Tag Archives: connection

Versatile Blogger

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A heart felt “Thank You” to Jen at Step On a Crack…, for nominating the GrowthLines blog for The Versatile Blogger Award.  I began blogging as a way to think out loud with a larger community, outside the therapy room.  To think about the growth that comes from our experiences.  To recognize the incredible resilience of humans.  To highlight the hope to be found even in our darkest moments.

In the process of writing my thoughts, I have encountered an amazing fabric of fellow travelers who push me to listen more closely, think more clearly, and to see the raw beauty in each of us.  Fellow bloggers have expressed that beauty with humor and wit.  With warmth and encouragement.  With agony and longing.  With confusion and uncertainty.  With candor and honesty.

Thank you, Jen, for your continued presence in the blogging world.  Thank you for your willingness to give us a window into the complexity of your relationship with your mother, and your grief over her living, and her dying.  You invite and inspire all of us to engage in honest conversation about our own lives.

According to the requirements of the award I must:

• Nominate 15 other bloggers

• Inform my nominees

• Share 7 random facts about myself

• Thank those who nominated me

• Add a picture of the award to this post

Congratulations Versatile Bloggers!

I am honored to nominate the following blogs for the Versatile Blogger Award:

http://www.thursdaymorningmeditations.wordpress.com – Emerson J. Winchester invites me to think with her every Thursday morning through her writing.  Her meditations push us to think as a springboard to action, as in her recent post , Pop Music Failure (or, A Step in the Wrong Direction).

http://www.creatingyourbeyond.com – Check out this blog on “survivors creating a life beyond Loss and Trauma”.  I found Brenda’s post on self-forgiveness to be insightful.

http://www.findinglifeinadeath.wordpress.com – a rich and poetic blog about the simultaneous dance we do with life and death, loss and change.  The final post of 2011 was especially thought provoking.

http://www.thereinventedlass.wordpress.com – join a fellow blogger at a crossroads with the chance and challenge to reinvent her life.  One view of the crossroads can be found in the Weekly roundup post.

http://www.ptsdawayout.com – a wonderful “voice of experience” resource for people living with complex PTSD.  “Show up empty and experience everything joyfully.”

http://www.fewerforgreater.wordpress.com – Consider fewer possessions for a greater quality of life.  I was intrigued by the most recent post, Pick four people.

http://www.workthedream.wordpress.com – I was delighted to discover this blog about daring to dream your life, and then working the dream.  I was even more delighted to discover that the dream is being worked out in the shadow of one of my favorite places on this earth, The Spanish Twin Peaks near LaVeta, CO.  The indigenous tribes of the area called them Wahatoya, the “breasts of the world”.

http://www.grandfathersky.wordpress.com – Written by “a poet and a dreamer”, asking “Why Life?”  Beautiful photographs and thought provoking posts, such as Walking Between Worlds.

http://www.cocorum.wordpress.com – She’s a seventeen year old thinking beyond her years, and writing her thoughts.  Listen to her in “What’s the point of kindness?”

http://www.katiedodson.wordpress.com – following the musings at the People Always Leave blog, and read Hanging By A Moment

http://www.belleofthecarnival.com – Join the “head clown” at the Cameron family Carnival as she looks at being family yesterday, today, and tomorrow.  Hear her honor her own father’s spirit in A Skier’s Dream

http://www.nidhisays.wordpress.com – Thank you for poetry and prose.  Make sure you read “To a special man…”

http://www.ariannasrandomthoughts.com – Arianna invites us to join her in a discussion of resilience, motivation, and personal development.  She sometimes uses sports as a metaphor for our discoveries about life, as in Press On!  What Rowing Taught Me About Resilience

http://www.anissastein.wordpress.com – an interesting blog about “living the life less traveled”, which includes among other topics, “Mistakes introverts make”.

http://ashleycherie.wordpress.com – Another young, talented artist who is letting the blogging community join her as she “paints” her thoughts with words.  I appreciate her candid thinking in Recap: 2011.

Congratulations again to my Versatile Blogger nominees! 

Now for the seven random facts about me:
  1. I have lived long enough that after years of wearing glasses and contacts, I now have 20/20 vision to see anything within 18 inches of the end of my nose.  Since I love to read, write, and “google”, all of which fall within the 18 inch range, I’m ecstatic.  Anything past the magical 18 inches is a blur, including the glasses I took off in my moment of “clarity”.  On more than one occasion I’ve had to put in contacts in order to find where I left my glasses.
  2. I too am a “one-sneezer”, and sometimes pretty loud.  I am occasionally embarrassed when a sneeze refuses to be stifled.  On the heels of nearly every sneeze I have a memory moment of my grandad.  Our sneezing behaviors are identical, which means my sneezes are often followed by a smile.
  3. I grew up watching my Dad work on cars, literally a “shade tree mechanic”.  Later, with the luxury of a garage, he taught me how to maintain and repair my first car, a 66 Mustang.  I spent years worth of happy moments in that garage getting my hands dirty and my heart filled.  Some of my hardest moments were being there alone, packing up the remains of my shade tree mechanic dad, when dementia made it necessary for him to move to a nursing home.  Sometimes I go to my own garage and hold his socket wrench in my hand for old time’s sake.
  4. When I was old enough to know better, I left my grandad’s horse grazing in the yard while I went to get a drink of water.  In less than five minutes, Old Red had caught the saddle horn on the clothesline wire, and was racing around the yard in a panic dragging one of my grandmother’s new iron clothesline poles behind him.  The other pole was bent to the ground.  I had to wait for grandad to come home so I could look into his clear, blue eyes, and explain what had happened.  I had to live knowing I had destroyed something my grandma had waited for, for years.  Red and I both survived the experience, him with a small cut over one eye and me with a better understanding of responsibility, and that it takes less than five minutes for things to “go to hell in a handbasket”.  My grandparents kept on loving and investing in me in spite of my mistakes…, priceless.
  5. I like hiking with a camera and a sketch pad.
  6. I’ve been to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival every year since Hurricane Katrina.  If I could rewind my life, I would shake the limitations of a “no dancing” religious code, and learn to do the Zydeco.  The next best thing is to be at the Fais Do Do stage watching a mass of people dancing zydeco to live music.
  7. I love Vivian Higginbotham’s seafood gumbo, and am so glad she gave me her recipe and taught me how to make it before she died.

 

End of the day, end of the year…

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Describe the last year in one word.  I was sitting with a friend at breakfast this morning, the last day of 2011.  “Life,” I quipped.  She continued, reading the fairly lengthy list of responses.  They ranged all along the continuum from awful to fabulous.  When she finished, I thought, “This year described in a single word?”  “Yes, life.” Life lived in a year.  Filled with good and bad, difficult and pleasant, achievement and defeat, and on and on.  How do we resolve the extremes of our lives?  How do we stay engaged in life beyond the moments of satisfaction?  To be fully present in the unbearable moments that may last past the moment, for days, months, maybe even a year. During the past year I have watched people filled with joy and swallowed up in grief, sometimes the same person, sometimes the same moment.  One of those friends wrote about the death of her 95 year old grandad.  She added this quote to her note.

“When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.–Kahil Gibran

My hope for the coming year?  That you will find comfort in your moments of weeping by remembering your delight.  That you can find in the pain of separation, the assurance that you knew and were known.

May your new year be spoken in a single word, life.

Dominoes falling

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In 1975, Bob Speca appeared on the  Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.  He had lined up 5000 dominoes onstage in varying patterns, including a section that spelled out Johnny’s name.  On the count of three, Johnny reached out with a single finger and pushed the first domino over. One after the other they fell until none were left standing.  All because that single first one had been bumped.  Five thousand dominoes falling forever, in a matter of seconds.  It was fascinating to watch them fall, precisely, regularly, each leading to the next one’s fall, with no chance of stopping what had been started.

I think about those falling dominoes a lot.  To me they are a picture of loss and the grief that follows. Those dominoes remind me that our losses rarely happen one at a time.  There’s the loss we recognize, the first domino falling, bumping into the next and the next until we are buried beneath more loss than we believed could come to one person at one time.

Bob Speca’s dominoes weren’t in separate, straight rows.  There were intersections where dominoes fell in several directions at once, fanning out like the spokes of a wheel or weaving back and forth in a braid.  I could anticipate the direction and outcome of some of the falls, but was caught off guard by others.

Such is loss and the grief that follows.  Our losses rarely belong to us alone.  They intersect, weaving our lives and our grief together.  We may take comfort in the fact that someone besides us is feeling the weight of this loss.  We may be angry that others call this loss their own, when we feel sure it is completely ours.  We do our best to prepare for the losses we see coming.  We feel helpless and sometimes conquered by those we couldn’t anticipate.

We could say that this is the end of the story.  That in 1975, all of Bob Speca’s dominoes fell.  That our lives are defined and dictated by loss after loss.  That that’s all there is.  But we would miss the fact that for the last 36 years Bob Speca has been standing dominoes up, creating larger and more intricate patterns even though he knows they will fall.

Such is loss and the power of our own resilience.  To stand up again and again.  To risk stepping back into life.  To seek connection. To open ourselves to relationship.  To do all this, knowing that loss will come again.

“But there was no need to be ashamed of tears. For tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”   ~  Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Learn more about Bob Speca at Ocean City lifeguard is toppling records one domino at a time.

The language of loss

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There are a handful of books in my library that I decided to buy before I knew much about the contents, because the title was intriguing.  One of those is Steve DeShazer’s Words Were Originally Magic.  I thought of the title again when I decided to write about “the language of loss”.  I discovered that DeShazer’s title was inspired by these words.

“Words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power. By words one person can make another blissfully happy or drive him to despair.”     Sigmund Freud

I don’t know that the language of loss is magical, but it is powerful.  It has the power to heal, to offer respite, to comfort.  It also has the power to confuse, to limit, and at its worst to harm.  Language is at the center of the things we tell ourselves, how we think out loud with others, how we experience this life. The words and phrases we use are like the weft and warp on a loom that determine the pattern and texture of the fabric.  I wonder how the fabric of our grief might look if we wove it with a different language.  Would it comfort us to know that our experience and expression of grief is not a sign of craziness, but a richly woven fabric of our common journey?

I have sat with many people over the years in moments of grief, but I can only speak with certainty from my own.  I can’t say “closure” or “saying good-bye” are a help to me if they mean I will come to an end of grief, that I will be done with who I lost.  If my job in grieving is to finish, and to finish means to end the relationship,…well, I’m going to avoid that finish line at all costs.  I have no intention of being done with those I’ve lost.  But what if our relationships are not bound by time and space.  What if our grief is not about the end of relationship, but about how relationships change when death comes.

In the movie Shenandoah, Charlie Anderson, played by Jimmy Stewart, is a widower trying to keep family and home together in the midst of the Civil War.  Charlie often visits the family gravesite to talk with his dead wife Martha.  He tells her about the children and the war.  He asks her questions and shares his thoughts.  These private, intimate moments between Charlie and Martha assure us that our relationships continue beyond death.  In the midst of the sadness and pain of loss, Charlie Anderson also finds comfort and the strength to continue.  Even in death, Martha remains his partner for the journey.

When we don’t talk about death, we are at risk of believing that our experience of death is not only unique, but may be evidence that we’re crazy.  We may worry that our ongoing involvement with our loved one means we’re “stuck” in our grief.  We may also worry about what it means when some of our memory seems to be slipping away.  Sometimes we can remember details of a person’s hands, can hear their voice, can see them moving, but their face begins to fade.  I don’t know what it means that we can often call to mind so much about someone we love, while their face becomes a blurry, veiled image.  If our eyes are windows to our soul, perhaps a face that fades in our mind is a reminder that our relationship is no longer defined by a physical body, but now fills the universe.

If we are going to discuss death, we need language.  But experiencing loss and death is not the same thing as the language we use to describe it.  Language can be concrete and limiting.  Loss continues to remind us that it will not be bound by a word.  That it is often gray and messy.  Don’t be afraid of the language of loss.  It’s the willingness to speak our loss into words that creates a language of possibility rather than limitation.

“We’re fascinated by the words–but where we meet is in the silence behind them”
                                                                                                                 -Ram Dass

Our Universal Loss

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The first time I saw a portion of the AIDS Memorial Quilt was in 1991, in Wichita, KS.  It was a small part of the entire quilt, and it filled the floor of the convention center.  I had read about the quilt from the beginning.  I had seen photographs of the display on the mall in Washington, D.C.  None of that prepared me for the flood of emotion I felt as I walked among the quilt blocks on display that day.  Looking at the first block, I knew I had stepped into sacred space, as though I had been allowed to witness thousands of private moments of loss and remembrance.

Each quilt block held the remnants of a life.  Stories told piece by piece through pictures, pieces of clothing, belongings that identified each person as unique, known, loved.  The fabric blocks were tangible evidence that this person participated with family and friends in this life, and was now gone, but never forgotten.

Harold Marcuse, is a professor of German history at University of California, Santa Barbara.  His research on the view of different groups looking back on the Nazi period since 1945 is presented in his book, Legacies of Dachau, 1933-2001.  One of the stories is of German pastor, Martin Niemöller’s visit to Dachau concentration camp in November 1945.  Noemöller had been imprisoned at Dachau from 1941 to April 1945.  Marcuse notes that Niemöller’s November diary entry and subsequent speeches suggest returning to Dachau prompted thoughts that by the early 1950s had become this familiar poem.

First they came for the
socialists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the
trade unionists,
And I did not speak out
because I was not
a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out,
because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left
to speak for me.

Pastor Martin Niemöller 

Today, December 1, 2011, is World AIDS Day.  A day that will be just another day for many.  A day when many will not speak out, because they believe AIDS is someone else’s loss.  But today is a day that belongs to us all.  It is symbolic of our universal loss, whether we recognize or acknowledge it.  We believed AIDS belonged only to the indiscriminate, the addict, the transfused, the gay, and have said nothing.  Can we hear that 1000 babies are born with HIV every day and say this loss is not ours.

I recently watched Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story with a group of middle school students.  Liz lost both of her parents to AIDS over a ten year span.  In the discussion following the film, a student ask “What is AIDS?”  In that moment I was reminded that the advances in treating AIDS leaves us at risk of forgetting that the disease exists, and there is still no cure.  That people’s lives are still being forever changed, and lost.  Take time today to acknowledge that AIDS is a loss that belongs to us all, and decide how you will speak out.

 

After a harsh winter…

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No holiday should be a time of sorrow, a place acquainted with grief.  Certainly not Thanksgiving.  There is nothing in the name that suggests loss.  It’s a time to gather with family and friends.  A time to “give thanks”.  Who wants to give thanks for loss or difficulty?  Nevertheless, we are faced with the reality that Thanksgiving is experienced in a context that includes hardship and tragedy.

I’ve thought a lot about the marriage of gratitude and grief during this Thanksgiving holiday.  Maybe it was writing the series of posts about loss.  Maybe it was spending time with three generations of family. Maybe it was attending the funeral of a friend  two days after Thanksgiving.

I decided to revisit how this holiday came to be, so I googled “Thanksgiving”.  A sentence caught my eye.

“The first American Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621, to commemorate the harvest reaped by the Plymouth Colony after a harsh winter.”

On that first holiday they gave thanks for the bounty of the harvest, “after a harsh winter.”   Their celebration was based on having survived a season of hard work, tragedy, and loss.  They gave thanks for the gift of plenty.  They gave thanks for the discovery of their own strength and resilience through difficulty.

President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanks in October, 1863.  A day of giving thanks, in the midst of the Civil War.  What was there to be thankful for in a time of such internal turmoil?  How could we be grateful in the face of so much destruction and death?  Perhaps Lincoln hoped that a day of Thanksgiving might remind us of our connection rather than all that divided us.  That our strength and resilience might unite us once more.

It seems that Thanksgiving has always been about gratitude in the midst of loss.  Gratitude for the gift of time, of health, of relationship.  John Claypool came to understand gratitude “after a harsh winter,” when his ten year old daughter died of leukemia. In the midst of his grief he realized that he had never been promised a span of time with her.  That each year had been a gift.  He began to move from anger that he had been robbed of a lifetime with her, to thanksgiving for every unpromised moment shared over those ten years.  Claypool discovered the gift of his own resilience.  Grounded in the strength that comes from adversity, he made his way beyond his own winter of grief to a place of healing gratitude.

What if our clearest moments of resilience and strength are mined from the landscape of our disappointments and tragedies?  What if the key to discovering these gifts is our willingness to fall into the abyss of our grief.  Psychology Today, Psych Basics, notes that,

“Resilience is that ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever. Rather than letting failure overcome them and drain their resolve, they find a way to rise from the ashes. Psychologists have identified some of the factors that make someone resilient, among them a positive attitude, optimism, the ability to regulate emotions, and the ability to see failure as a form of helpful feedback. Even after a misfortune, blessed with such an outlook, resilient people are able to change course and soldier on.”

What does it mean to “soldier on”?  I don’t think it means being an untouchable stoic who never falters, never sheds a tear.  I think to “soldier on” may mean that we continue to rise in all our faltering, tearful, uncertain, grieving humanness. Continuing to rise again, and again, until we find a new balance.

J.R. Martinez began to “change course and soldier on” a long time before he won Dancing With the Stars.  After his win, he received a note from US Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta that read:

“Your strength and spirit captivated the nation, and your victory sends a strong message about the strength and resilience of our wounded warriors.”

In reality, we are all wounded warriors, struggling to soldier on after our own harsh winter, to a place of thanksgiving.  I hope as you sat with loved ones at your Thanksgiving table, you received the gift of strength and resilience that comes after surviving a harsh winter with grief and gratitude.

Papa’s Stocking

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I attended a Hospice Memorial service just before Thanksgiving several years ago.  The room was filled with families and friends who had experienced the death of someone they loved during the past year.  It was a time of remembering.  And a time to focus on the journey of living through grief.

Loss is one of the few experiences besides our birth that is universal.  We would be hard pressed to find a single person in a crowd, who has not had some personal contact with grief.  How is it then that grief can feel so solitary?  Perhaps that mixture of solitary and universal is why talking about our grief brings both pain and relief.  But talking about loss and the grief that follows is important if we are to weave both joy and sorrow into our own rich fabric.

I don’t remember the name of the speaker at that Hospice service, but I remember the personal story he told about finding joy in the midst of grief.   After his wife’s mother passed away, his father in law came to live in their home.  He quickly became an integral part of their daily lives.  And then last year, in the fall, Papa had died.  The man, his wife, and two daughters were left with the empty spaces that Papa had once filled.  As Christmas drew near, the depth of their loss was magnified.  Christmas traditions that had been a source of joy, were now a reminder of Papa’s absence.  This was especially true when it was time to hang their Christmas stockings.  There was Papa’s stocking, empty.  Just like his chair at the table.  Just like the hole left in their hearts.

They began to talk about the pain of Papa’s absence, and the dilemma of how to have Christmas without him.  A new tradition, a ritual of healing, was born out of that conversation.  Papa’s stocking would be hung in its place on the mantel, with slips of paper near by.  In the days leading up to Christmas morning, family members wrote their thoughts, memories, feelings about Papa and dropped them in his stocking.  On Christmas morning after presents had been opened, and their own stockings emptied, they read the notes from Papa’s stocking. There were tears, and laughter, and connection with each other and with Papa on that Christmas morning.

I don’t know if they hung Papa’s stocking beyond that first year he was gone.  But I do know their Christmas story is a wonderful example of partnering with grief to create a moment of celebration that will last a lifetime. They had discovered that although Papa was gone, he was not lost to them.  Sometimes healing comes not from avoiding the painful moment, but from stepping into it to create a new meaning.

Connection

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Saturday was an incredibly full day.  It began with breakfast at one of our “regular” places.  I ordered what I “usually” order.  Later that morning I sat in a church sanctuary, celebrating the life of a longtime friend who finished her race in this life and crossed over into eternity. There was wonderful “catch up” conversation with a friend over a lunch that extended into the afternoon.  Then the spontaneous decision to drive to another town to catch the play “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”, and finally back home to crash on the couch with a dog who thinks I hung the moon.

As I snuggled with the dog I replayed the day.  Not just the time spent, but the emotions felt.  I thought about the gift of connection. In the course of my day I had experienced…

  • the connection and comfort of routine.  Those things we do over and over, day in and day out, that ground us in the familiar.
  • the connection of remembering and celebrating one who enriched and changed us in this life on her way to the next.
  • the connection of friendship, of shared space and conversation that warms like an old flannel shirt.
  • the connection of laughter as I joined a community of strangers to watch a play.
  • the connection of a pet who loves me without judgement or hesitation.

Resting there on the couch I felt profoundly thankful for the connections of the day.  I was glad to be reminded of the connections across the years and the ways they had challenged and sustained me.  I hoped to step into the week ahead more mindful of the space we share and our impact, for good or bad, on each other.

And then Tuesday came.  April 19.  The sixteenth anniversary of the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.  Tuesday came and reminded me of the powerful connection of shared experience. If you were living in Oklahoma on April 19, 1995, you probably remember where you were and what you were doing at 9:02 when the Murrah Federal Building was bombed.  Shared experience invites us to rise above what separates us.  On April 19, 1995, an act intended to destroy led us to common ground and gave us a reason to connect.  We connected then to rescue, to grieve, to grow, and eventually to celebrate our resilience.

Celebrate connection!   The small and the large of it.  The quiet and the loud of it.  The joy, and even the pain of it.  Most of all celebrate the timing of it and choose to connect now, with family and friends, with occasional acquaintances, with total strangers.  Connect with those like you, and not, with God’s creatures, and with yourself.  Look for the “tie that binds” and just connect.

More than you’ll ever know.

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Trivia is intriguing.  Trivia couched in a story becomes less trivial and more about “fleshing out” a person or situation.  I knew Brian May played lead guitar for Queen.  I didn’t know he also held a PhD in astrophysics.  I discovered that piece of trivia listening to the story of how in 2007, a Dutch school teacher discovered “a great, green blob floating in space”.  She knew very little about astronomy but while looking on Brian May’s website, followed a link to Galaxy Zoo photos, where she made the discovery.

What interests me about this bit of trivia has nothing to do with astronomy and very little to do with Brian May.  It has to with drawing conclusions based on partial information, making assumptions.  The moment I learned that Brian May has a PhD in astrophysics I realized “again” how often I assume that all I know about a person is all there is to know.  I thought of how easy it is to forget that people have a history of experiences and stories that precedes my stepping into their lives, and how that view may limit my definition of who they are.

Marie Hughes was one of the sweetest people I have ever known.  She seemed almost too nice to be real.  I knew Marie had been married for a long time to Luther, a gentle, pleasant man in spite of having been a POW during the Vietnam war.  Over time I think I began to assume that only someone incredibly innocent could be that sweet, a 20th century Pollyanna.  If Marie had reached her senior years with innocence intact, then I had to conclude she hadn’t felt the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”.  I think I began to see Marie as sweet, and diminished.

I was facilitating a women’s book discussion group which Marie attended regularly.  One night the discussion focused on how we live in spite of difficult life experiences and loss.  That night I learned how much I didn’t know about Marie Hughes as she told us about her first husband, a railroad worker who was killed on the job, leaving her a young, widowed bride.  She described her devastation and grief, how empty and lost she felt, how she didn’t think she could go on.  She told us how her father’s strength helped her and what a godsend it had been when she met Luther and they began to build a life together.  I was stunned. Marie was still one the sweetest people I had ever known, but she was no longer untested, and she would never be diminished to me again.

Tracy Kidder wrote about life in a nursing home in his novel, Old Friends.  It is a wonderful, insightful story of strangers becoming community, of people near the end of life whose history and stories seem present in fragments if at all.  Kidder borrows a line from a Frost poem as he wonders, “What to make of a diminished thing…”  After the revelation about Marie, I began to look at the people around me wondering how many of them I had diminished simply because I didn’t know more of their story. How many had I discounted without intending to, due to my tunnel vision about who they were, what they had accomplished, and what they had to contribute.  I became more aware of the risk of living out of my own perception without acknowledging the inherent limitations.

I could suggest that we focus on gathering every tidbit of information we can about those we encounter.  Although there are occasions when we should be open to a fuller life story, it isn’t practical to think we can literally know everything about someone before we assess who they will be to us or who will be to them.  What I am suggesting is that we work to be fully aware that there will always be more to the story than we will ever know. That our respective stories will be a part of our exchange even when we don’t know they’re there.  And knowing that, we will add an extra measure of grace to our giving and our taking.

I think Plato said it well…

“Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Just a piece of paper. . .

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I stepped into the seventh grade literature class to watch and discuss scenes from the movie “Freedom Writers”.  A boy greeted me with “I know you!”  I smiled, thinking of the time spent over the years with students at SMS.  I assumed he remembered me from another class, the hallways, or at some school event.  He said, “You talked to my grandparents.  You gave them a piece of paper for me to sign.  I signed it and it’s in a frame on my bedroom wall.  It’s my promise to stay in school and to not do drugs or join a gang.”

It took me a minute to shift gears and realize his grandparents must have come to a parent involvement night when he was a fifth grader.  We had watched “InsideOut”, a documentary about the epidemic of school drop outs and the value of staying in school.  The parents were given certificates to take home to their children.  They were encouraged to talk with their kids about their education, asking their fifth graders to “contract” with them to choose school instead of dropping out.

Positive outcomes are always good news.  Coming from a seventh grade boy made it even more special.  As I replayed the scene throughout the day, I began to think less about my part in the outcome and more about the power of a piece of paper.  For two years a piece of paper hanging on a boy’s wall had reminded him of his grandparent’s commitment to him and their investment in his future.  That framed piece of paper was their celebration of his commitment displayed in a prominent place.  It was a subtle, daily message that they expected him to keep his part of the bargain.  A paper statement of their belief in him.  And he clearly got it.  Just a piece of paper, printed in bulk from my computer, handed out to multiple fifth grade parents.  Just a piece of paper, turned into so much more by grandparents and a grandson who believe in possibility.

My youngest daughter created a time capsule in a shoebox as an eighth grade science assignment.  She spent several days filling her box with bits and pieces of her life.  I didn’t know the contents of her time capsule until ten years later when the science teacher, now administrator, brought my daughter’s box to me.  I raised the lid for a walk down memory lane through the keepsakes chosen by my daughter to represent her eighth grade life.

There were snapshots, trinkets, movie tickets, drawings, and pieces of paper…post it notes…from me, dropped in a lunch bag, stuck in the front of a binder.  Notes that said, “I love you”, “Have a great day!”, “I’m proud of you.”.  Pieces of paper that an eighth grade daughter chose to keep at a time when becoming a person separate from her mother was part of her job.

Remember the MasterCard commercials that listed items one at a time followed by their price tag.  Then the resonant voice read the last thing on the list, usually something involving human connection.  After a pause for effect, the voice said, “Priceless.” The commercial reminded us the value of some things goes way beyond a dollar amount on a price tag.

Sometimes a piece of paper is just a piece of paper.  Sometimes a piece of paper is a relationship, a child’s drawing hung with a magnet on the refrigerator door, a reading award, a “have a great day” post it note in a lunch sack, or a boy’s signature on a certificate that says “I will stay in school”.  That’s when a piece of paper becomes. . . “Priceless”.  Create a priceless relationship moment in someone’s life today.  All it takes is a piece of paper.