Archives for November 2011

In some Native American cultures, you are not allowed to bring your worries into another person’s household. You are not allowed to bring negativity to the hearthstone of someone else. It is deemed improper.

Because of this belief, many of the homes have a little “worry basket” outside. Before you set foot in the home, you lay your worries to rest in that worry basket.

My guess is that you don’t remember to pick them up on your way home.

We live in very worrisome times. Money is short. The world seems to be falling apart in one way or another every day. The future is uncertain. But I realized, in thinking about the concept of the worry basket, that we really don’t take time to express our fears and our worries. We let them simmer inside our heads and our hearts. We let them flavor our perspective on the world and our relationships with other people. We let them hold us back.

Given that, it’s not so surprising that we don’t go out of our way to ask other people what is on their minds. When was the last time you asked someone, “What are you worried about? What’s on your mind?”

I can’t recall  starting that conversation with anyone but my own brain.

Kind of silly, isn’t it? Because as we all know, dropping our worries – verbalizing them, sharing them, dealing with them – that’s the best way to get rid of that load.

So, I’m taking the time to ask. What are you worried about? What is on your mind? You don’t have to comment here. You don’t have to answer out loud. But however you respond, don’t keep it locked up in your brain. Write a post and then delete it. Write a post of your own if you like. Write an email to a friend or a pastor or a family member.

Whatever you do, let those worries go.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fkehren/6098824622/ via Creative Commons

It is that time of year again – the time when watching It’s a Wonderful Life and bawling your eyes out is not only appropriate, it is darned well expected.

My personal favorite part of the movie has always been when Clarence, the guardian angel, takes George Bailey on a tour of what could have happened if George had never existed. Person by person, neighborhood by neighborhood, Clarence helps George Bailey trace the outline of his life’s footprint until George realizes that he is not only loved by many but that he has played an integral part in the lives of people he has never even met.

In the era of social media, this resonates particularly strongly.

If you are feeling like your social media presence isn’t doing much, or if you are feeling, as some do during the holidays, like you are just not really getting ahead in your life, take a moment to be your own Clarence. What would Clarence tell you about what your online work has meant to others?

If you’re saying, “Yeck yeck, Clarence wouldn’t have anything to say to me, ” I say au contraire. The thing of it is that as soon as you set foot in the online world, you are a perpetual stream of ripple-creating pebbles into a big pond. Every blog post you write, every tweet you send out, every Facebook status update you post, they all are ripples across that glass surface of the enormous pond of the online world. Maybe your ripple reaches a person who needed to hear just that particular message at that particular moment. Maybe your ripple will reach a person who was trying to figure out the problem you so neatly summarized and solved in your post. Maybe your tweet was the last one that was needed to reach a goal. Maybe your Facebook status update changed a person’s frown into a smile.

Pulling a person back from the edge without knowing it

When I was a kid, a story fell into my hands somehow. It makes this point pretty clearly, so I will share it with you here.

Once upon a time, there was a young man who just could not get on track in his life. He was bullied every day at school. Things were going wrong in his family. His grades were falling. He didn’t like the way he looked. Every day, he just kept getting more and more convinced that there was not a person in the world who cared for him or even noticed he existed.

One day, when it was grey and rainy and cold, the young man was walking his big armful of books back home when someone tripped him and he fell down, all of his books spilling on to the ground.

It was the last straw. The young man was convinced that this world had nothing to offer him, and he was equally convinced he had nothing to offer the world.

Suddenly, a stranger leaned down and helped him up. Asked the young man if he was okay. Helped the young man pick up his books. Asked the young man if he needed any other help.

And for some reason, this was enough to give the young man that boost he had so long been looking for. It was that little break in the clouds that showed him hope was still there. There were people who cared, and he could encounter them in the world. That person, who did something any normal human being would do on any given day, made all of the  difference to this struggling young man.

If helping someone who has fallen pick up what they dropped can make that kind of difference, there’s really no telling how many lives you’ve touched in big and small ways.

Think about all of the people you’ve talked to. All of the people who have responded to what you’ve written.

You’re quite the difference-maker, aren’t you?

And you’re rather special.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tsueg/4191156523/ via Creative Commons

You’ve probably heard the saying, “Not in my backyard!” It’s an interesting statement. To me, it is meant to indicate that various problems the world experiences won’t be present in your general sphere of living. There shouldn’t be anyone starving in your proverbial backyard. There are no homeless in your backyard. Nobody is sick without ways to get better. Not in your backyard.

A lot of people feel quite fervently about taking care of their own first, then expanding out as people around them become more secure. Take care of the homeless in your neighborhood first, then maybe worry about the whole city, and then maybe, just maybe, take it to a national level. International problems may draw compassion, but priorities remain domestic in nature.

Here’s the thing, though. The online world – this whole “social media” thing I’ve been talking about here on ye olde blog – it has changed the way I look at my world. I talk to people almost every day who are from Canada (various parts), Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Malaysia, Australia, England, Scotland, and many other places too. These people have faces, voices, families, and friends that I know and recognize. If something happened in their city or in their country, I would feel as obligated to help them as I would to help my next-door neighbor. My backyard, my neighborhood, has become expansive.

This represents the framework for the #tweetdiner chat that will happen this week. We are trying a new day – Thursday, but the same time (9 PM EST). We’ll talk about what “backyard” means in this day and age and what the advantages and disadvantages of that kind of “local first” thinking are when it comes to social good in the online world.

Just search for the #tweetdiner hashtag on Twitter and jump in. I’m looking forward to the conversation and I hope you are too

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/15216811@N06/5619617675/ via Creative Commons

Remember the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina? It was a lot of forecasting, a lot of doomsday “this is the storm of the century” kind of reports, but we hear those a lot. Then the storm came and we all saw the aftermath, and we realized the forecast had actually undersold the severity of the storm somehow. In the days that followed, news coverage showed people dying in the streets of New Orleans, people standing on roofs begging to be saved, and many other horrible images that will not leave the memories of those who saw them, not to mention those who witnessed and survived that horrible tragedy.

I don’t know about you, but as I watched all of those images I felt the most utter sense of helplessness. I mean, heck, the people who are responsible for saving people in those kinds of situations couldn’t get to the people who needed them most. What could  I do? Send band-aids? That hardly seemed worth it. How would the situation ever resolve itself? How would New Orleans and the whole Gulf region ever recover? Would they ever recover?

With these thoughts running through my head, I realized I needed to make a run to the grocery store to get a few items. So off I went, thinking about everything I was seeing on the news.

One of the items I needed at this particular time was garbage bags. It’s one of those irritating things that you only realize you’ve run out of when you have a huge mess of food you need to throw away, right? So I was standing in the garbage bag aisle surveying the offerings. I was looking for a particular kind of garbage bag, one I had discovered somewhat recently. It was the “odor shield” garbage bag. Tall, for kitchen trash cans. There it was (top shelf, as all things are that I need). As I held the box of smell-good trash bags in my hands, I was struck by an obscene moment of absurdity. Here I was in a suburban grocery store with a box of garbage bags in my hands – bags that would ensure that my trash, as in, the stuff one throws away, would not smell bad.

Meanwhile, people were trudging through armpit-high water in New Orleans, filled with filth, looking for ways to feed their families.

I wanted to make sure my garbage smelled good.

Kind of out of whack, don’t you think?

Do you really need that?

This is not a post that has the intent of chastising people for buying nice things for themselves when they can. I, by the way, ended up getting those smell-good garbage bags even after being struck by how ridiculous it was. But do you ever think that maybe there are some things that we could sacrifice and not notice it at all? Like, maybe I could take my garbage out 20 minutes earlier and not have to worry about stinky garbage anyway. I could probably live without my streaming Netflix (although I’m so addicted to Breaking Bad right now it would be a bit painful). I probably don’t need a lot of the stuff I have. I love it all, and I don’t really splurge, but there is so much stuff I don’t need that I always look for.

And there are so many people who are just looking for a roof and something to eat.

It is not to self-flagellate. It is merely to say, on the fumes of Thanksgiving here in the US, that there is probably a lot of stuff we take for granted that is totally gratuitous to our every day existence, and we should be cognizant that there are people who wouldn’t even consider that stuff on a must-have list of 1,000 items.

It’s interesting to think about, isn’t it? All of this stuff we accumulate?

Maybe there is another way to channel those funds, at least some of the time.

What do you think?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nataliemaynor/4497967157 via creative commons