exploring the details (and trying to be kind)

Let this be our symbol for The Pathetic.

A grown-up allowed this pickle to be put in a bag by another grown-up and then given to a customer. The first grown-up is the manager who poorly hired, poorly trained, poorly developed, and/ or poorly held accountable the second grown-up. The second grown-up is the person who allowed himself to be distracted from his potential and being valuable.

This is not love (care).

We’ve all served up our share of pickle flop. Most of the time, it’s just laziness rather than a lack of awareness or interest in doing the right thing. So let’s encourage each other to expect more from ourselves.

I know. It’s just a pickle.

“Virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking…

It turns out, multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They get distracted constantly. Their memory is very disorganized…

We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.”

Clifford Nass
Stanford University

Scary and exciting… PBS’s Frontline production, Digital Nation – Life on the Virtual Frontier.

Pick this over your next top model-chef-bachelor-biggest-smallest-loser-winner show (86 minutes). You can watch the whole thing or watch it in 9 segments (click on the little circles below the video to see the chapter choices – so much added content on their site).

Incredible to have access to such great stuff… on demand… for free. Thanks PBS, MacArthur Foundation, Park Foundation, Verizon, and contributors.

(Here’s 4 quick tips to minimize the bulk of distractions… because you want your time to matter.)

My lady is too hot.

Tortilla soup, Man. Squiz.

I’ve been thinking about the business of Christmas… why we celebrate it and where it came from. It took me 44 years to look into it (of course, the first couple years I was learning how to talk and the next couple decades I was learning how to think so… maybe it only took me about 25 years to dig in).

Please understand, I’m not kidding…

It looks as if the early Christian church was looking for a way to compete with the pagan celebration of Saturnalia – a month-long festival that honored the god of agriculture, Saturn. Apparently, during Saturnalia (are you laughing at this word yet?) there was also a group of Romans who celebrated the birth of a sun god named Mithra (who was born from a rock). Mithra’s birthday was December 25.

Bottom line… A fourth century Pope set 12.25 as the day the Christian church would celebrate the birth of Jesus (a day that wasn’t celebrated until that point).

History.com has it laid out nicely beginning here.

Now… I bring this to our attention because I don’t like going through the motions (although I hypocritically do).

I believe our focus every day should be on loving our people. But what exactly does that mean?

• It means we need to give ourselves to the people around us more (giving them our attention and care).
• It means we need to help end someone’s suffering when we can (and then look for more opportunities).
• It means we need to be kind, compassionate, and patient.
• It means we need to be truthful, forgiving, and humble.
• It means we need to enjoy the hospitality and gifts of others.
• It means we need to be thankful.
• It means we need to connect (really).
• It means we need to be attentive and engaged with our work (to how we contribute).

To me… all of these holidays we celebrate allow us to more often compartmentalize our gratitude and care rather than encourage it to be a part of our daily lives (missing out on a daily celebration that might otherwise exist).

At Christmastime, we embrace getting together more and giving gifts to each other (things) yet at the same time complain about the busyness (and business) behind it all, changing nothing year after year. (“Let’s get together after the holidays when everything settles down.”) Then we go into a New Year, pausing and reflecting at certain points over certain things dictated by our federal holiday calendars and those of our chosen faiths (and remember, a belief that there isn’t a god is also a faith).

But in our day-to-day (the bulk of our time here) opportunities for care (love), will we be awake enough not to go through the motions and make a positive difference to others whenever (wherever) we can?

Can we remember (more often) that we’re here for each other – that that good feeling we get more often around our winter holiday of choice comes from a love that we can (and should) have every day?

“But then it won’t be special.”  (special: being other than the usual)

Wouldn’t that be great.
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12.25 is arbitrary. Merry Today.

(Valentine’s Day? You can’t handle the truth.)

Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart by Gordon Livingston

I’m into my second time through and was completely smoved by these words from Gordon…

“This tension between simplicity and effort works itself out in our daily lives. If we believe in the sudden transformation, the big score, we are less likely to pursue the harder and less immediately satisfying work of becoming the people we wish to be.

So here’s to the role of time, patience, and reflection in our lives. If we believe it is better to build than destroy, better to live and let live, better to be than to be seen, then we might have a chance, slowly, to find a satisfying way through life, this flicker of consciousness between two great silences.”

Let’s encourage each other more.

(168 pages | serious | quick read – but not really because you’re going to reflect more)