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Change the World: Love Animals and Learn from Them!

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For GP, Hart, and Whitney

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Sometimes we only have to participate in a small way to make a big change.

One of us, plus one of us, plus another one and we make a difference.

For all of our animals and all of our animal lovers . . .

Hart is looking for stories of how people saved animals. It happens all of the time. Save an animal. Save a life.

Whitney saves animals every day.

GP brings us the wisdom of two particular sages and role models both of whom are “interested and interesting.”

Animals help us live longer, know ourselves better, and appreciate things other than buildings and paper. When we understand that, we somehow expand as human beings. People around us notice.

We don’t have to stop a highway. We only need to appreciate our relationship with all creatures. The planet would be a lonely place, if we were left with only each other.

We can change the world — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Unconditional Dots Between Fathers and Daughters

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Connecting dots with The Idea Dude

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Liz challenged me to write about a topic quite a while back. For the longest time, it never got written. Like seeing the first rainbow after rain, some things are just so darn hard to put into words. I was relating to her how my daughter danced into my life 13 years ago and this year literally danced into the world with great success. I was so proud. Liz said…

Why don’t you write a post about fathers and daughters? …this is it!

As long as I can remember, my daughter never walked to me. She always ran, whether it was at the airport, meeting her at school or anywhere where there were more than 20 feet between us. She ran.

This week, as I walked through the front door, she bounded down 2 flights of stairs, flung her arms me and hugged me like there was no tomorrow. When I asked what was so special, she simply said…

Just because…

At that moment, the clarity she brought to our relationship blew me away. Why should there be reason?

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Liz’s dad understood this long before I did. So it’s not surprising that he features so prominently in her blogging goal. Most daughters are proud of their fathers, as they should be. I won’t try to convince you how outstanding mine was. I’ll just tell that it is so. Her dad was not just part of her legacy but surely part of her destiny too.

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I suspect that Connie’s dad helped her realize that every dot connects. This lifelong Daddy’s Girl tells us one of the best gifts he gave was her conversational heritage.. He connected to Connie in a very special way and now she adds that “special” to all the dots she finds.

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There is nothing more beautiful than the tribute that Sheena wrote for her father. The ending is priceless…


He’s the man who gave me more
Than ever I could see
And now that I am grown
His heart lives inside of me…

Can’t think of a better way to end this post than with two lines from John Mayer’s song about Daughters.

I know a girl
She puts the color inside of my world…

May the dots be with you!

Vern, The Idea Dude

Girls, and Boys, and Best Friends for Life

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Talk or Action?

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When he was in high school, my son and I drove a few hours to visit a friend in at her family’s summer house. On our way home, we talked about the ways that people relate to each other.

He wondered why gossip was important, especially to the girls.

I told him I didn’t know the answer, but that I thought it had to do with point of view. I explained that through my life I had made some observations — so had his father. I said, “When you were in preschool, your dad was amazed to see the difference between the boys and girls each afternoon when he would come to collect you.”

“In what way?”

Friends

I said that the boys were all physical energy, often bouncing off the walls. The girls were all conversational, often chattering out of control. It seemed true of most young children.

I told him that I had figured it out this way.

Maybe it’s that girls do things together so we can talk to each other, and guys talk to each other so that they can do things together.

My 16-year-old said “So that would be why, then, that most guys quit having ‘best friends’ after about age 10.”

I said, “I hadn’t really thought of that.”

I don’t know that boys and girls are so clear cut definable. I’m not qualified to say so. I know I watched the boys I taught seek out other boys who liked to play the same games. I saw the girls I taught seek out games that were conversational venues. Smarter folks haven’t quite explained what makes it so. I only have my limited experience to go on.

A friend listens, understand, and knows who I am.
A friend shares my interests in action. Friends walk the walk.

Maybe the combination is where best friends for life are found.

I guess I notice, because I’m just a bit of the exception. I wonder if it’s the same or different where you come from?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Give Yourself Permission to Claim Your Life

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The How to Happiness

In January, I wrote these words.

I want to have the time of my life.

I wrote about the how to happiness and listed out ten ways to live life. The first way was to claim it.

We don’t need to get a life.
We need to own the one we’ve got.
Owning our life is the first step to living life.

Give Yourself Permission to Claim Your Life

After years of school and people telling us what to do, we can find ourselves doing what “comes next” for everyone without ever considering whether that’s what should come next for US. We end up moving through time doing things, but not really living life.

Give yourself permission to claim your life. You know you can do this. What is a few minutes in the context of the hundreds of thousands that you might reignite?

  1. Stop what you’re doing.
    Still yourself, your body, and your mind, completely.
  2. Sit and breathe in deeply.
    Be inside your skin.
  3. Notice the feeling that begins to become you.
    Keep breathing deeply.
  4. Keep with that feeling until you forget about the breathing,
    until you are comfortable feeling the lightness of being.
  5. Name that being feeling “living.”
    Don’t try to make it into anything.
  6. When you feel like a human, get up and do something to claim this life you’re living.

Go Out to Claim It

Here are a few ways you might do that, in case this notion is new to you.

  1. See the sun rise. See a beautiful sky.
    See a smile you put on someone’s face.
  2. Eat something delicious.
    Share a marvelous meal with a friend.
  3. Send yourself fresh flowers.
    Keep some and give some away.
  4. Listen to the sounds of nature that you don’t usually hear.
    Enjoy silence, especially silence share with someone you care about.
  5. Take the longest shower or bubble bath in your experience.
    Buy something soft as cashmere and give it someone who inspires soft thoughts.
  6. Kiss someone you love.
    Follow that with a hug.

Most folks don’t need ideas to fill our life moments. But we might need an occasional reminder to fill our moments with life. Once we start breathing and inhabiting our skin again, the ideas for living life aren’t hard to recognize.

How will give yourself permission to claim your life?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Everyone Is Having Marvelous Day

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Before the Day Is Fully Conscious

When the first bit of morning comes to visit, I’m hardly awake. I walk in the dark to the kitchen. Still, I have an intention, an aspiration ready and waiting. I think about it before I go sleep.

Sunrise before the day is fully conscious

I will have positive things happen. I intend. I mean. Intend to make my a positive life. Positive things make a life light free. I mean to fill my life with them. I see. I will. I see no reason that why I cannot be or do what I set out to be or do. I will be someone who changes the world one person at a time.

The word intention literally means stretching toward. The word aspiration means breathing toward.

I intend to aspire to bend my knee and fly higher. I intend to become more and then imagine even more.

The possibilities are as big as my heart, as unconditional as my love, as generous as the rain. — Aspire

I wish those ideas into my head and my heart even before the day is fully conscious. When I succeed, everyone around me notices they’re having a marvelous day.

What will you stretch toward, breathe toward, today?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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The Single W Seal of Approval

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Can we talk about . . .

a seal of approval.

No, I’m not advocating that anyone be a “people pleaser.” For goodness sake, I just wrote yesterday about the incredible influence of being a 65th Crayon.

A comment on the post about saying “thank you” to folks on social networks got me thinking. Here’s the part of the comment that Rob Scott left . . .

Sending thank you notes is a good idea. My grandma would definitely approve too – and there’s not much on the internet that she would approve of!!

It’s not about Rob’s grandma, or my grandma, or that fact that I’m old enough to be someone’s grandma — even though I’m surely not. It’s about how the world has changed since we’ve gone from an alphabet that had one W to addresses that have three — www. It’s also about how, though the world has changed, people have stayed mostly the same.

So I’m thinking about the question and I wonder if you’ll think with me.

Be it my dad (born in 1907) or your grandma, or any hero you know from the era of the Single W . . .

What on the Internet would get your hero’s Single W Seal of Approval?

I’ll go first. You can find my answer in the comment box.

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