Five lessons about the way we treat people

 My thanks to Aubrey and Ron for the following stories

3 - Third Important Lesson - Always remember those who serve.

In the days when an ice cream sundae cost much less, a 10-year-old boy entered a hotel coffee shop and sat at a table. A waitress put a glass of water in front of him.

"How much is an ice cream sundae?" he asked.  "Fifty cents," replied the waitress.  The little boy pulled his hand out of his pocket and studied the coins in it.

"Well, how much is a plain dish of ice cream?" he inquired.  By now more people were waiting for a table and the waitress was growing impatient.  "Thirty-five cents," she brusquely replied.

The little boy again counted his coins.  "I'll have the plain ice cream," he said.  The waitress brought the ice cream, put the bill on the table and walked away.  The boy finished the ice cream, paid the cashier and left..  When the waitress came back, she began to cry as she wiped down the table.  There, placed neatly beside the empty dish were two nickels and five pennies..

You see,  he couldn’t have the sundae, because he had to have enough left to leave her a tip.

Rules for Grandsons and sons

Thanks to my cousin for this post which was originally from The Good Men Project as well as from Tim Hoch

1.            Never shake a man’s hand who is sitting down.

2.            Don’t enter a pool by the stairs.

3.            The man at the BBQ Grill is the closest thing to a king.

4.            In a negotiation, never make the first offer.

5.            Request late check-out.

6.            When entrusted with a secret, keep it.

7.            Hold your heroes to a higher standard.

8.            Return a borrowed car with a full tank of gas.

9.            Play with passion or not at all…

10.      When shaking hands, grip firmly and look them in the eye.

11.      Don’t let a wishbone grow where a backbone should be.

12.      If you need music on the beach, you’re missing the point.

13.      Carry two handkerchiefs. The one in your back pocket is for you. The one in your breast pocket is for her.

14.      You marry the girl, you marry her family.

15.      Be like a duck. Remain calm on the surface and paddle like crazy underneath.

16.      Experience the serenity of travelling alone.

17.      Never be afraid to ask out the best-looking girl in the room.

18.      Never turn down a breath mint.

19.      A sport coat is worth 1000 words.

20.      Try writing your own eulogy. Never stop revising.

21.      Thank a veteran. Then make it up to him.

22.      Eat lunch with the new kid.

23.      After writing an angry email, read it carefully. Then delete it.

24.      Ask your mom to play. She won’t let you win.

25.      Manners maketh the man.

26.      Give credit. Take the blame.

27.      Stand up to Bullies. Protect those bullied.

28.      Write down your dreams.

29.      Always protect your siblings (and teammates).

30.      Be confident and humble at the same time.

31.      Call and visit your parents often. They miss you.

32.      The healthiest relationships are those where you’re a team; where you respect, protect, and stand up for each other.

33.      Take stock of where you’ve been but don’t dwell on it.

34.      Don’t let your past mistakes own you, but keep the scars from those mistakes close at hand. They’re part of you.

35.      Set goals and work like hell to accomplish them. But later you’ll realize the journey was a lot more enjoyable than the end result.

36.      Offer those less fortunate a helping hand even though some may not deserve it and most will never appreciate it.

37.      In business, it’s best to try and get along. But remember there are some people you will run across who don’t understand anything but a hard kick in the balls. Make sure your aim is good.

38.      Don’t ever assume that someone else is looking out for your best interests. Some people are. Most people are not. If you find someone who is, guard and treasure that relationship above all others.

39.      Be open to, and unashamed of, the possibility, however slight, that you might be wrong.

40.      Take a couple of backroad trips to California. Take a mix CD (heavy on Jerry Jeff Walker), a journal and a camera (on second thought, never mind the camera).

41.      Volunteer because you want to, not because you feel like you have to.

42.      Develop your spiritual side but do not be a slave to form or ritual. Cultivate your own relationship with God.

43.      Understand the importance of leverage. But, if it’s with recourse, don’t borrow more than you can afford to pay back.

44.      Doing good is just as important as doing well.

45.      Time is not just your most precious commodity, it is your only commodity. Don’t waste it. And don’t give it to people or projects that don’t respect it.

46.      Try new things.

47.      Be decisive.

48.      Do what you love but find a way to make money doing it or you won’t be able to do it very long.

49.      Don’t be an ideologue or a demagogue. The world has plenty of those.

50.      Don’t vote straight ticket. Think for yourself. If you think one political party has all of the answers, you’re not asking the right questions.

51.      Don’t buy into dogmatic bullshit. Opinions are not facts.

52.      Give people the benefit of the doubt, until you doubt the benefit. Then stop. You’ll know when that is.

53.      Most of your life should be spent running uphill. If you’re not, then you’re not challenging yourself.

54.      Don’t bring home stray kittens. Someone other than you is probably better equipped to take care of them.

55.      Most of your life your only company is yourself. Like yourself.

56.      If you want to get a tattoo, go to your closet and pick out your favorite shirt. Wear it every day and every night for 2 years. If you’re not tired of wearing it after 2 years, go get your tattoo.

57.      Don’t worry about trying to impress people with your knowledge or experience when you’re young. Just be interested, engaged and eager to learn.

58.      If you show up to class on time and sit in one of the first three rows, you will succeed.

59.      It’s often easier to effectuate change by working within the system rather than outside the system. When it’s not, be sure to find strong allies.

60.      If the police officer or the professor is talking, you’re listening.

61.      It’s not always chess; sometimes it’s just checkers.

62.      In things both big and small, always be someone upon whom others can rely. Help your friend move into his new apartment. Return phone calls. Keep your word. Follow through.

63.      Read leisurely for at least 30 minutes every day. This will broaden your point of view and increase your curiosity about the world.

64.      Kindness can be disarming.

65.      Stand up straight, look people square in the eye and be the first to offer a firm handshake.

66.      Have a toothbrush and toothpaste close at hand. A vigorous tooth brushing right before an important meeting is a confidence builder.

67.      Don’t talk about how much ass you kicked in high school when you’re in college. No one gives a damn.

68.      You’re always working for yourself, even when you’re working for someone else.

69.      Don’t assume that an obvious question has already been asked.

70.      When you review a proposal from someone else, don’t feel constrained by the parameters of their proposal.

71.      Embrace and celebrate the things that make you feel different from everyone else.

72.      Resist the insidious, slow progression toward cynicism.

73.      Don’t get frustrated just because your immediate needs are not the priority of others. They seldom will be.

74.      If you see someone who is alone, go out of your way to tell them hello.

75.      Buy a box of nice stationery and write lots of “thank you” and “thinking of you” notes.

76.      Look for beauty in the mundane.

77.      Always carry some cash.

78.      Wait at least 24 hours before sending a letter with the salutation “Dear Judge Dumb Ass.”

79.      Pay your fair share. Don’t be a moocher.

80.      Don’t major in the minors.

81.      Exercise regularly.

82.      No matter what is in front of you, walk toward it with confidence.

Are your tasks gifts or burdens?

There are some who believe that to become a master at a task, an athletic endeavour, or a skill, you have to put in over 10.000 hours of quality practice to learn your skill, craft, art, whatever.  There are those who are masters of spiritual laws. However, a master's awareness of spiritual laws, directs her or him to manifest major life changes by working with their thoughts, not by working harder. 

Which isn't to say they don't work very long hours, because they do; they just don't think of it as work. 

Which also isn't to say they all have cool jobs that anyone would love, because they don't; they just see every task before them, no matter where they work, as a gift. How do you see your tasks as gifts or as burdens?

Do you know why?

Do you know why we generally feel optimistic when we start a new project or trip?

Because no matter how crazy it may have been, we KNOW we're here for a REASON and that with imagination and action we can still ACHIEVE ANYTHING! 

We were all born AWESOME and you still are, alive in a BEAUTIFUL world that needs you.

There is a truth, this is it, you're part of LIFE'S SACRED DANCE of BECOMING - loved, eternal, and all powerful. 

Want to be Happy?

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” ~ His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself, it doesn't work. Follow the advice of His Holiness and practice compassion. The only thing feeling sorry for yourself changes about your life is that it makes it worse.

The question of what makes us happy is likely as old as human cognition itself and has occupied the minds of philosophers, prophets and scientists for millennia. In The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, psychology professor Jonathan Haidt unearths ten great theories of happiness discovered by the thinkers of the past, from Plato to Jesus to Buddha, to reveal a surprising abundance of common tangents. (For example, from Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” From Buddha: “Our life is the creation of our mind.”)

No matter how you look at it, you involve yourself with whatever you think about, the mind is a powerful tool, as Daniel Gilbert says "We have within us the capacity to manufacture the very quality we are constantly chasing.” 

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert published Stumbling On Happiness four years ago. To this day, it remains the best-researched yet captivatingly digestible book on the art and science of happiness, exposing with equal parts wit and scientific rigor the many misconceptions we have about happiness, the tricks our minds play on us in its pursuit and how the limitations of our imagination get in the way of the grand quest.

The only thing that grows from cultivating any dark seed of sorrow is more bitter fruit. So rather that cultivate sorrow, it is perhaps better to cultivate love.  In Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, French scientist-turned-Buddhist-monk Matthieu Ricard distills 25 centuries of Buddhist spiritual tradition alongside bleeding-edge neuroscience and the most compelling findings of Western cognitive psychology — an intelligent and refreshing vision for fusing the life of the mind and the life of the heart into a path of genuine psychoemotional fulfillment.

Feeling sorry for those who want you to feel sorry for them is like giving an alcoholic a gift certificate to a liquor store.  So  rather than feel sorry for someone, give them the gift of love as writer Gretchen Rubin did when se found herself having one of those inevitable carpe diem epiphanies about the fleeting nature of life and the importance of savoring the moment. Instead of shrugging it off as a contrived truism, however, Rubin decided to turn it into an experiment: She set out to test humanity’s ample arsenal of theories about what makes us happy, from ancient philosophies to pop culture prescriptions to the latest scientific studies. She chronicled the experience on her blog and eventually adapted it in The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun — an enlightening and entertaining record of her journey through awkward moments and surprising successes that together weave a rich mesh of existential insight.

Anytime you embrace a dark inner state, you increase the size of its stake on your heart and mind.  Feeling sorry for yourself is a slow acting poison; it first corrupts, and then consumes the heart…choking it with dark and useless emotions. Dr. Martin Seligman, father of the thriving positive psychology movement — a potent antidote to the traditional “disease model” of psychology, which focuses on how to relieve suffering rather than how to amplify well-being.Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment offers a toolkit for harnessing our core strengths to make everyday interactions more fulfilling, complete with a range of assessment tools and self-tests rooted in cognitive science and behavioral psychology research. "Relieving the states that make life miserable… has made building the states that make life worth living less of a priority. The time has finally arrived for a science that seeks to understand positive emotion, build strength and virtue, and provide guideposts for finding what Aristotle called the ‘good life.’” ~ Martin Seligman

Something to think about

Ain't life grand? You know, all the people, millions and millions and millions, who have gorgeous bodies that fill them with pride. Who've created enormous wealth - more than they could ever spend. Who have loving friends scattered all over the globe. And most have little more intelligence than a gopher. 

What they did is just got busy and didn't take "no" for an answer. 

Think about it. 

A Short History Of Cats

We have had cats for almost fifty years, our latest cat is about 18 years old and will not be with us for much longer, so we make his life as comfortable as we can. I am amazed at his ability to communicate his needs, which are simple, to us. I will miss him when he has gone. I was thinking about how therapeutic animals can be to those who are on their own or who are sick and I started thinking about how long humans have interacted with cats.

It seems strange that there was ever a time when cats were not a part of our lives. It's been less that 10,000 years since cats swaggered into our lives. Hardly an eye blink in  the grand sweep of life on this planet. Why were cats so late to join our team? The simple answer is they didn't need us to survive. Cats were surviving just fine on their own. Then, people invented agriculture. Agriculture resulted in large scale storage of grains which attracted the usual and well know group of freeloaders, mice and rats. Grain attracted rodents. Rodents attracted cats who consider them tasty meals. The result was that cats set up housekeeping close to human settlements. Eventually, cats being cats, moved right on in.

Who were these first cats? The first clue lies in where agriculture was first practiced. Agriculture first took root (no pun intended) in the Middle East in a great sweep from modern day Turkey to Egypt. Within this area ranges the African wild cat, Felis libyca. African wild cats are slightly larger that our modern house cats and are yellow in color with muted stripes. These cats have a docile, almost laid back nature. Interestingly, these cats still tend to live and hunt near human dwellings today. Locals still like to catch and rear young wild cats as pets. When mature, wild cats raised by humans tend to behave very much like our familiar housecats. A very good case can (and has) been advanced designating Felis libyca as the principal founding population for domestic cats. At least two other varieties of wild cat are speculated to have contributed to the genetic make up of domestic cats. One is Felis silvestris, The European wildcat who appears to have contributed darker markings and a peppery spirit to the African wild cat base. Also, from Asia, comes the Pallas or Steppe cat (Felis manul) that appears to have contributed long-haired coats to the mix.

The early period of domestication of cats is vague with only patches of evidence. However, by 6,000 B.C. statues found in Anatolia (modern Turkey) show women playing with domestic cats. Cats had clearly become common and affectionate pets by that time. The earliest written records about cats appear by approximately 4,000 B.C. in Egypt where they were frequently kept to hunt mice and rats from stored grains. It was a good time to be a cat in ancient Egypt. Domestic cats were thought to be the embodiment of the goddess Bast (or Bastet). There was a necropolis at her principal temple at Bubastis that contained mummified cats.

Romans spread the domestic cat northward into central Europe and westward to Britain during the expansion of their empire. Cats were quickly adopted and admired as great hunters.  And they continued to move north and east in Europe.  The Vikings used cats as both rodent hunters and pets. The Viking goddess of love and war, Freyja, was associated with cats. Huge winged cats drew her chariot. It also became the custom to give new brides a kitten in her name. 

The Middle Ages it were a very bad time to be a cat. Cats were said to be witches familiars, in league with the devil. Because of this superstition, cats were routinely killed during festivals. Sometimes they were even burned alive or thrown off tall buildings. The Europeans paid heavily for their cruelty to cats. The deaths of so many cats allowed the rodent population to rise out of control, bringing in the Black Death which killed so much of the European population. ventually, the cats' cleanly ways and hunting prowess redeemed them in the eyes of the people of Europe. By the 1600s, people in France began putting little holes near the bottom of their doors to allow their cats to enter and leave as they please.

In Asia cats continued to be familiar hunters and cherished pets. Cats were often subjects for drawing and painting in China. In Japan, cats in the form of Maneki Neko, usually portrayed as a sitting cat with one paw raised and bent, are considered good fortune. They are often found in businesses to draw in money.

The history of cats is a fascinating one, worthy of much more in depth study. It fosters an appreciation for the personalities and talents of our pets. It helps me as I watch our old tom lay on the steps waiting for us to take him up to bed.

Habits

Almost everyone has some habit in their life that robs their day-to-day life of a little (or a lot) of joy. We might have a habit of showing up late, bottling up our emotions, smoking, eating excessively, not eating enough, avoiding exercise, drinking too much caffeine, spending too much time on a computer, blaming others, getting angry quickly, over-spending, not taking care of our selves, or many other non-helping habits.

Over time the word "habit" often becomes synonymous with "excuse." We begin to feel that we can't change an area because it is a "habit," and stereo-typically habits are hard to break. However, if we have the power to create a habit, then we also have the power to un-create it. How do we know if a habit needs to be broken? When it begins to negatively impact our relationships, self-esteem, finances, career, or any other area important to us, then a habit has become a hurt. Let's look at strategies that can help rid ourselves of habits that hurt.

Clearly Define Your Habit and its Purpose: 
We don't create negative habits for fun and to purposely complicate our lives. We create a habit because at the time of creation it seems to serve a purpose in our lives. Typically, we then outgrow the need for the behavior however we don't relinquish the habit. The first step in breaking a bad habit is to clearly define what the habit is, when it started, and how long we have been engaging in it. We can't mange or change what we don't clearly understand, so get a working definition of your habit on paper along with your thoughts on why you created this habit in the first place.

Gather some basic background: 
Take a quick inventory of the past 12 months. Answer the following questions:
How much time did you spend keeping up this habit?
How much did this habit cost you?
What did this habit prevent you from doing?
Answering the above questions can help us see the reality of the effect a particular habit has in our lives.

Fast Forward: 
As you conduct your habit analysis, imagine what you days would be like if you were rid of this habit? What would change? Write about how your life would be different. Write as much as you can about the benefits of changing your ways. Try to come up with at least 10 separate reasons for change. The more you think through the benefits (and write them down) the more solid the foundation you will have when you begin to implement change.

Track Your Habit: 
Grab a notebook and for the next week write down each time you engage in your habit. Note anything that might be influencing you like your thoughts, those around you, or how you felt physically or emotionally. Conducting this habit-audit let's us see exactly how our habit is affecting us in our current day-to-day activities.

Make a Commitment: 
After you have completed the steps above it is time to clearly define what you want to change and how you want to change it. Make a detailed plan by breaking down the steps you need to take. It would be a bit unrealistic to say that in 4 weeks you don't ever want to overspend. Dramatic overhauls often lead to "slips and relapses." Try creating a multi-tiered plan for change. If the habit was overspending, choose and define your new goal. Then set milestones between where you are currently and where you would like to be. If you routinely overspend $100 a week, you could reduce your spending by $20 every other week, and in 2 months you would have a $20 spending budget each week.

Think it Though: 
Before your start date, think through the challenges you are likely to face. What might confuse you? What might cause you to run from new change? What might cause you to slip? Think of as many potential roadblocks as you can write them down. On your own, or with the help of others, brainstorm a solution for each of these roadblocks.

Tell Someone!: 
Once you have defined the change you want to make and chosen the steps to make it, then it is time to make a first commitment. On one piece of paper summarize the change, the benefit, and your action plan. Choose a start date. Tell someone what you are doing! None of us like to go back on our word. If we don't tell anyone about the change we are contemplating it is easy to revamp and alter the plan at any time. If we tell someone and ask that they help us be accountable we are much more likely to succeed.

Begin! 
When your start date arrives, review your plan. Daily review the reasons for change that you created above. Rely on your support person for help when needed. If you find new roadblocks, add them to the list you created earlier.

Don't let a slip become a fall: 
Often we have a little slip (or a big one) and that becomes a reason to abandon our plan all-together. DON'T! Just because you slipped today doesn't mean you need slip tomorrow. Don't let the shame of one setback be a reason to abandon your plan. Instead, add that as a roadblock and brainstorm a solution for the next time you face that specific scenario. Take the day off and then get back on track tomorrow!

Try it! What habit is holding you back? Use the strategies above to create an action plan for change.

Have a great day ahead!