The Caring Catalyst

Who Cares - What Matters

Your NOBEL PRIZE

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Have you ever had one:
A NOBEL PRIZE MOMENT. . . ?
A moment where you make a lifesaving contribution for all of
H U M A N I T Y. . .

The Nobel Prize Season has begun:

STOCKHOLM — The 2019 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicinehas been awarded to scientists William G. Kaelin, Jr, Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza.

They received the award jointly for their discoveries of “how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability,” the Nobel Committee announced Monday.

Two of the scientists, Kaelin and Semenza, are U.S.-based, at Harvard University and Johns Hopkins respectively. The other scientist, Ratcliffe, is based at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

It is the 110th prize in the category that has been awarded since 1901.

The Karolinska Institutet said in a statement the trio should share equally the 9 million kronor ($918,000) cash award.

The discoveries made by the three men “have fundamental importance for physiology and have paved the way for promising new strategies to fight anemia, cancer and many other diseases,” the Committee said.

So Congratulation, William, Peter and Gregg
for your contribution to the world
for your prestigious award
for your
R E M I N D E R:

As Caring Catalyst’s
it always comes back to us at the most
simplest
purest
C E L L U L A R level
and we
now more than ever
as dramatically
as desperately
as the very oxygen
in the cells that connect us
the love that binds us
the hate that can never obliterate us. . .

For their contribution
and the honor of the Nobel Prize
William, Peter, and Gregg each received $918,000.00
For YOUR contribution
and the honor
to give
to serve
the honorarium is
p r i c e l e s s
(connect anyway–all-ways)

YOUR TICKET

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https://youtu.be/I9Inh5kTpV8

We’ve all got a
T I C K E T
and the biggest question is:
ARE YOU CASHING IT IN?
GIVING IT AWAY?
TICKET. . .WHAT TICKET?

Most of us are trying to hold open a door
that doesn’t exist
for folks who
need more than an opening
to go forward. . .

We’ve got to get past
doing for others
what we’d want done for
o u r s e l v e s
to
DOING FOR OTHERS
WHAT THEY TRULY WANT DONE
for
T H E M S E L V E S

It’s time to
CARING CATALYST UP
and Verb up
K I N D N E S S. . .

DARE
to make Another feel
that real Kindness is
giving up something you need
yourself
(all-ways)

What about THEM Apples ?

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https://youtu.be/hma8JBEWHpU

I was never good at Math;
I’m still not. . .
and some have actually said,
“It’s because you never applied yourself!”
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. . .
Maybe
but
THEY SAY
Math is pure
and it explains everything. . .
T H E Y
don’t know
e v e r y t h i n g. . .

5 + 4 = 9
but so does
6 + 3
and
8 + 1
or even
10 – 1
and many more options
so how exact is Math;
HOW PURE. . . ?
and more:
WHO IS RIGHT?

W a i t. . .
W h a t. . .
are we talking about Math,
a n y m o r e

S O M E T I M E S
the things
that aren’t so
E X A C T
that can’t be
F I G U R E D
give you the most wonderful
a n s w e r s
without showing your work
( but actually/factually living IT )
How about them, Apples?

Hey. . .
How’s
YOUR
M A T H
. . .go figure!

YOUR MOVIE

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. . .SOMETIMES WHAT IS BROKEN
IS REALLY
F I X E D

So what kind of a person are you?
 Are you the kind of person that believes everything happens
for a purpose
or a reason
and it absolutely has a meaning. . . ?

Are you the kind of person that says hey nothing has a purpose;
it’s all fate. . .
Are you the kind of person that believes in the Doris Day Que Sera, Sera whatever will be will be
kind of person?  
We probably have the opportunity to ask ourselves this question at least 100 times a day,
maybe even 10,000 times a week
and the interesting part is
the answer
may change from situation to situation.  . .

So here we are at a movie to see The Goldfinch and having went through all of the previews are awaiting the main attraction when all of a sudden the screen goes blank. . .
Well not completely blank ~~
computer blank:

Now mind you, there were only two couples that were attending this movie and after the more than uncomfortable 20 minutes of silence and shifting about, Management came in and apologized and said there will not be a movie that night; that they were having a malfunction with the equipment. Now there were a couple of options: we could go to another show or we could be refunded our tickets. 

Fate ?
 Purpose ?
 Que Sera, Sera ?

It kind of hit me at that moment
that maybe
some of the best movies there are,
A R E N ‘ T
M A Y B E
 The best movies aren’t the ones that come from the screenplay
weren’t adapted from a novel or short story
The best movies aren’t the ones that are being adapted from a true life situation
or even the infamous, Mark Twain one-liner:
“All stories are true; some of them actually happened. . . .”

No,
I didn’t think any of those things so much as
maybe the best movie really
is the one that’s not on the screen
or not from any other medium
but the one that’s continually being created, formatted and shown from the Inside;
NO TAKES,
NO CUTS,
NO EDITING,
NO BUDGET
n e c e s s a r y
The one
where no Concessions are available,
no bathroom breaks taken. . .
(or needed)
The movie of our mind
and better still
the actual real life footage
from our life
is much more compelling
than anything that can come from a book
Anything that can be shown on the screen
Anything that can be adapted to the digitalized formats. . . 

So what kind of a person are you?

An Everything has a reason and a purpose, Person
A Fate. everything is just fate, Person
Que Sera, Sera whatever will be will be, Person
Or a you kind of person where
You are the Creator
the writer
the producer
the co-producer
of your movie.   . . ?

Maybe it’s the one that hasn’t even made it to the reel
hasn’t even been digitalize to get up on the screen
hasn’t haven’t even had the first letter of the first word in the first paragraph imagined or written yet.  . . ?

Maybe

Maybe
Maybe
it’s that fresh
that new
that now kind of thing
It would even surprise you
what you’re about to produce. . .

And now for the most important question of all:

Who are your co-stars?

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Turn off your cell phones

The lights have dimmed
the theaters darkened
and all is quiet on the set
The action is about to begin
And here’s the promise:
The next scene is better than the last one or any others before
If. . .

COME ON. . .
You’ve paid for
THE TICKET
a thousand times over
DON’T MISS THE SHOW
(a g a i n)


FAILING GOOD

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Do Other People’s Failures Make You More Self-Compassionate?

It’s a fair question. . .
and you ask it without always realizing that it’s even something you care much about

B U T

Knowing you’re not alone in failure might activate self-compassion in some people. . .
Y O U ?

It’s a question that the journalist,  KIRA M. NEWMAN recently posed

Failure is trendy. Many successful people today are broadcasting their fails, flaws, and imperfections for all of us to see—from entrepreneurs who designed a whole conference about failure to fitness gurus posting their face-plants to Instagrammers fond of the #fail hashtag.

They seem to be aiming to normalize failure itself—to say to the rest of us (who are hiding our faults in a deep, dark closet) that it’s okay, everyone trips up sometimes. That’s a message we might try to communicate to a close friend when they’re distressed by their own failure. But does this strategy actually help? 

According to a new study, it might—but only for certain people. 

Researchers from the University of Waterloo recruited just over 100 college students to record a three-minute video about their interests and hobbies. Then, they were told, an “objective observer” was going to watch it and rate how socially skilled, friendly, likable, warm, intelligent, and mature they were on a scale of 1-9. 

Before they got their score, students were shown how others had supposedly performed—averaging a 7 out of 9. Then, they got the bad news: They themselves had only scored a 5. (Of course, there were no objective observers and this was all part of the ruse to make students feel like they had failed.) 

Next, the students were shown the score of one of their peers, someone of the same gender and in the same program at the university as them. Half of the participants saw that the peer also got a mediocre 5 out of 9, while the other half found out that the peer scored a 7—leaving them alone in their mediocrity. 

After the experiment, the students filled out surveys of their positive and negative emotions, as well as their shame and guilt. The survey also assessed their level of self-compassion—that is, their ability to be kind to themselves while seeing their struggles as part of the human condition. 

Did it make a difference whether they failed alone or saw others fail, too? It depended on how self-compassionate they were. 

For highly self-compassionate people, the knowledge that they weren’t alone was beneficial—it led them to feel less shame, more positive emotions, and more self-compassion in the moment than when they thought they were the sole failure. This wasn’t the case for people low in self-compassion. 

“Perhaps [the shared failure] led to better responses for self-compassionate individuals because this knowledge supported their pre-existing expectation that failure is a part of life,” write researchers Sydney V. Waring and Allison C. Kelly of the University of Waterloo. Indeed, another recently study found that 

In other words, seeing a fellow coworker miss out on a promotion or another parent arrive late for back-to-school night could give us comfort—provided we already have a tendency to treat ourselves with care and kindness. Hearing about other people’s slip-ups doesn’t seem to create self-compassion out of thin air, though.

“Some people might not actually find that as helpful, and interestingly it would be the people who tend to have a more difficult time with failure—the more self-critical people,” says Waring. 

As Waring and Kelly theorize, shared failure doesn’t really fit with the worldview of the self-critical, who typically see themselves as alone in their flaws and their suffering. 

If you’re trying to comfort a self-critical friend, Waring says, jumping in with your own failure story might not do the trick. Instead, “we should be prepared to be flexible and open to trying out different strategies to see what works best for our friend,” she says—like validating their feelings about how hard the situation is.

And if you’re the one with a tendency to be harsh on yourself, you may need to cultivate self-compassion. Doing so will tend to bolster our beliefthat failures are learning opportunities and part of life. According to this study, that self-compassionate attitude could help us feel comforted when we witness the fallibility of other humans.

So here’s the question
(maybe for your LIFE):
ARE YOU THE KIND OF FRIEND
YOU’D WANT TO HAVE. . . ?

Pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst
OF THE DAY:

MY TWO CENTS

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TWO CENTS
isn’t a whole lot
until your ability to
GIVE YOUR TWO CENTS
or you’re forced to get
A N O T H E R ‘ S
TWO CENTS. . .

I’ve been offering up
MY TWO CENTS
for well over 40 years now as a
Parish Minister;
It’s the title I give my monthly
Newsletter posts. . .
and more recently,
I do a bit in my presentations that emphasizes
not so much
G I V I N G
your TWO CENTS
as being a literal
Depository
for the-often-not-so-welcomed-two-cents
of Others. . .

These Pennies
ARE NOT
Magical
and they hold no special significance;
They will buy you
little to nothing
U N L E S S
Y O U
bring (add)
THEM to a larger Good. . .
Sound Familiar?

The Gift of your
Compassionate Presence
allows Another
i m p l o r e s
THEM
to share their
Two Cents. . .

E V E R Y O N E
has a story
that not so much desperately needs to be told,
but even more fiercely has to be Heard;
Y O U
are the
H E A R E R
of such stories. . .
Y O U
hold space
for them with each encounter
and it not only makes the
o r d i n a r y
E X T R A o r d i n a r y,
IT DEEMS
it a most sacred
Holy Communion. . .

YOUR TWO CENTS
will be a cue
for you to remember
YOU WILL NEVER BE PENNILESS
giving as you do;
YOU WILL ALWAYS BE ABLE TO KEEP YOU SENSE (c e n t s)ABOUT YOU
because very often those around us
most often can’t or don’t. . .

S E E. . . ?
Nothing magical. . .
T H I N G S
often don’t contain all that much magic;
THE MYSTICAL
takes place
at the end of the hand;
person to person
one at a time;
S A C R E D
H A L L O W E D
and not merely for what you do
but that you do
it consistently
s e l f l e s s l y. . .

YOUR TWO CENTS
won’t so much be
THE CHANGE
jingling around in your pocket
as the
HOLY CHANGE
you bring to Another. . .

And now for my humble
TWO CENTS:
YOUR LIFE
HAS BLESSED MANY;
MAY IT NOW BE BLESSED
TO BLESS MANY MORE

S E E ?
p r i c e l e s s



I have a MIND to. . .

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M I N D F U L N E S S

. . .talk about a buzz word
that may not be always completely
m i n d e d

What Mindfulness Actually Means

A couple of journalists, Peechaya Burroughs for TIMEBY CATHERINE CUELLO-FUENTE  pull back the
MINDFUL Curtain
and give us some glimpse of what this
M I N D F U L N E S S
might be all about:

There’s a lot of talk about mindfulness lately, but what does it actually mean? “Mindfulness” is a translation of the Buddhist concept of sati. Sati, which Buddhists consider the first of seven factors of enlightenment, means, “memory of the present,” and that’s exactly it:
Mindfulness means to be present.

Mindfulness means to slow down, to be kind, to look at someone and not through someone. To accept that life has its ups and downs but that, in the end, the downs pass like clouds in the sky. It’s realizing that, even though it may be easier to run than to walk, it is in stillness or slowness that you start to find beauty around you and in everything that you do.

Mindfulness helps you enjoy the day-to-day and teaches you that there is no better place to be than where you are right now. You learn to see things that are unpleasant as temporary or as tiny chapters in the larger story that is your life. Our culture makes us believe that only big life events—birthdays, a promotion, graduation, New Year’s Eve—are worth celebrating. As a result, we end up underappreciating the things that we do every day.

I see people all the time who do not realize their worth. They complain because they’re so focused on what they are looking forward to that they cannot be mindful and enjoy what is in front of them. And with the dying, it sometimes can be magnified to make it so much worse or it focuses them like they’ve never been before in their lives and they see with a clarity no corrective lenses could ever promise. Unfortunately, as it usually happens, I had to hit rock bottom to learn this myself. . .We all do and maybe the secret is:
HIT THE BOTTOM FAST
or
RAISE THE FLOOR
so the Fall
is more like a step
than an abyss. . .

Have you ever had those definable moments when you utterly feel:
I wasn’t fulfilled,
I wasn’t challenged or 
I wasn’t enlightened. . . ?

THE ANSWER?
Well. . .
LOOK WITHIN
(except there’s no compass, there’s no GPS, no real manual for that journey)

M I N D F U L N E S S
is well. . .
m i n d f u l
and there are many ways to
attain it
but none
more important than
Y O U R
W A Y

M I N D F U L N E S S

It’s not about the
L a y e r s
so much as knowing which
o n e
you occupy
N O W

M I N D
k i n d. . .
why stand in front of a mirror
catching your reflection
when you can see yourself
from the inside
in a way that can’t be reflected
ONLY REFLECTIVE
?

I have a mind to. . .
be more mindful,
Y O U ?


Assuming YOU Assume

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I’ve used this 4 minute Clip on many different occasions since it first came out from the Cleveland Clinic in 2012;

My point when I present this clip is to
SHOUT THE STATEMENT:
ASSUME THAT EVERY PERSON YOU MEED MIGHT BE HAVING THE ABSOLUTE WORST DAY OF THEIR LIVES
AND YOU ARE THE ONE PERSON
WHO CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. . .

Followed up by one of the most important questions of our modern day era:
WILL YOU?

Every person has a story they desperately need to tell
but even more desperately needs to
BE HEARD. . .

BE
T H A T
P E R S O N
not often—
ALWAYS
all-ways

The Priest that Isn’t, IS

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The priest that isn’t, is. . .


It wasn’t to mock the priesthood
or rip on the Catholic Church
When I came dressed in my black shirt and white collar. . .
It was only a reminder that each of us
at our best
and not so best
are representatives
A M B A S S A D O R S
of something much better than us. . .

It’s also a reminder that first impressions
make a powerful,
p o w e r f u l
statement;
In fact,
when I was at Giant Eagle
prior to the service on Sunday
the cashier sneezed
and the person in front of me and the person behind me and I all in unison said,
“God bless you!”
The man in front of me, seeing me in my collar, said,
“I think it means more coming from him, than us.”
R E A L L Y

And then
as I was walking to my car
a group of Browns fans were coming in
obviously for some refreshments for the upcoming game that afternoon
and one of them yelled out,
“HEY, FATHER, BLESS THE BROWNS, TODAY!”
I just smiled and waved and didn’t have the heart to tell him that I was a Steelers fan. . .
The Golden nugget;
The magical moment came after church
when we stopped at our neighborhood grocery store on the way home to pick up some cat food and dog food
and as we were going through the checkout line the cashier stopped checking us out and said,
“Father, I know you’re off the clock, but I sure could use a blessing.
And before I could say a word she told me what a rough year it has been because her husband has been so sick. . .
And right there in the checkout line,
it became hallowed ground,
the check out counter had become an altar
the cash register shelf
a small Confessional. . .
We both seemed to forget about the people in line;
I asked her what her name was,
“Beth,”
she said no longer looking at me.
“And your husband,” I said, “what’s his name?”
“Larry,”
she said above a whisper like prayer. . .
I asked for her hands
and she reached across the counter and gave them up to me
as a sacred offering. . .
“Beth, may your and Larry’s new upcoming Blessings far outweigh any of the troubles that you’ve had this past year and may you never look at any sunset that brings the darkness without knowing of the explosive Sunrise that follows it.”
She had tears in her eyes and asked me if it would be OK if she could come around the counter and give me a hug.
And as we hugged
I whispered one more Blessing:
“Here’s to your greatest memories being those you’ve yet to create”

Sometimes
the greatest priest that isn’t,
I S

The take away:
You are
T H A T
Priest
especially the one without a collar.  . .

Make Love
your Law
and Kindness
Your Gospel. . .
and recognize the hurt that the World often brings to your door
is often
the very salve you already possess to heal it;
THE QUESTION:
WILL YOU?

The OLDER, The HAPPIER

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Why You Can Look Forward to Being

                      Happier in Old Age.      .      .

If life wanted to mess with you, it couldn’t have come up with a better way than
                                                    D     E     A     T     H .     .     .
Especially the lead-up. Your strength flags; your world narrows; much of what once gave you pleasure and satisfaction is now gone. But as it turns out, happiness is still very much with you—often even more so than before.        .       .

In some ways, our youth and middle years are really a sort of training period for the unanticipated pleasure of being an older adult, psychologist Alan D. Castel of the University of California, Los Angeles, argues in his new book, Better With Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging. In one 2006 study -Castel cites, a group of 30-year-olds and 70-year-olds were asked which of the two age cohorts was likely to be happier. Both of them chose the 30-year-olds. But when those groups were asked about their own subjective happiness, the 70-year-olds came out on top.

Just as surprising as the happy oldster is the miserable middle-ager, Jonathan Rauch reports in his book The Happiness Curve, published in May. Life satisfaction appears to follow a U-shaped course, with its twin peaks in childhood, when the world is one great theme park, and in old age, when we’ve been on all the rides a thousand times and are perfectly content just to watch. It’s in the middle—our 40s and 50s, when our power, potential and productivity are the greatest and we should be feeling our happiest—that life satisfaction bottoms out.

The U is true across nations, cultures and income levels, research shows. It makes a lot of sense. For one thing, all that power and productivity require a lot of work to maintain, and it comes at the very moment when other pressures are the greatest—raising kids, paying the mortgage and those kids’ tuition bills. Your evaluative happiness (how your life would appear if measured in terms of wealth, achievements and a stable family) can be very different from your affective happiness (how you actually feel). A life that looks happy is not necessarily experienced as happy.

In the later decades, this changes in a lot of ways. For one thing, that business of realizing that you may never achieve a long-desired goal can actually be a positive experience. After banging your head against the wall for 40 years to make partner or become department chair, the day you accept you’re free to quit trying comes as a relief.

There is, similarly, what Rauch describes as an older person’s ability to normalize crises. Life can be a series of experiential typhoons, both good and bad—falling in love, falling out of love, marriage, divorce, new job, lost job—and every one of them feels overwhelming at first. But there are only so many Category 5s that can be thrown at you before you realize that the clouds will eventually part and you’ll probably be left wet but standing.

Then, too, there is the business of wisdom. Evolutionarily, any species that hopes to stay alive has to manage its resources carefully. That means that first call on food and other goodies goes to the breeders and warriors and hunters and planters and builders and, certainly, the children, with not much left over for the seniors, who may be seen as consuming more than they’re contributing. But even before modern medicine extended life expectancies, ordinary families were including grandparents and even great-grandparents. That’s because what old folk consume materially, they give back behaviorally—providing a leveling, reasoning center to the tumult that often swirls around them.

In another study cited in Better With Age, a group of successful CEOs of Fortune 500 companies—all 50 to 70 years old—scored lower on lab-based tests of reasoning and processing speed than younger people, yet all the CEOs nonetheless were running huge, stable and exceedingly profitable companies. Clearly, something more than the ability to crunch a lot of data was contributing to their success.

Earlier in life, wisdom can seem out of reach. But for those who have attained it, Castel writes, “often wisdom allows people to see the obvious, or to use common sense without second-guessing themselves or the outcomes.”

Yes, death is nonnegotiable—something that can only be delayed, never avoided. It’s a mercy, then, that when we do reach the end, so many of us arrive there smarter, calmer and even smiling.     .     .

And.          .          .

Maybe that’s not only the greatest revenge of all.          .          .

M            A            Y            B            E
That’s    just
L                I                V                I                N                G
at     its
B            E            S            T

Professional Speaker, Author, Assurance Man