Creating Pivotal Moments That Can Change Lives

The woman wreaked of ugly emotions as she forcefully dragged the screaming child towards her car...

 I had pulled into a gas station to fuel up and there was a car at the pump in front of me.  It was a cold, gray February late afternoon in Wisconsin.  As I had been fueling up myself, I had become an unwitting audience to this scene unfolding before me.  When the woman had gotten out of the car to wrestle with the stiff, cold fuel hose, I could hear the child, strapped into the car seat in the back of the car screaming and crying.  As a Mom I know the sound of a small child that has exceeded its capacity to cope.  My heart immediately went out to that small, tired, possibly hungry child...it's a mother's reaction to the sound of a child in distress.  I found my attention turning to the mother.  She was young, probably late teens, early twenties.  Even at twenty paces, it was easy to see that she was at the end of her rope, as well, as she wrestled the hose over to her car and put gas in her tank.  She hadn't swiped a card so she was going to have to go inside to pay for the gas.  Sure enough - once she had finished fueling the car, she leaned into the backseat of her car to free the child from the car seat and lift him to the ground.  Taking his hand, she led him, still sobbing, into the convenience store to pay for the fuel.  What I saw, in that time frame, was a mother and child who were both, pretty much in the same place emotionally.  My daughter, who was in the front seat of our car, also saw this scene play out.  I was just finishing up fueling my car as the mother and child emerged from the store in the same stressed condition.  The child was now fighting back, venting his anger at the only available person - his Mom.  She had simply given in to the misery and degenerating conditions of the relationship, and was pulling him by his upper arm towards the car, almost lifting him at times as he was prone to try to go weak at the knees in order to resist.  He was inflicting pain on her, and she was inflicting pain on him.  This was not good.  Just as she got to the car, the child dropped the stuffed toy he was holding and it fell, unseen by the Mom just under the car.  As the mother lifted the child back into the car seat, the child erupted into protesting sobs over the loss of the toy, which the mother, not realizing the toy had fallen, interpreted as even more resistance.

 Here is where the story changes. I moved to get out of my car, but my daughter put a hand on my arm, and with a worried look said, "Mom, don't."  As I slid out of my seat into the cold blustery winter evening, I smiled back at her and said, "I have to."  I walked over to the woman, who was just finishing buckling the child into the car seat, and I said in a kind a caring voice, "excuse me..."  she immediate took a defensive stance between me and her child, in an instant turning that emotion towards me.  "You dropped something..." and I immediately got down on my knees in front of her and smiled up at her, "Let me help" I said.  I took my time, probably more than I needed to, fishing under the car, allowing for the space and grace of the changed circumstances to start to take effect.  "I saw your little boy dropped a toy as you were putting him back in his car seat..."  I stood up with the toy, and handed it to the woman with a smile.  "I'm a Mom too, and I can tell that it's been a long day."  I smiled at her as she took the toy, her face now softened by our connection, "You have no idea," she responded.  As I handed her the toy I touched her in a comforting way on the arm, "Your son?"  "Yes," she sighed, as she handed the now more muted, hiccuping child, the stuffed toy.  As she prepared to close the door I smiled at the child and said, in parting, "hey buddy, you hold onto that guy now..." and I smiled at her and said, "you may not feel it right now, but Mom is just another word for Love."  I wished her well and returned to the car, to my daughters exhortations of potential bad endings and futile efforts.  I reminded her of the injured bird that she insisted that I stop and pick up, and take to the wildlife refuge.  That little boy and that Mom were just like that little bird and that fallen toy was an invitation to change the direction of things, just like you did that day with the bird - when the world calls to you, it is imperative that you be ready and willing to respond and that you have the highest good of all at heart.  It may not work out, or it may create a pivotal moment that changes lives for the better.

The True Nature and Destiny of Creative Transformation: Trash into Music

People realize that we shouldn't throw away trash carelessly...so why do we think that it's OK to throw away people carelessly?  Cateura, Paraguay is a slum that is built in, around, and on a garbage dump site.  These people live, survive, and aspire to thrive through salvaging what others found no value in.  When I look at the faces of Ada and Bebi, and I hear the music that is in their hearts I find myself celebrating the resilience of the human heart and the human spirit.  To hear the music of the Landfillharmonic is to hear the Heartsong of the people and children of Cateura, Paraguay, and to come to understand the resonance of the human heart as it transforms trash into music and elevates a subsistence lifestyle to something that speaks to us all and calls us to acknowledge the greatness of humanity even in the lowliest existences.  These lives do matter, and they can make a difference.  Please, share this with others, and celebrate the Landfillharmonic.

Strong People Ask for Help

Walk your talk and ask for help.  Creating a centered life that moves through the world in powerful ways - that's my goal.  Centering on my WHY: that core of what I believe that, for me, the world moves around, creates a strong centered core.  Asking for help in working through, executing to, and questioning options is KEY to the transparency of the truth.  A truly transparent centered life allows me to freely put my 'word' out there as a personal truth, without fear, knowing that the world will test it, poke and prod it, turn it over, and take it apart.  Criticism is perspective based feedback, and worth listening to, criticism can be the catalyst to engaged conversations around differences.  To truly understand another's perspective and to connect over that understanding, can change lives and connect in meaningful ways.  Acceptance is not agreement.  I have only lived one life out of the millions that are in this world.  To connect with others, to come to understand their views and perspectives is to enrich the ground upon which I stand.  Help does not just come from those who think like me, more importantly it comes from those who have taken the time to reflect on what I offer and to provide feedback and thoughts.  Asking for help is a great way of acknowledging the connectivity that inherently underlies humanity.

Can We All Get Along?

 

"Can we all get along?"   This question, posed by Rodney King, continues to stump us.  In all fairness this failure to all get along goes back to the origins of man.  Survival, or the sense that survival depends on specific conflicting outcomes, certainly fuels not getting along.  What I'm speaking of here, is not about those kinds of choices.  What I'm speaking about here is how we've distorted our differences into the art of using differences to self justify.  Our politicians do it, our special interest groups do it, and we do it.  This approach is evidenced in bullying, and in us and them thinking.  So let's look at the countermeasure for this faulty thinking...common ground...that's right...common ground.  So here's my story that lead me here.  I have been challenged with how different I was from one of our leaders at work for years, absolutely years.  It has been a contentious relationship at best, and downright antagonistic at worst.  The conflict has almost cost me my job along the way.  Then something happened.  He and I made a mind boggling discovery: we were different, we communicated differently and understood differently.  Even more astounding was the discovery that this condition wasn't a deal breaker: we could be different and still get along.  For myself, I was amazed to find out that he wasn't intentionally trying to get on my last nerve, and that he did want to connect in meaningful ways in order to enrich each of our lives.  In truth, he discovered the same thing about me.  We had, up until that moment, been of the belief that we were each out to make the others life a living hell.  We found out that we were very wrong about each other.  This discovery occurred because he attended a Communication Skills Class that I was facilitating, and we came face to face with our challenge in the middle of the class.  What we discovered is that it took a caring "village" to work through our differences.  As this person and I were starting to spin out of control in our habitual non-getting along behavior, a young engineer in the class called a time out on us, and shared his observation that we just didn't get each other.  He then, miraculously, translated what I was trying to say into a format that this leader could understand and, VOILA! for maybe the first time in a long time we finally got each other.  Even more importantly, we read in each other's faces and body language that this was something that we had collectively never considered.  From that point forward we were each more willing to give the other the space and grace to be different, and instead of going at each other's throat, we got that we simply didn't get each other.  We learned to slow down and not judge, but to give the benefit of the doubt and seek to understand.  It made all the difference in the world.  Just today, this self same person, who I would have framed as my nemesis not that long ago, came to my defense and had my back.  WOW!  So when I face Rodney's question of, "Can we all get along?"  I am inspired to say, it certainly is possible, but it's going to take a collective effort and a willingness to accept differences, and assume good intentions, and then slowly and carefully explore where communication and understanding may be getting off track.  Finding the common ground amidst the differences provides a point of alignment to start developing understanding.  Identifying common ground and common understanding is the key to evolving a sense of connectedness and a sense of "getting" each other.  Focusing on our differences isn't going to get us there.