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Change the World: See the Innocence

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Looking and Seeing

Change the World!

When I get stressed or pulled like a wire, my expectations for others creep higher. I don’t see things the way they are, I sometimes get stuck in my head and lose track of the people around me. I sometimes forget that people don’t do things to make my life harder.

I’m learning to pay attention to when I get off like that. It usually starts with need to walk faster, faster, faster.

The minute I start to think I should run is the minute I need to walk slower. That’s the time to breathe and reconnect my heart to my head.

When I start to hide behind the work on my desk . . . when I start to climb too far into my head, I listen to music. I listen again when I start to think the world is on my shoulders. I use music to remind me that I’m not what the center. I’m not where everyone should be looking. I listen to music to remind me that sometimes I don’t see everything.

You must choose compassion over right
and the best place to start is with yourself tonight.
see the innocence in of a crying friend.
see the innocence to your guilty end
see the innocence now — the child in all of us. . . .

Understand the ones you help the most
What they don’t know now accept them for who they are.
see the innocence of someone else
see the innocence to improve yourself
see the innocence now it’s not that hard to see. . . .

If I had and you had one last call to make
Who would and what would you say . . .?
Why’d you take so long?
See the innocence. It’s not that hard to see. . . .

— Tommy Henriksen, See the Innocence.

Sometimes I don’t listen to the music, I just think about the words.

We can change the world — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
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If you’re ready to change the world, send me your thoughts in a guest post. Feel free to take the gorgeous Change the World image up there that Sandy designed back to your blog. Or help yourself to this one.

Change the World!.

Email me about what you’re doing or what we might do. Let’s change the world one bit at a time together. Together it can’t take forever.

About Heroes and Believing

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I've been thinking . . .

Late last night I read what Ellen wrote. She was talking about Seth’s piece on thrill seekers and fear avoiders. I read Seth’s post too. I woke this morning thinking about what I read.

Both of them avoided the word risk in the traditional sense. Seth said, “So why not call them risk seekers and risk avoiders? Well, it used to be true. Seeking thrills was risky. But no longer. Now, of course, safe is risky.”

Ellen said, “Thrill seekers move on, learn and live so that new opportunities soon wash over both thrills and fears in colors that open curtains of another Oscar possibility.”

They’re both right, but I still feel the risk — the Steve Farber OS!M of doing something when not doing something would be easier.

I guess, I’ll always be something of a thrill-seeking, risk taker. I won’t risk my life — no bungee jumping for me. The risks that I take are for the world that I believe in. I invest in every chance I can find to prove it’s okay to believe.

Sometimes those angels who are everywhere stand up and invest even before me.

I know some folks who are risking what they don’t really have to make something happen, They are investing in doing a usual thing in a remarkable way, solely becasue it’s time someone did. It’s not share the risk, share the benefit, because those who benefit won’t ever know — actually feel — the risk.

Somewhere along my life, I picked up a message that believing in heroes was naive at best. White knights and folks who do things without thought of gain or glory are often portrayed as fictional creatures. People who cared for my well-being told me that often enough. For them, I tried to believe, but how could I after the dad I had? My only recourse was to decide I’d rather be a fool than live in a world where heroes couldn’t be.

I chose right.

I’m taking that risk alongside those folks I talked about. And every day I watch them and think they are my heroes.

Heroes are ordinary people who have extraordinary values.

And they really do exist. They’re the ones who quietly do remarkable things so that we can believe.

Liz's Signature

Time to Spend and to Save

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I've been thinking . . .

“Beginning in 2007, most of the United States begins Daylight Saving Time at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday in March . . ” This year that is March 11.

The clocks are about to change. I heard a bird yesteday. Soon it will be spring. I hope I get to see it. The tulips are my favorite.

My life has started speeding up. Gee, like it hasn’t been fast all along. Projects are reaching their launch. Big events are happening. SOBcon is one week. My son graduates from college the next. How can time go by faster than it already has?

Spring forward one hour — one hour less. I don’t need less. More might be useful.

Daylight Savings Time. Who is saving mine? I only know who is spending it. That would be me.

Sometimes, without thinking, I spend and save time simultaneously.

We’re on the porch in Massachusetts. My husband is fixing my glasses. My son smiled, “So, you finally found a use for him.”

We’re in the living room in Illinois. I wrote a poem for a kindergarten lesson. “You think you’re five, but you’re only four-thirty,” joked my husband.

I hear my father saying, “If you sleep on the floor, you’ll never have to worry about falling out of bed.”

My my older, older brother called on our 23rd wedding anniversary. “Tell your husband I said he chose wisely.”

When I was small, time was huge, unending, constantly thrusting me forward. But that’s not time, no, not really. Time’s not a moving, unbending force upon me.

Time is a paradox of meaningful or meaningless moments. We can lose track of it We can waste it or wait for our time to be over.

If we’re lucky we find that time is the one thing we can spend by living and save in memories..

Spring back and breathe.

I don’t need to save time, or find time or make more time in my life.

I need to spend more time that I can save as memories.

Liz's Signature

Change the World: Doing What’s Humanly Possible

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The Power of Offering

Change the World!

In publishing the schedules were killer, at certain times of year — at some places all year — folks would work 16 hour days and through the weekend. I would find myself telling new editors to go home without work. The conversation would often be the same.

“Go on home. You’re tired. You’ll come back tomorrrow and in the first hour you’ll accomplish three times what you would do in the next hour now.”

“But I want to get this one thing done.”

“Okay, we have to do what we need to. But will you do one thing for me?”

The answer was always an anticipatory look, tinged with a fear of possible more work.

“Remember that you can only do what’s humanly possible. . . . and to think you can do more makes you a kind of snob [big grin here], because the rest of us humans can’t.”

The reply would shoulders relaxing and a move to start packing up.

When I start to get ‘whelmed and rushed, I know it’s time to slow my step. I
So often I try to do more, be more, help more than the next guy. I might try to out achieve the overachiever, but I cannot do more than is humanly possible. For me to think that is sort of arrogant. What human can do more than a human can?

I can only do what’s humanly posisible.

It’s such a nice thought. I immediately relax when I think that humans need to eat, sleep, relax, reflect, reach for balance to be effective.

I can only do what’s humanly posisible. It’s like a mantra for overachievers.

I accept it, and people start smiling. Being human is attractive. It makes other humans feel good to have me around

We can change the world — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
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If you’re ready to change the world, send me your thoughts in a guest post. Feel free to take the gorgeous Change the World image up there that Sandy designed back to your blog. Or help yourself to this one.

Change the World!.

Email me about what you’re doing or what we might do. Let’s change the world one bit at a time together. Together it can’t take forever.

It’s My Weekend

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I've been thinking . . .

Once upon a long time ago, when my son was 2 or 3, I was freelancing as a writer and a production artist. I lived in Chicagoland then too. Only then Chicago was a hub of educational publishers. I never had to want for work to do, and yet, I was always working.

Some of that “always working” was the good old Midwestern’s, “hard work never hurt anyone” work ethic. Some of that “always working” was the freelancer’s, “you never know when or if the next job is coming.” Some of it was the helper’s, ” they have a deadline and I can help them meet it.” or “they need someone with my qualifications, and they really need it.” Then again, some of that constant working was a combination of more subtle forces — fear of a lacking bank account, love of the work and the way it engaged me, and freedom from the need to plan another use for my time.

Whew! That’s a whole lot wrapped up in constantly working.

When I began a full-time job with a publisher, I moved to Texas, and for four months, I lived alone until my family sold our Illinois house. Though I brought work home with me each night, I still found I had time to do other things.

One Friday I rediscovered bookstores. The luxury of time in a bookstore — when no one is waiting and no obligation is pressing for me to go — is a decadent pleasure. WHoa! At 2 in the afternoon, I was ready to hide somewhere to be looked in all night, forever. Doing work was the farthest thing from my mind. When I left hours later, I picked up food on the way home, I made a lovely dinner for myself. and I sat down to eat with one of the pile of books I bought. The work I brought home still in my briefcase.

I read that book all weekend. I carried the same unfinished work in my briefcase back to the office on Monday. From that day forward, I still took work home on the weekend, but it came home with a tacit agreement.

The weekend is my time. Except in a rare case of emergency, I’ll bring the work with permission not to do it. Sometimes doing some work feels good — it’s nice to get a jump on Monday. But I also like knowing that I can leave that work in my briefcase all weekend. The deal is no guilt for not working.

Now that I work at home again, I have no briefcase I fill daily — only a list I make on Friday. But I keep the relationship with that list the same. I pick whether to deal with the list items on the weekend or wait until Monday. . . .

It’s my weekend and now and then, it’s a great idea just to have one.

Liz's Signature

Change the World: Don’t Hesitate to Ask or Offer

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The Power of Offering

Change the World!

We are all aggregators of what we bring into the world and what we experience once we get here. Some context:

I’m the only girl and the baby of the family. I have an older, older brother and a younger, older brother. They were 8 and 9 years old when I was a baby. . . . Yeah, I’m fiercely independent.

Besides that I’m second-generation American. My grandparents were all born in another country. . . . All around me, as I grew up, were messages that said, “Hard work never hurt anybody.”

I was shy and perceptive. . . . My social skills were a cross between a monkey and a Weimaraner puppy — intrusive, cute, and clumsy.

When I went to college, I was the only one who had carried my suitcase. That was the way the world worked. That world had worked pretty well for me.

That explains a lot; doesn’t it?

This morning a man I just met, Fred Zelders, reminded me of all of that with one sentence in his comment..

P.S. Don’t hesitate to ask for help.

Wow! Hit my head. What the heck had I been thinking? I love to help people. Why shouldn’t they get a turn too?

What Fred sent me when we talked minutes later was simpler and more elegant than what I had been planning.

That simple offer — one sentence — changed my world. It saved me hours and gave me something so much better. AND Fred is no longer a stranger.

One sentence.

Thank you, Fred Zelders, for offering. Thank you for your generosity.

We can change the world — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
______________
If you’re ready to change the world, send me your thoughts in a guest post. Feel free to take the gorgeous Change the World image up there that Sandy designed back to your blog. Or help yourself to this one.

Change the World!.

Email me about what you’re doing or what we might do. Let’s change the world one bit at a time together. Together it can’t take forever.