“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
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There have been many quotes I have used to begin posts on this blog but none have had as much of an impact on me as this very powerful string of words.
I lead a very fortunate life. I may not be rich in terms of dollars and cents but I am wealthy. I have roof over my head, a job that I love and I am surrounded by a wonderful network of friends and family who are nurturing, loving and supportive. Perhaps that energy is the fuel that brought me to this moment in my life, the moment when I realized I wanted to give more of my time to people who could use a hand and in a way I felt I was best able to help.
There is no set of standards for helping others. There is no rule book, no guideline and no complex set of algorithms. It is a simple equation. Time + Effort = Results. And for some, the results of our time and effort can make more of a difference than we will ever potentially realize.
A small group of people, including myself, spent a little over two hours of our time a week ago Sunday and the outcome of our concerted efforts will provide dinners for deserving families in our community. It was two hours out of our Sunday. We chatted, we had cocktails and we laughed. And in that small window of time, we made a huge difference. We created meals that will allow people to, not just feed their family during a tough time but, feed their family a home-cooked meal made with real food. And next Sunday, and maybe every Sunday this winter, we will do the same thing again with some familiar and some new faces and, hopefully, take another small amount of weight from the shoulders of the families we are trying to help.
If I can subsequently find myself while losing myself in the service of others, point my compass in that direction any time. I go to bed with a tired body, but with a full heart. And if my journey has taught me anything, it is that life is not defined by what you have. Life is defined by what you give.
Category Archives: hope
Be the change you wish to see in the world
Leave a commentI never used to be one who could sit and watch the news on television and that habit has not drastically changed over the years. I have not ignored the reality of what is happening in the world. I have merely chosen to moderate how much negative energy I will allow inside the walls of my home. And with the most recent barrage of cynicism and hostility that has been taking centre screen on every news feed across the world, I choose, for the most part, to tune it out.
Don’t misunderstand me….I will still have a modicum of knowledge when it comes to current events, but I cannot subject myself to hearing the same stories told by a select number of news anchors who beat the same dead horse over and over again. Instead, I choose to take my positive energy and inject it back into my reality.
There is some debate as to whether or not it was Mahatma Gandhi who quoted the subject line of this post but, regardless of its origin, it holds a strong place in my resolve to make a difference, if not in the world as a whole, at least in my world. And with so much hate bubbling to the surface in the current political climates, I have resolved to love what matters.
If I think of myself as a fraction of the population of the planet, I am an infinitesimal part of the equation. But if I simply see myself as a fraction of my community, my significance becomes notably more meaningful. Perhaps I cannot make a difference on a global scale but I can certainly try to make a difference within the boundaries of my geography and that is what I am trying to do.
The world can only be changed by example, not by opinion. And now, more than ever, the world really needs us to be the change we wish to see.
An open world begins with an open mind
6 CommentsI saw this video on Facebook. Every so often, after spending countless minutes of looking at absolute crap, you stumble on something that is absolutely worth watching. And after watching this video, which is more of a summation of a few people, I continued down the line and watched all of the individual videos that were posted. I was in tears after watching this video. I was sobbing at the end of last one I watched.
But the tears I shed weren’t specifically about the videos. The tears I shed were about the message that I got from watching the reaction of each person as they found out they weren’t exactly who they thought they were. Each of the participants were so adamant about their background that they had all but dismissed any other reality….until they got their results.
The message in this experiment is one I wish we could spread across the planet. And this test is one that I wish WAS made mandatory for everybody. Finding out you share DNA with someone you have been historically trained to hate, not as a person but as a race, religion or belief, would be a hard pill to swallow. But that pill could possibly begin to cure the current pandemic called Hate.
We the people….
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We the people – three words at the beginning of a document meant to bring together and not divide a nation.
As a Canadian, I have felt the need to hold my tongue about what has recently happened south of our border. It is not my place to make judgement since I do not live in that country and I did not cast a vote in their election. But what happens in the United States affects me, not as a citizen but, as a human being.
What is currently taking place in a country that is my neighbour, that is home to many of my friends and some of my family, is unsettling. I am not writing this blog post with any political view in mind. My beliefs bear no consequence on the words that I am about to write. I am simply afraid that a door has been opened that may require many years to close again.
I am friends with some who support Trump and I am friends with some who support Clinton. Their choices are none of my business and the least of my concerns. My worries stem from the divide that has now been created, and that gash in humanity has allowed hatred and idiocy to bubble through its fissure of common sense.
Regardless of the outcome of the recent election, we are all still members of the human race. We have made leaps and bounds over the years to become a diverse and accepting population but lately it seems the masses are not listening to understand, they are merely listening to reply and have their own voices heard above the crowd.
My heart weighs heavy in my chest tonight and my brain is riddled with concern. Where does our collective society go from here? Will it one day wake up from its hangover, shake it off and say “What were we thinking”? Or is this the beginning of a binge….a need to test the limits of humanity to see how much it can get away with before justice finally catches up with it?
We, the people, may not all live inside of the borders of the “united” states. But we, the people, at least the people I have in my circle of friends, live as equal members of the human race and are very simply seeking liberty and justice for all.
Thyme and time again…
2 CommentsIt is a painfully contradictory reality in my mind, but this is truly my favorite time of the year. Sure, the leaves are gone and the landscape is a gloomy blend of brown and grey. It’s depressing. And sure, the clock has slipped backwards by sixty minutes and it gets dark at 5:00 pm. That’s disheartening as well. But I have to look at the bright light that now greets me in the morning when I wake up at 6:00 am and think of all of the good things that happen in my life this time of year.
When the doors of the lodge close for the season and the work clock slows to a turtle pace, my life clock has the freedom to pick up its momentum and I have much more spare time to spend doing things for others.
There is something inherently fulfilling about being able to give my time and my skills to causes that have taken up residence in my heart. Last winter was the first of hopefully many that groups of locals gathered to make freezer crockpot meals for a family who lost their home to fire while in the hospital delivering twins. We banded together, gave our Thyme and our time, and filled their freezer with a few months worth of meals. So many of the group commented on how wonderful they felt being able to help.
And this year will be the fourth year I have organized a Toy Drive for the local children. To say the response has been incredible would be an egregious understatement. My heart swells so much when the time comes to pack up the toys for delivery that I am overwhelmed by emotion.
I had always looked at volunteers in silent awe. I knew they must feel some reward to give their time, their generosity or even just their smile or a touch of their hand to help someone’s day become a little brighter, but I had no idea how truly euphoric the feeling was until I began giving my time. And now that I have had a taste of that….I will always want more. If you have never had the chance to do any volunteer work and the opportunity presents itself to put up your hand to help, in any way, I promise you won’t regret it!
The rain from my heart
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A single drop,
a salty tear,
lingers in the corner of my eye,
tentative at first,
until the relief comes
from letting go of the emotion
I’ve held so close to my heart.
One drop follows the contour of my cheek,
marking the path for others to follow.
I feel solace in that line of emotion.
I trace it with my finger
as countless tears fall in succession,
trailing the first,
releasing my imprisoned worry.
Only the silence hears me cry,
and when my tears have all but gone,
the clouds over my heart are lifted,
and my rain has washed away my unease.
Getting the green light
6 CommentsThe lodge where I am employed is closed for the season, our quaint little village resembles more of a ghost town with a few tumbleweeds rolling down the main street and the silence at night can be deafening.
But in these times of serenity, behind the doors of seemingly empty kitchens, a group of women and men are readying themselves to wield sharp knives and give even Gordon Ramsay a run for his money in the chopping department!
Our small group of devoted volunteers meet for a couple of hours over a couple of weekends to create crockpot freezer meals to help a few families who may be struggling, for whatever reason. Last year, it was a young family who had lost their home in a fire just after delivering twins. This year we are doing our best to spread the meals to a few families and not just one.
There have been a few hurdles along the track to finding these families but the ribbon at the finish line is getting to be within striking distance. Although the meals are being prepared in an inspected and certified kitchen, many of the choppers have not taken a food safety course, so there was a question as to whether the food bank was going to be allowed to accept our donations.
The joy of living in a small town is that you can literally ask your neighbors if they know of any families who could benefit from our knife skills and they will immediately give you a list of names. And I have recently discovered that, as long as the meals are labelled with all ingredients (which they are), the food bank will give us that long awaited green light and accept the meals – so the only thing left to do is shop and chop!
Putting the “jerk” in knee-jerk reaction…..
6 CommentsOn Saturday, I spent a couple of hours at our local Foodland trying to promote our small curling club. We had a tiny table set up with a lone chair, our club banner and some flyers with information about our open houses and our membership rates. What I thought was going to be a couple of hours of chatting about the club turned into a very eye-opening experience and a great deal of fodder for this blog post.
If you have ever shopped in a grocery store, you have undoubtedly seen small town clubs raising awareness (or funds) for their groups. Having never been on this side of the table before, I was ill-prepared for the events that transpired.
Many locals did stop at the table. To their good fortune, and our misfortune, they were snow birds counting the days until they left for the sunny south. We did receive a collection of names to add to our list of possible new members. But what I didn’t expect were the reactions of the multitude of people going by who would do anything to avoid eye contact with me.
Let me remind you, I was not selling anything or asking for money. Most shoppers picked up their pace as they passed me, looking straight ahead as if trying to remember where they parked their car. Several people didn’t even want to know why I was sitting in that cold lobby, they just told me they didn’t have any cash and kept moving. One lady went so far as to tell me she had already donated! This generous stranger had somehow anonymously given money to our little curling club and nobody on the executive committee were any the wiser.
The crowning glory was a middle-aged woman who, as she pushed her full grocery cart past me, simply responded “NO” when I had asked, “How are you today?”.
I was in awe of how quickly people were willing to dismiss me, to turn a blind eye and not even take a moment to understand why I was there. My presence wasn’t threatening. I was not holding my hand out asking for anything. To say I was disappointed by the reactions of those people is an egregious understatement. And I can only hope that if I ever have a knee-jerk reaction to a similar situation, that I’m not such a jerk about it.
I am in love
9 Comments“Life is about finding someone who understands the sum of your parts….and not just some of your parts.” ~ SN
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It seems my brain, lately, has been running programs in the background that I have been unaware of, until now. Being in the hospitality industry, and being a student of life, I have had the good fortune of meeting a great number of couples. Some couples go through their journey alone and many travel the road of life with their children. And over the last few months, I seem to have been paying much more attention to how these couples interact with each other – the nuances of the looks they give each other, their unspoken communication and the respect they have for each other as best friends and as lovers, and not just as parents.
There is a silent language they speak, an inaudible conversation they have been having for years. You can see it in the way they look at each other and laugh at the same silly things. Their declaration of love comes from a mere touch, their bodies speak to one another, and their understanding of each other comes from years of really getting to know everything about that other person.
I have slowly come to realize that I am in love with the way they are in love. They just get each other. They realize that they have found the person who loves everything about them and not just the things they are supposed to love. They share crazy habits and the same sense of humor but they are mindful of the mannerisms that they don’t quite understand. They can spend hours just talking and never be bored in each other’s company.
The opening line of this post is one I came up with earlier this year and it has stuck with me. Enough so that it has haunted me until I was able to eventually use it on this blog.
Whether I have yet to meet him or he is somehow already in my life, I’m willing to wait for that someone. That person who will know me, really know me, and take every opportunity to let me know that he gets my math.
I’ll have what she’s having….
2 CommentsI have several friends who suffer from chronic pain. Some have a mildly annoying dull ache that never goes away and some are almost immobilized by debilitating pain. My dog recently became a victim of that chronic pain but, unlike my friends, she had no voice to tell me how uncomfortable she had been until it was alarmingly noticeable.
If you read my most recent blog post, you’ll know that I took Callaway in to the vet on Tuesday and the vet prescribed an anti-inflammatory with a mild pain-killer. After one dose and about six hours, she was a brand new dog. She regained some of her youthfulness and we seemed to move the clock back by four years.
I immediately became jealous of my dog’s new vitality and joie de vivre. I told the vet I would call the day after her appointment to report how she was doing on the medication and my first sentence began with “I don’t know what is in that Meloxicam, but I want some”.
But as much as I feel the oncoming burdens of aging, I consider myself very lucky that I have not fallen victim to the same incessant pain that my friends must bear. It seems so unfair that the people who are able to voice their symptoms still suffer the same torment from their chronic pain, try prescription after prescription, and feel no relief at all.
I can only hope that each of you will eventually find your Meloxicam and enjoy the freedom of movement that so many of us take for granted each day.
polysyllabic profundities 