of news. People’s lives can be ruined.

And what of the effect on all of us? It is to the point where we can’t trust much of anything we read unless we do our own diligence with fact checking and research.

What happened to the truth? What happened to accountability?

As with most things, the buck stops with each of us. We can’t control the world, but we can choose whether we want to further lies. Take your time before you believe what you hear. Do your research. And let your words and actions shine with the light of truth.