I wrote you a story - "Compassion and the Pebble"

*When I began searching for a photo to go with my little tale I realized that so many people have written about pebbles in shoes lol - but I'll post this anyway. My version;-)

So let’s say you have a pebble in your shoe.

It’s really painful at first, but soon your foot goes kind of numb and you forget about it.

Time goes on and you’re just use to it being there.

Suddenly somebody runs up to you and yells “OUCH!! I’ve got a pebble in my shoe and the pain is so horrible I can barely breathe!”

At that moment your foot remembers and you are in so much pain, having forgotten about the pebble in your own shoe, and you remember when you got it, how terrible it was, you have empathy for your friend with the new pebble and your foot begins to throb from all the time it’s been stepping on the pebble.

It’s unbearable but after a while your foot gets use to the pebble again and kind of goes numb and you do the best you can.

Until the next time you see somebody else in agony over a pebble and it happens all over again.

So this is what happens when you have some great sadness, grief or pain inside of yourself that you haven’t quite worked out yet, or come to terms with. You just put it away somewhere inside you and forget about it. 

But when something happens like a war or tragedy, maybe close to you or maybe even very far away, it touches on that sore spot inside of you and gives it a shake and wakes it up and you live it all over again.

This is one of the reasons that we have more trolls, more negativity and hate errupting during times of change or emotional hardship. Sometimes people in great pain lash out.

If you add in the fact that the Internet and social media acts as a magnifying glass on world events, sometimes only showing us the horror, then you can maybe understand the suffering that goes on inside of people.

I want to give you some advice to end this and say, if you have a pebble in your shoe, stop, take it out, bring it into the daylight, examine it, smile at it and put it on your favourite bookshelf where you can visit it any time. Then you can remember the pain it caused you, and smile and feel grateful that the worst of the pain has stopped, and even though your foot remembers, it can also wiggle around in your shoe, pain free most of the time.

And the next time somebody yells “OUCH!”, you can say “Oh, I remember that, yes it’s terrible!”, but this time you can have compassion for your friend and maybe show them what you did with your pebble. 

A Valentine for Sylvie Murrow

It’s almost ‘that’ day. That day where we’re ‘suppose’ to make a show of affection to someone we love. Don’t get me wrong, I AM of the grand gesture sort, but I do it every day, so when Valentine’s Day comes around every February I just shrug and watch the parade go by and sales on all red, pink and heart shaped thingamabobs – skyrocket.

I firmly believe that romance should be left in books, and it should even have it’s own genre and warning: ‘Romantic Fantasy – Beware’, like on cigarette labels, so there are no expectations or mixed signals out here in the real world.

Curmudgeon? Nah. Realist? Yeppers and I know when it all began.

I was in grade 2 and my mom in a mad dash, had to run out and buy a book of Valentines, because we were meant to give one to every kid in our class. I spent hours at the kitchen table that night, tearing out each Valentine from it’s little perforated bed, writing in fat pencil the names of my classmates and then nearly-origami-folding every one for the greatest secrecy into it's little gluey envelope. The next day they would be deposited into a paper bag – not unlike an airsickness bag now that I think about it – which was decorated and taped to the front of each of our desks.

I recall sitting through the day watching all the 8 year olds try to sneakily put their cards into those bags. I didn’t understand the ritual, but at the end of the day it seemed that we were to eat red frosted cake, and open our brimming paper bags to receive all of the red-hearted love that our classmates had bestowed. But what really happened was a lesson in math.

22 kids in the class and only 17 kids with that magic number of cards – a sigh of relief if you had 22 – I did. Then all at once, one girl was crying. I recall the teacher was saying something about that we were suppose to give cards to ‘everyone’. One other girl, who nobody liked, called Sylvie Murrow, just sat quietly. She smiled thinly, I could only see a few small corners sticking out from under her small hands and I know she didn’t have 22, probably not even close, but by grade two she was already use to this.

I never knew why nobody liked Sylvie Murrow, I thought she was a nice girl. People laughed at her blue ‘cat’ glasses, they laughed because she lived right next door to the school. They even made fun of her at her birthday party, where there were a gaggle of girls who all sat beside each other on the couch, stating in whispers that they were only there because their mother’s ‘made’ them go. We went to see the movie The Cactus Flower – it was way over our heads, but Sylvie Murrow sat glued to the screen.

Now I understand, she was just different, and probably already had a respect for Goldie Hawn and Ingrid Bergman that would take me a few more years to cultivate.

I never thought it was right, or fair and I was never part of the bullying, but I never tried to stop it either. I guess I had my own demons to deal with, so I, in my awkward state sat with my pile of Valentines on the desk in front of me, just being relieved that I had the right number.

I’ve tried to look Sylvie Murrow up over the years as social media has grown; I have never found her. But I want to give her a Valentine this year, with all my heart, to try and make up for those lonely elementary school years and to start a new tradition.

If we have to have a Valentine’s Day, what about giving one to somebody other than your main squeeze – what about give a card to someone entirely different.

Here’s a card I made for you to give. 
From me to you, and from you to……..

Just cut along the dotted line.

* Names have been changed. *

The evolution of culture through social media

Do you ever think about this?

It is on my mind constantly these days as I see us moving in leaps and bounds. I wonder things like:

 - who will be left behind?
 - what can we do to help people move forward, catch up, or be involved?

And with the opening of social media, developing world information gaps are slowly closing. Take for example villages who can now provide classes to people via MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) learning, with only a meeting space and a internet connection required!

It's funny because when I think of these developing world cultures that will be learning so much and moving ahead, I don't have the same questions as above. Because of the ways family and society are structured, I don't think many will be left behind, rather I think that the knowledge will be used for the betterment of the group. But that is my opinion.

I think in the first world we can work towards the betterment of the group, and we are in some ways, as we reach to implement new systems in health care etc., but is it enough? What else are we racing towards? Then I wonder:

 - who will be left behind while we're working on solutions and then trying to implement them?

I would love to hear what you think.

Read more on this subject here!

Read an interesting article here!

(Thank you Joyce for fuelling the flame for these thoughts with your recent fb post.)

Good advice! That Ariel sure is a smarty pants!

Nothing better than clever stuff, (with pictures!) that's easy to remember!