Consider This

What happens when hell on earth becomes heaven on earth?

Will anyone even notice?

What happens to those who believe that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing us he doesn’t exist if they suddenly find themselves in a place where the devil truly does not exist?
And what happens to that place?

What happens when the excuses we all have used so effectively and acceptably to cover up our lies, shortcomings, or poor and self-centered choices stop becoming excuses and start becoming what really happened?

What happens then to those who really were sick?
What happens to those who actually made an honest mistake?
What happens to those who really did get stuck in traffic?
What happens to the man or woman or boy or girl who actually needed their rights read?

What happens when our faith in each other, in our families, in our friends and those we try so hard to trust in a world that has become so untrusting becomes something more than a belief or hope or prayer we struggle to cling to when doubt and fear and betrayal threaten to close our hearts and minds?

What if I really didn’t mean it the way you took it?
Will you stop hating me?

What happens when the most important lessons we strive to teach our children no longer need to be taught?
What happens when children really are smarter than their parents and teachers?

What happens when masculinity lies in one’s ability to be soft, not hard?
What happens when femininity is nurtured to be more than just nurturing?

What if I really didn’t understand?
What if I really didn’t know better?

Will you forgive me?

What happens when we stop telling people it’s OK to make mistakes and they are not supposed to be perfect and start allowing people to make mistakes and stop expecting them to be perfect?

What happens to a declaration of independence and a bill of rights in a world where all men and women truly are created equal and all of us truly are free?
What happens to those who fight for civil rights when everyone learns to be civil?

What happens to warriors when we finally win the war against war?
Do you have an exit strategy for your internal conflict?

Do you believe the people you believe in?
Do you believe in the people you believe?
I never allow myself to think those questions could have different answers.
So the line I ride is between the only two answers – yes and no – a choice between love and hate.

What side of the line do you stand on?
Do you even know where you stand?
How can you be so sure?
Don’t you realize the line is moving faster than you can run?

Here’s a philosophical wake up call taken straight from mathematical fact –
Every line we see is actually an infinite circle
So here is the real question:
Are you inside looking out or are you outside looking in?

Have you ever considered the possibility that our world is not the scary dark place we were raised to think it is?
Have you ever considered there is no such thing as necessary evil?
Have you ever considered that we live in a world of light and that is the rule, not the exception and if we stop living and hiding in the shadows we just might see that the shadows only exist because we are the ones casting them?

Have you ever considered that you might have spent so long in the light you started to believe you were the sun?
Have you ever considered that you might have spent so long in the dark you started to believe that you were the shadow?

Have you ever considered that the only reason anyone can’t see the light is because you have placed yourself above them?
Have you ever considered that the only reason you are in the dark is because you have placed others above you?

Have you ever considered stepping down the ladder instead of climbing it?
Have you ever considered inviting others to join you on the ground instead of trying to knock them off their pedestal?

Have you ever considered the possibility that all people truly are loving and kind and brilliant and beautiful?
Have you ever considered applying what you believe instead of just preaching it?

Consider it.

Done.

Life is too Long Not to Sweat the Little Things

       Note:  It took me a long time to decide between ‘publish’ and ‘trash’ on this one.  I am more often misunderstood than understood.  This was written in response to the Colorado movie theater shooting, but a few days after I wrote it one of the ‘little things’ came true – a former student was killed while crossing the street I used to live on with her daughter.  At that moment I knew I had to share this.  The pictures I added were taken as I walked home from work in remembarance of Ashley; at the same time I was heading home, a memorial was being held 3,000 miles away.  Understand that I wrote everything after this paragraph before that happened – very scary.

Our time here [on Earth] is limited and it is precious, and what matters at the end of the day is not the small things, it’s not the trivial things which so often consume us and our daily lives. It’s about how we choose to treat one another and how we love one another.  – President Barack Obama in response to the Colorado movie theater shootings

The intersection outside my new school building – errily appropriate.

It is easy to read these words and be touched; perhaps even inspired.  But I can’t help but wonder if this philosophy is what got us into this mess in the first place.

I mean no disrespect to our President or anyone else.  The sentiment is right on, but the premise is backwards.  And if we keep thinking this way, we don’t have a chance in hell.

Everybody is always telling us how important it is to love each other.  We are told it is better to give than to receive.  We are told to be compassionate and sincere.  I completely agree.

But to suggest that loving each other is a choice demonstrates a woeful and dangerous lack of understanding about what love is.  The only person we can choose to love is ourselves.

The theme of a person trying to force or create love is a central theme of almost every book, song, poem and play ever created.  It never works.  We can’t force ourselves to love someone else any more than we can force someone else to love us.  The harder we try, the more disastrous the results.

Let me give an example.

When you see classmates or co-workers on a Monday morning and ask them how their weekend was, do you really give a damn about their weekend?  Even worse, do you find yourself silently praying that they will not actually tell you about their weekend?   And worst of all, have you ever gotten extremely irritated when someone actually started telling you about their weekend – especially if they got really excited and wouldn’t shut up about it?

I believe that to feign love out of fear or obligation is one of the worst things a person can do.  Every bit of ‘good’ that is done without sincerity will always have negative consequences.  Every day our society becomes less receptive to ‘good’ because everything around us is intentionally deceptive.  We don’t believe in anything anymore.  Hate and fear are the only things we can trust.

At roughly the same time I took the picture of a mother and daughter crossing Hope St. in LA, this was the scene back in Springfield MA.

No doubt you have consoled a friend at some point in your life by saying “Life is too short to sweat the little things”.  I know I have, and I realize now that I was wrong.

Life is too long not to sweat the little things. 

I try not to dwell on big things anymore. Big things are difficult to stop and impossible to control.  Big things can cause serious damage but they also bring communities together.  All we can do is try our best to understand the big things and stay out of their path. 

Chances are pretty good you’re going to live at least half of a century, probably three quarters or more.  During that time you will have to dodge your share of big things here and there.  But you are going to have to deal with countless little things every single day.   Little things terrify me.

One text at 30 mph could take a mother from her family.

One bad grade can keep you out of college.

One moment of weakness can lead to a lifetime of addiction. 

One sentence out of context can end a career. 

One “I dare you….” can lead to a lifetime of disability. 

One moment of indiscretion can create a life.

One moment of indiscretion can end a life.

Certainly accidents will always happen but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss them.  Most of these tragedies are preventable.  We have so much more control than we realize.  But that control doesn’t have anything to do with how we treat each other, it has everything to do with how we treat ourselves.  It is tempting to hate and call someone who causes one of these tragedies self-centred, arrogant or even evil.  But the reality is that these are all consequences of people who don’t care about themselves.  These people don’t hate others, they hate themselves.  Drug use, offensive language, reckless driving, promiscuity, giving up on school; these are all signs that someone has given up on themselves, even though they rarely realize it.  We have to stop waiting for them to cause collateral damage before we recognize there is a problem.

This caught my eye as I got to my car.

We have great sympathy for those without the means to feed themselves.  We have pity for those who lose their jobs or homes through no fault of their own.  We provide an education to anyone who was never given the chance to learn.  Why are we so quick to judge anyone who has never learned how to love themselves?  Would you have the audacity to call a starving child who steals a loaf of bread a hopeless criminal? 

You can’t just tell yourself to love someone.  You can’t make someone else happy and you can’t make them sad.  Love and hate aren’t guns that can be pointed at other people.  They radiate in all directions from within.  When we feel love or hate for others, it is nothing more than a reflection of how we feel about ourselves.  To hate another is to hate ourselves, and to ignore each other is to ignore ourselves.  To watch others suffer feeling powerless to help or without compassion is to give up on our own life.

Suggesting that we choose to love each other completely ignores the real problem.

Why do you think teen suicide is such an issue these days?  People who belive children commit suicide because they hate their lives have it all wrong.  People don’t commit suicide because they want to die, they commit suicide to prove that they actually lived.  That is why I am so torn about the media’s coverage of teen suicide – it just makes the idea more appealing to a troubled person who desperately needs to be loved and acknowledged at any cost.

It is so obvious that many never even realize it.  How we feel about ourselves may be the only thing we actually can control.  It isn’t easy – but it doesn’t require any special training either.  It doesn’t cost money and it doesn’t care about race.  It doesn’t require a church, it doesn’t require a partner or a mentor or an education.  It requires us to take a leap of faith – to stop looking outside and start looking within. 

Every ‘little thing’ is a warning.  Every ‘why me?’ and every unintended consequence is a reminder that we are not paying attention to the road and we are headed in the wrong direction.  Sometimes I feel like I have spent my whole life staring into the rearview mirror wondering why the horizon kept getting further away no matter how fast I was going.  

As I drove home in Los Angeles this was the scene in Springfield.

Love drives us.  And when we miss our exit and the tank is low, the only thing we can do is continue heading the wrong way praying that we will find somewhere to fill up before we hit empty.  If that help comes, we need to think long and hard about what to do with it.  When we are so far off the path, do we turn around or just keep heading in the same direction?

It is overwhelming to realize it could take the rest your life just to get back to where you started, but I believe that returning home might have been our destination the whole time anyway.  You can’t help but at the very least understand how someone might decide that it would be easier to continue down the wrong path. 

My heart bleeds for the killer.  It bleeds for his family.  It bleeds for every stranger who crossed his path and ignored the obvious signs that he was lost and desperately needed help.

It bleeds for every person who was told not to sweat the little things – only to wake up wondering if changing a few little things could have fixed everything.

I expect I may be misunderstood by people reading this.  I’m not blaming anybody, and of course I feel for every victim and their loved ones.  And I’m not talking about what this guy deserves as a consequence for his actions.  I don’t care about the months of trials and analysis that are going to stem from this.  It’s all irrelevant, the damage is done.  It was done a long time ago.  What breaks my heart is that nobody even knew he was falling until he pulled others over the edge with him.

I believe that a lost soul is a far greater tragedy than a lost life.

The mascot of Putnam H.S. – where I was a teacher and Ashley was a student – now drives through a new community.

We can’t change what happened but we can change what happens next. Anyone who thinks that putting people who do evil things in jail changes anything risks being the next victim.  Must we fan the flames of hate to make sure everyone knows there was a fire?  Do we have to make people stare over the edge to remind them how far down it is?  Haven’t enough people suffered?

How many depressed children starving for love and attention are sitting in their bedrooms right now while mom and dad watch the television wondering how this could have happened? How many students will choose to repress a little more of their sadness and despair because their teachers and counsellors all said “Look at what happened in Colorado. Life is too short to sweat the little things.”

I am going to wrap this up by sharing something I believe many of you will relate to but may never be able to admit.

When I read about a tragedy like this it scares the hell out of me.  I say “Oh my god; that could have been me”. But I’m not talking about the people who were shot. I am talking about the shooter.

I am not violent. But I know depression and I know what it’s like to feel completely alone. When you are in so much pain that you shut out the world what is left?  Just you and that voice inside your head.  And when he starts hating you too, hate becomes all you know.

Love sustains us.  Without our families, friends, teachers and neighbors we wouldn’t have a prayer.  But at some point in our lives we will be alone.  And at that moment we need to be able to love ourselves unconditionally, because we won’t be able to get it from anywhere else.

We hate people who commit crimes like this not for what they have done, but for the fact that they remind us of what we are capable of.  It is a reminder of how vulnerable we all are; not to the bullet but to the trigger.  It is easy ask how any sane human being could be capable of this, but the reason I believe that this type of tragedy bothers us is because despite our hollow words we know exactly how a person could be capable of this.

There is something amazing at the end of every journey.

I doubt anyone reading this hasn’t at some point considered – even if only for an instant – how easy it might be to lose control.  And we know that if we ever stumble in the battle we constantly fight in our hearts, it could just as easily be us or someone we love with the gun in hand next time.

Our time here on Earth is precious, and what matters at the end of the day is not the big things which so often consume us and our daily lives.  It is all about the little things that we can change – and resisting the temptation to ignore them or misinterpret them.  It’s about how we choose to treat ourselves and how we love ourselves – before we become the very big thing we lived our entire lives in fear of.

Something Smells Fishy

baby koi (i)

When you stock a pond with minnows those minnows will thrive and grow until they become fully mature adult fish. As most adult fish observed in the same pond vary relatively little in size, we are tempted to infer that they have reached their limit of growth both as individual fish and as a species. But people who started to observe multiple ponds noticed that some ponds tend to produce even larger mature fish.

Eventually we realized that the limitation was not something intrinsic to the fish, but a product of the fish and the pond in which it grows up. So we had the brilliant idea of transferring these fish to larger ponds. Timing is crucial; we must allow each fish to begin its life in the pond which it was born and allow it to grow to the point where it won’t be devoured by the giant fish in the pond which it will later call home. But we must act before the young fish’s brain sends the signal that its size and maturity is sufficient for its environment – lest it will arrive in the new pond without the ability to grow at all.

We discovered that in general, 18 months was the perfect amount of time to satisfy these constraints for the vast majority of fish.

Role Models, Motivational Speakers and Other Dangerous Things

The pleasure of Night sky viewing : Sanyam Kumar Shrivastava, MD Star astronomy club, Bhopal

Let me make something very clear to every teacher or wanna be teacher. This applies to parents, administrators and professional athletes as well. You are not a role model. Pause, and let that sink in for a minute. Don’t fight it. You are not a role model.

If You Can’t Laugh at Yourself…. Laugh at Me Instead

where it all happened – lousy pic but I don’t feel like waiting until tomorrow morning to take another in proper daylight

Sometimes God (I don’t have the energy to be politically correct, feel free to replace ‘God’ with any deity or lack there of that makes you happy for the remainder of this post) plays practical jokes on us that are just too hilarious not to share with the world.  And as embarrassing as this may be for me, every minute you are reading my blog with laughter is a minute you aren’t reading ignorant and hateful comments on the Huffington Post with contempt for humanity.  (please note that I am referring to the comments, not the actual content of the site)

When Barbara Boxer, Origami Cranes and Facebook Collide

Have any of you actually ever written to an elected official?  You might want to consider giving it a shot sometime.

As of today I am officially 4 for 4.  It all started back when I was in the 3rd grade and everyone in my class had to write a letter to someone in government.  This was back during the Persian Gulf Conflict and our class had just read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes.  Don’t ask me how I remember that when I can barely remember to put gas in my car.  Anyway, the book is about a girl who was dying of leukemia and attempted to fold 1,000 origami cranes while in the hospital.  According to a Japanese legend anyone who folds 1,000 paper cranes will be granted a wish and her wish was to live.  Sadly, she never finished and the Japanese gods executed her for her inefficiency and poor work ethic.

Common Crap in our Schools

I am so sick and tired of the language used to push education reforms. Any teacher who has been around the block a few times has seen a few of these come and go and it’s always the same bag of burning dog feces wrapped up with a different pretty bow.

I was just reading an article pushing the Common Core standards and I just want to scream. America, please tell me you aren’t so easily manipulated!