It is a warm cloudy day today. August quickly approaches. Soon a new school year will begin.
I was raised Catholic in Illinois. Raised at a time when every question had an answer supplied by someone else. I was a gullible child, much like a sponge that you kept filling up and wringing our now and then so that you could pour more in.
My gulliblness lead me through the first 37 years of my life and then I made decisions that forced me to leave my "scripted" life behind. I did everything everybody said I was supposed to do and then one morning I woke up and realized that I had not been truly "present" in my own life at all.
Life is a strange place sometimes. Strange in the sense that you think you see and hear what's going on around you, but truth is, you don't.
To "open ones eyes" is to see beyond the obvious; to hear what another says, is to listen beyond the words; to understand another person, you must set aside all you've learned from others and start anew.
The world ahead will be filled with people, just like it is now. But I believe that those people must see, hear, and get to know each other differently than we do today.
When my past ways of doing things no longer worked, I fumbled in the "dark" for years, slipping back into shoulds every other moment. I'm still not rid of all the thoughts that were never my own, but I'm getting there.
The next time you see a stranger, or better still, someone you think you know, step back a moment and really see, listen and most of all feel. Open yourself to the other person and set yourself aside. "Walk" for a moment in their world.
To live is to engage in and give to the world about you. One action allows and the other shares.
Have a wonderful day.
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