The Caring Catalyst

Who Cares - What Matters

R I S E S

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It’s a tarry black uckiness
Called DARK
and every Soul knows
IT intimately
Every Foot has traveled
Its unmapped Valley
IT not only covers
but smothers completely
And when it descends
with the heaviness of a
Mud-coated itchy wool blanket
IT sucks even the last
desperate breath
no ventilator could salvage
IT HAPPENS
first at a distance
that no horizon can hold
and then even more resounding
than an amplified heart beat
using your ribs as a xylophone
L I G H T
IT rises
with a newness
The Lazarus
of a new day
And it doesn’t hold you
IT FREES YOU
to unimaginable beginnings
G R E A T
is what RISES
THAT never sets
(and is noticed)




Say WHAT?

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Swearing More is a Sign of Healthy Verbal Ability, Study Suggests

She was an 87 year old patient, who, when I first met her told me she had been waiting for my visit because she had a really important question to ask me.

My mind went to the usual things like:
“WHY DOES GOD ALLOW SUFFERING?”
“IS THERE A HEAVEN AND HOW DO I KNOW I’LL GET THERE?”
“WHAT IF I HAVEN’T BEEN GOOD ENOUGH; GIVEN ENOUGH?”
“WHAT ABOUT FORGIVENESS?”

BUT
N O. . .

“IS IT BAD IF I SWEAR, I MEAN A LOT AND I REALLY LIKE IT; IT REALLY FEELS GOOD?“

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm:

We often link the use of slurs and profanities to people who’re rude and ignorant and we view them as impolite and unacceptable in everyday speech. But, even though the use of profanities is still frowned upon, the people who use them may not be as ignorant as we previously believed. According to the 2014 study, conducted by Kristin Joy and Timothy Jay, psychologists, the use of swear words may be a sign of a better vocabulary.

Language Sciences published one part of the study in 2014 which involved 43 subjects who were in their late teens to their early 20ties and had their knowledge of profanities compared to their general vocabulary knowledge. The subjects were first tested with COWAT (the controlled oral word association test) in order to determine the subjects’ ability to list words on command. They were asked to write down as many animals and curse words they could think of starting with a given letter in a minute or so. Next, the participants were asked to list as many animals and curse words they knew in general, also in under a minute. The use of animal names was supposed to be an indication of the subjects’ overall vocabulary and general interest in language. Their results were then compared and analyzed.

The researchers were able to conclude that the ability to produce profanities and curse words is not a sign of overall limited vocabulary. On the contrary, they discovered that fluency in curse words is positively linked to verbal fluency. A rich curse words vocabulary may be a sign of healthy vocabulary rather than a cover for vocabular deficiencies.

If you were curious, the top 3 curse words that appeared most frequently in the test were ‘f*ck’, ‘bi*ch’ and ‘sh*t’, as you may have assumed. There were more than 400 swear words generated in total and only some of them were so creative to be encountered just once. The researchers were surprised to discover that people frequently use creative compositions like ‘cockass’ and ‘ass pirate’.

In conclusion, we must point out that the most important finding in this small sized study only confirmed the hypothesis fluency is fluency. According to the hypothesis, word proficiency is more or less universal, regardless of context. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that if you swear more often you have a richer vocabulary. Moreover, the study doesn’t suggest that fluency is the same as frequency, meaning that it wasn’t able to determine whether swear words are spoken more frequently by people with limited vocabulary or lower IQ or not.

The sample size for the study we refer to is rather small and until a larger scale study is conducted we can only speculate and wait for
confirmation. . .and I’m fairly sure it didn’t include 87 year old hospice patients.

Again:
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Most of the time when a patient asks me any question I usually answer with a question:
“WELL WHAT DO YOU THINK?”

She didn’t pause much before answering:
“I really think it’s alright. I mean the only thing I was really worried about was that it’s not just swearing, it’s REALLY SWEARING. And my favorite go to word when I’m really upset or mad is f*ck; when I shout THAT word, I almost always feel better. . .”

“I think you might have answered your own question, what do you think?”

Again, very little pause before answering, “It’s not like I’m using the Lord’s name in vain, I mean always thought it wasn’t so much what I said as the way I acted or treated someone else. I’ve never called anyone THAT, I just love saying, f*ck when I’m the most upset–it seems to cover what I can’t say or explain. . .”

I asked: “Do you think God knows how we feel without ever saying it or explaining or even praying?”

“Yeah,” she said almost in a sigh. “Yeah I think he knows,” and then almost as if she clicked on some inner light, she beamed, “And who gets me more than God; he made me this way.”

A Third,
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

“Hey, you’re going to come back and see me again, aren’t you?”

“I was hoping you would be thinking that’s ok.”

“Absolutely,” she said. “You give great advice.”

A Fourth
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Maybe it was something I didn’t say?


HOROSCOPE(D)

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We all have them, don’t we:


B I R T H D A Y S

and they always come around once a year. . .

Some are absolutely more celebrated more than others
but all of them have a huge message attached to them:
THERE IS ONE LESS ONE TO CELEBRATE

Now if that doesn’t
blow out the candles
crumble the cake
harden the icing
deflate the balloons
destroy the gifts
and hurricane the party–
N O T H I N G W I L L

B U T

WE AUTHOR OUR OWN HOROSCOPES

Now make no mistake about it. . .
We can allow others to write our scripts
and we can feel powerfully inspired and obligated to follow them. . .

B U T

Why not just author your own
and more importantly:
FOLLOW IT?

Every year has
T W O
N E W
Y E A R S:
January 1
a n d
Your BIRTHDAY. . .
both will have
hopes
new beginnings
anticipations
resolutions
and mostly
RESPONSibilities. . .

GUARANTEED
NEW
YEAR(S):

Write your own HOROSCOPE
and better still:
L I V E
I T
F U L L Y

HERE’S THE SECRET:

W O W
that’s being
H O R O S C O P E (D)

ELDERHOOD

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Birthdays may not be worth celebrating after a certain age. . .
but moments are never to be missed or passed up

A Bucket of Birthday candles won’t much last past a good couple of flickers but we live for the
FLAME
not the fleeting flickers. . .

Do We Need a New Roadmap for Getting Older?

Old age can last half a century, says physician Louise Aronson, so it needs a better definition—and more praise.

Recently journalist, JENARA NUREMBERG asked some fairly pertinent questions that beg for even more compelling answers

What do you think of when you think of “old age?” Maybe you think of it as your time of decline—something to be avoided at all costs. Many of us imagine the few short years just before our death, rather than the long stretch of time often available to explore new interests and relationships and activities.  

Louise Aronson

Author and physician Louise Aronson wants to change that. In her new book, Elderhood, she argues that old age or “elderhood” is a much richer, more nuanced experience than most people understand, and that treating it like an illness or pathology is the wrong approach. She believes people need to embrace elderhood as another normal phase of life—just like childhood and adulthood—with its own challenges and rewards. By reclaiming the narrative around older age, she hopes to not only support elders, but to impact family life, health, research, policy, and society as a whole. 

Louise Aronson: I define elderhood as one of the three main phases of life—what comes after childhood and adulthood. It captures the years that begin between ages 60-70 and continue until a person’s death. And if a person lives until the age of 100, then that means elderhood lasts almost half a century.

Human civilizations from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the early Chinese and Egyptians have been defining old age beginning between 60-70. Because people don’t like hearing that it starts so young, they’ve pushed that to the extreme, whereby people think of “old” as a debilitating phase that only lasts the very few short years right before death. 

Louise goes on to explain: Part of why I wanted to introduce the term elderhood to a wider audience—I did not make it up—was so that we would begin thinking about elderhood the way we think about childhood and adulthood. “Old age” absent the term elderhood is the subject of a lot of prejudice and bias, so we end up with phrases like “silver tsunami” and “no one wants to be old” or “aging is life’s great disaster.” 

By reframing it as this long phase of life with multiple sub-phases—just like childhood and adulthood—we take a broader approach and we can look at it as a society and community, and not just as individuals. So right now having “old” be devalued, with everyone being meant to face it on their own, we hear questions like “can we cure aging?” Why are we treating something that is normal and natural and that has always existed as pathology? 

Now, are there things that come with aging that we would feel much better without? Sure. But we don’t tend to pathologize other entire phases of life. Take adolescence. We recognize that there are behaviors that adolescents are more likely to do that are not good for them or society, but we don’t necessarily say we should get rid of adolescents the way that people often talk about older people. “Let’s go house them somewhere separately, let’s not think about them, let’s build a world for children and adults and then blame older people when that world doesn’t match with their needs or interests.”

Miss Aronson goes on to remind us: There’s more and more out there about age, and there’s so much good stuff; but I felt like the most well-intentioned material was still insulting old age and old people by saying, “Old is only how you feel, 70 is the new 50, 100 is the new 70.” All these things are saying that being old is never in and of itself a good thing or a desirable thing and by extension people who are old are never good people or desirable people. I didn’t like that. 

I also didn’t see anything that pulled together all the different ways in which we’re addressing aging—culturally, medically, socially, historically. We tend to think we’re doing all these novel, innovative things with aging, and although some of the specifics differ, human thoughts and approaches about old age are pretty much the same as what we have in evidence from 2,000 to 5,000 years ago. The attempt to understand and adapt to aging is a very human task and such history shows how important these questions are and how existential they are.

I really like how Louise explains: In medicine, we tend to say that such and such population—children, women, people of color, old people—is somehow different from “the norm,” defining the “norm” as middle-aged white guys, because that’s who was doing medicine. Medical research has begun to acknowledge that children aren’t just variations of adults, and women aren’t just variations of men, and people of color aren’t just variations of white people. We need to recognize that being old is as different from being an adult as an adult is from being a child. We change throughout our lives. 

For example, with vaccine schedules, we have different schedules for adults and children because of different biology and behaviors. Well, biology and behaviors also change from age 75 onward. Even in diseases that primarily affect older people, the research at best will be on the younger range of older people. So we say that older people are different, and yet we apply results from people different than them to them. Then we blame bad outcomes on old age rather than on what it was—a scientific setup that was destined to fail or hurt people because it didn’t study the target population adequately. 

When asked about the HAPPINESS FACTOR as we grow older Miss Aronson reflects: That’s such a good question. Most people are shocked to learn that happiness and life satisfaction go way up just before 60 and continuing into the 80s. So people who are older are much happier than adults in midlife, on average. On average people get happier, and part of that has to do with a real comfort with self and confidence in one’s priorities so that people are more focused on spending time in ways they value and on spending time with people that they value. So their life becomes positive and self-reinforcing. 

Another thing that was just reported this year is that older people generally rate their health pretty good. They look around at other people and generally conclude that, yes, their health is better than they thought it would be. So some of this is about having perspective, which takes decades, and also a comfort with who you are and where you are. And when you think about things like meditation and mindfulness and retreats and such, these are the things that elders are best at naturally. So it’s really interesting that we have this untapped population group that are doing the exact things that so many adults are hungry for and yet adults still disparage the very group that is living the things they wish for themselves. 

I just turned 64 yesterday and I remember when that seemed older than a dinosaur bone with stardust in its DNA
. . .and now it just feels like 34 with a lot more
SNAP
CRACKLE
AND POP
with each step I take
or when I get out of a chair after sitting a little while
or when I try walking down a staircase
or when I make a trip to the bathroom for the
third time before my 5:30 a.m. wake up time

B U T

Never has my
G L O W
been Brighter
been Warmer
My flicker
more FLAME

With a few more
W I C K S
to light
and be lit
with paths not yet traveled,
E N L I G H T E N D

Are You Contagious?

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When Are You Most Likely to Catch Other People’s Emotions?

Researchers discovered an important factor that influences how contagious emotions are.

In a new study, Stanford psychologists examined why some people respond differently to an upsetting situation and learned that people’s motivations play an important role in how they react.

Their study found that when a person wanted to stay calm, they remained relatively unfazed by angry people, but if they wanted to feel angry, then they were highly influenced by angry people. The researchers also discovered that people who wanted to feel angry also got more emotional when they learned that other people were just as upset as they were, according to the results from a series of laboratory experiments the researchers conducted.

Their findings, published in June in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, reveal that people have more control over how their emotions get influenced than previously realized, the researchers said.

“We have long known that people often try to regulate their emotions when they believe that they are unhelpful,” said James Gross, a professor of psychology at Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. “This set of studies extends this insight by showing that people can also regulate the way they are influenced by others’ emotions.”

How do other people influence emotions?

To learn how people react to upsetting situations and respond to others around them, the researchers examined people’s anger toward politically charged events in a series of laboratory studies with 107 participants. The team also analyzed almost 19 million tweets in response to the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

In the laboratory studies, the researchers showed participants images that could trigger upsetting emotions—for example, people burning the American flag and American soldiers abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The researchers also told participants how other people felt about these images.

The researchers found that participants who wanted to feel less angry were three times more likely to be influenced by people expressing calm emotions than by angry people. But participants who wanted to feel angry were also three times more likely to be influenced by other people angrier than them, as opposed to people with calmer emotions. The researchers also found that these participants got more emotional when they learned that others also felt similar emotions to them.

“The degree to which people said they were motivated to feel or not feel certain emotions predicted how much they would be influenced when they were exposed to emotions from other group members,” said Amit Goldenberg, the lead author on the study and a Stanford doctoral candidate in psychology.

Emotional influence on social media

The researchers also looked at social media, where they could see how emotions played out in real time. They focused on the unrest that emerged on Twitter following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

After analyzing almost 19 million Twitter posts, the researchers found that Twitter users were more influenced by stronger emotions expressed by people in their social network compared to weaker and calmer reactions. They also found that when Twitter users responded to tweets that were similar in emotional intensity to their earlier reactions, the users amplified their emotions to express stronger outrage than others in their social network.

“The social dimension of emotions, particularly in response to socio-political events, is becoming increasingly important with the use of social media and people’s constant exposure to the emotions of others in online platforms,” wrote the study’s authors, who also included Jamil Zaki, assistant professor of psychology at Stanford.

Emotions as tools

Researchers have largely assumed that people’s emotions get influenced automatically—in an unconscious, immediate response to other people’s emotions, said Goldenberg. His team’s new research challenges that perspective.

“Our emotions are not passive nor automatic,” Goldenberg said. “They are a little bit of a tool. We have the ability to use our emotions to achieve certain goals. We express certain emotions to convince other people to join our collective cause. On social media, we use emotions to signal to other people that we care about the issues of a group to make sure people know we’re a part of it.”

Further research needs to be done in order to understand the relationship between people and their emotions. One of the next topics Goldenberg says he wants to examine further is whether the desire of people to want to see and experience certain emotions lies at the core of how they choose their network of friends and other people around them.

“It seems that the best way to regulate your emotions is to start with the selection of your environment,” Goldenberg said. “If you don’t want to be angry today, one way to do that is to avoid angry people. Do some people have an ingrained preference for stronger emotions than others? That’s one of my next questions.”

So just how Contagious are you?

If people were around you
in close corners for any part of any day
would they catch a good case of anger

H A P P I N E S S

I N D I F F E R E N C E

Just how
CONTAGIOUS ARE YOU ?
When People are in your midst
Do they come away
INFECTED
with your best
or. . . ?

Psssssssssssssssssssssssssssst:

GET CAUGHT

Start an incurable epidemic
of your glorious self
with no hopes
or no need
of an
a n t i d o t e

This article was originally published on Stanford News. Read the original article.

BY ALEX SHASHKEVICH | JULY 23, 201

GETTING Home for CHRISTMAS. . .IN JULY

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The EDEKA GROUP

is the largest German Supermarket Corporation, currently holding a market share of 26%.  They were founded in 1898 and consists today of several cooperatives of independent supermarkets all operating under the umbrella organization Edeka Zentrale  AG & Co KG, with headquarters in Hamburg.  There are approximately 4,100 stores with the Edeka name that range from corner stores to megastores.

You want to gain even a greater range of attention?

Put out a Video like the one above

FOR    THE    CHRISTMAS   SEASON

So.       .      .

what say

 Y     O     U  ?

Do you think that the video evokes an emotional rape?

Do you favor the Father for faking his death in bringing his family together for Christmas.      .      .

possibly one last time?

Do you blame the Children for not having enough time.         .         .

for being too busy for coming home for Christmas or

 C H R I S T M A S     I N     J U L Y

to be with their lonely dad?

G   E   T   T   I   N   G       H   O   M   E

I mean.           .           .

r  e  a  l  l  y

GETTING   WHAT   HOME

really means is nothing more precious to any of us.      .      .

especially during the Holidays

and not to mention

THE     EVERYDAY

H       O       M       E

means more than showing up at some place we might have lived or grown up in

.        .        .it means more than two story dwelling with a crackling logs in a fire place

.       .       .it means more than decorations or paint schemes

.       .       .it means more than where a meal is shared or a drink is lifted up and toasted

.       .       .it means more than some makeshift, outback family reunion

.        .        .it means more

.        .        .it means    m u c h    more.

But the only question it ever really means is

what it means to you.          .          .          ?

GETTING    HOME

means more than traveling a road

means more than following a route

means more than using GPS

means more than making reservations

means more than a humble dwelling

GETTING    HOME

goes beyond a Dictionary Definition

or a family’s understanding

GETTING   HOME

isn’t something you give or receive

it’s only something

you   have

but maybe haven’t always realized

or worse

put to good use

for you

for others.       .       .

Here’s   to   you

GETTING   HOME

really

G      E      T      T      I      N      G

I    T

See you at the Corner Store

for a gallon of

L O V E

and a pound of

T O G E T H E R N E S S

(every Season)

C H R I S T M A S

or 

C H R I S T M A S     I N     J U L Y

Buccatini With Lamb Sausage

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I wish I could say that Frank Ostaseski is a personal friend of mine. . .
and I’m not so sure that I could even call him a casual acquaintance;
well I did share the stage with him once in Denver, Colorado at a National Hospice and Palliative Care Conference and there was those two times I heard him speak after that. . .and he has responded to a few of my The Caring Catalyst blog posts but friends–no not friends–kindred spirits, well yes. A couple of years ago Frank wrote a book which has quickly become a standard in the field of end-of-life care

B U T
Frank, like you and me
is first and foremost,
H U M A N
with a pulse that beats
blood that flows
lungs that breathe
a brain that thinks
and a heart that’ll one day stop. . .

Frank’s almost did a couple of weeks ago when he suffered a Stroke.
He’s responded well and in fact one week from the time he suffered his stroke he returned back to his houseboat

During his days in the hospital, his wife, Vanda, set up an account on CARINGBRIDGE so she could let one and all know how he was doing by sending out messages that went viral. I particularly like her last post which just appeared a few days ago:

July 20, 2019 

Journal entry by vanda marlow — BUCCATINI WITH LAMB SAUSAGE

Sometimes, being home is as simple as that- Frank’s favorite pasta dish from our local Italian, drenched in Parmesan, with his almost-4 year old Granddaughter holding his hand and leading the Meal Blessing. He had been craving this pasta in the hospital….along with movie watching and cosy blankie afternoons. Hopefully we can do the latter tomorrow, as somehow time accelerates AND stretches like taffy, and we found ourselves reaching the end of the day, both exhausted, in different ways. 

Some truly sweet and connected moments, which I hope I won’t forget; eating Mimi’s farm strawberries and him sharing dreams he’d had in the night. His consciousness is so bright and alive. And then there can be the tired-ness of Little Mind, with its pushy efforts to order time and experience, efforts that make our world hang together here in Consensus Reality. But I am seeing in him the vast freedom of living in Infinite Time rather than Tick Tock time. The shining great heart of compassion that runs very clear in him……Oh and then there was the 90 minute unannounced visit from a Kaiser Home Help Nurse, which was one of the hell realms. It made buying a train ticket in India look simple by comparison.

And so another day ends. Marking one week since the stroke, and as we took an evening stroll down the dock, I felt re-arranged inside. Sitting on a bench, to provide ear rubs to a ginger cat, I realised that the future holds these small precious moments now that all the big plans have blown away.

Thank you for all the love that continues to pour towards us both. It is very humbling. I have begun to read these comments to him, and he gets very quiet and settled – your love is Cranial Sacral for the Soul. 

Deep Bows
Vanda

No more words. . .
LOTS OF FEELINGS
and a sudden urge to have an endless plate of
BUCCATINI WITH LAMB SAUCE
. . .if you have any kind of appetite for living,
REALLY
DEEPLY
PASSIONATELY
s i m p l y
l i v i n g––
join me

Let’s eat and have our fill

Out of this World

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Many celebrations will take place this week commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. We’re focusing on Georgia connections to this amazing historical feat, along with the future of space exploration. 

Tiffany Davis is an aerospace engineer. You may have seen her on your timeline with the hashtag, #YesIAmARocketScientist. That hashtag went viral in 2016 after Davis posted it on her Instagram page, announcing her graduation from the Georgia Institute of Technology

Among her more earthbound accomplishments: her plea to make college more affordable caught the attention of then-President Barack Obama. Since then, Davis has  interned and been hired at Boeing’s mission operations and engineering group in Washington, D.C. 

On Second Thought host Virginia Prescott spoke with Davis and asked her what a rocket scientist looks like.

Interview highlights

On what advice she would give to any young minorities interested in STEM 

It takes … a type of ambition and determination to know that you’re going into a field where there’s not a lot of people that look like you, and some people will doubt that you belong there because there’s not that representation of you already in that field. So [there] will be times where you feel like you have to prove yourself, or you may not belong, but just understand that you have a purpose, and you have an intention, and practice makes perfect. Once you put in that work, and once you put in that effort, know that you do belong there, that you do deserve to be there, and you’re gonna crush it.

On her advice to girls who worry STEM is not a ‘feminine’ field.

Your life does not have to be binary. Women are not black and white. We can be many different things. I’m not one thing, I’m not just an engineer. I also was a track athlete. I was a basketball athlete. I was prom queen. I was all that in one. I didn’t have to pick and choose between what society wants me to be and what I feel like I am.

On how she knew she wanted to major in aerospace engineering 

Since I was a young girl I was always interested in understanding and learning how things work. I was the type of girl that would beg my parents to go to RadioShack instead of Toys ‘R’ Us. And I was also the person that would take apart my gameboy and try to figure out if I could put it back together.

On the future of space exploration

I think [the moon landing] was just the beginning for us. I actually hope to be one of the first people that walk on the surface of Mars one day. And I think that’s exactly where we’re going with capabilities being developed at Boeing such as the SLS, which is the Space Launch System, our heavy lift rocket that’s gonna take us to the moon, and Mars, and eventually beyond that. People want to mine asteroids, people want to set up amusement parks in space.

On how space exploration benefits life on Earth

Many inventions come from space, and us going up there with limited resources, and figuring out a way to make it work, and that ends up creating some type of innovation or product that we can bring back to Earth to make other people’s life easier or more healthy. Something like osteoporosis medicine, where you’re looking at the bone decay, and how the bone acts differently in space, we were able to diagnose that and treat that by looking at how astronauts’ bones decay in space under a no-gravity environment. . .

SO WHAT?

Like most miracles
Like most vast awakenings
They’re not always
recognized/noticed/seen
Especially when they’re right in front of us. . .

What’s even more amazing to me
is advanced as we are
FIFTY YEARS LATER
or TWO-HUNDRED-AND-FIFTY YEARS
from now
it’s not our scientific advances
our medical technology
our Pharmacology
our psych-social interventions
that heal us. . .

IT IS OUR RELATIONSHIPS

. . .And that’s the only thing that
HAS
DOES
WILL
be for an ever
OUT OF THIS WORLD

Your HAPPINESS Thermometer

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HOW’S YOUR HAPPINESS THERMOMETER.          .          .

Is    it    R I S I N G

Is    it    F A L L I N G

Is    it

S             T             U             C             K

By many accounts, Americans are living in contentious times. Yet they report being happier in 2017 than they were in 2016, according the 2017 Harris Poll Survey of American Happiness, shared exclusively with TIME MAGAZINE

That’s not to say that Americans are especially happy overall; only 33% of Americans surveyed said they were happy. In 2016, just 31% of Americans reported the same.

The Harris Poll, which has been conducting a happiness survey for the last nine years, surveyed 2,202 Americans ages 18 and older in May 2017. The survey was not designed to measure why Americans are or are not happy, but John Gerzema, CEO of the Harris Poll, has some ideas.

“It’s really interesting that Americans’ overall happiness went up from last year—a year of alt-facts, mean tweets and robots coming for our jobs,” Gerzema says. “Either people are becoming immune to the news, or there’s a promise of change for so many Americans that felt alienated.”

The people who reported being the happiest were men and women in high-income households and those with a high school diploma or less. Republicans and Democrats experienced similar increases in happiness levels (but Republicans tend to report higher happiness levels overall, Gerzema says).

Overall, men reported a greater increase in happiness levels compared to women, though they were more likely to say they were frustrated at work. Millennials were the most likely to say they were optimistic about their future: 79% said they were. However, 77% said they worried about finances, and slightly more than half said they were frustrated with their career. Despite the back and forth over health care changes, 53% of Americans surveyed said they rarely worry about their health, up from 48% in 2016.

Some of the biggest changes were in how people felt about their spiritual lives. In the survey, 71% of Americans said their spiritual beliefs were a positive guiding force to them, compared to 66% in 2016. Americans also say they feel close to their relatives; 86% said they have positive relationships with their family members. “One hypothesis is that we are trying to control what we can,” says Gerzema. “Maybe we are turning off cable news and turning back into our families and communities and faith.”

Americans have never been the happiest bunch, Gerzema says. In the nine-year history of the happiness poll, the highest happiness index was 35% in 2008 and 2009.

Distraction and a lack of control may be part of the reason why only about a third of Americans say they are happy, Gerzema says. Close to 40% of Americans said in 2017 that they rarely engage in hobbies and pastimes they enjoy, and 75% said that “my voice is not heard in national decisions that affect me.”

“To me, it feels like a cultural lack of presence,” says Gerzema. “We are so caught up in our texting, multitasking, jobs and commutes that we seem to have less and less free time. Older people age 65+ are the happiest.”

Despite the happiness gap, the majority of Americans remain hopeful, and 72% say they feel optimistic about the future. “We are not that happy, but perhaps that’s ok,” says Gerzema. “Optimism, but not necessarily happiness, seems to be part of the American psyche. Perhaps we wear it like a coat of arms.”

S   O.          .          .

ARE    YOU    H A P P Y

Are      you      happy?

If you were to fit into a survey right now

would you be on the upside of being happy

or on the low side of being happy?

What’s

YOUR    HAPPINESS    THERMOMETER    READING

 Are you happy with your life

Are you happy with your job

Are you happy with your family

Are you happy with your self

There will always be questions when we talk about happiness

because by the way that the world takes look at us we’re not all that happy

or does the world actually have it wrong.          .          .

 Right now

at this very moment what makes you the happiest in your life.        .        .

not what do you dream of that would make you happy

W          H          A          T

ARE  YOU

Happiest with right now in your life.          .          .

Could that get better

Could that get worse

Could that actually be shared.          .          .

Are you responsible just for your own happiness

Of the happiness of others

ARE   YOU   RIGHT   NOW

H               A               P               P              Y

with this machine gun kind of questioning.           .             .

Well something tells me

it won’t be a pill

 intervention

 therapy

voodoo

or  a  particular  kind  of  psychic  surgery.          .          .

It  certainly won’t be prime time days

 it’ll be something in yourself

from yourself

maybe a recognition

maybe a throwing away

of all that could lead to your happiness

and ultimately

the happiness of those around you.          .          .

O R        N O T.           .          .

YOU      TELL      ME!

The Mercifulness of a Caring Catalyst

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Are you Selfish?

Not many admit that they are.           .           .

and the folks who actually do
confess just how selfish they are.         .         .

usually are the folks who are the least self-serving

S          T          I          L          L

The most
 s        e        l        f        i        s        h
you can ever be

is when you’re  

f    o    r    g    i    v    i    n    g

Funny, huh?

We mostly think that
Forgiveness
is something we do;

something we provide for another person

for a horrid aggression done against us.          .          .

w        r        o        n        g

Forgiveness
isn’t ignoring you were hurt.        .        .

Forgiveness
isn’t about setting yourself up to be hurt again.          .          .

Forgiveness
isn’t about letting someone getting away with something.      .      .

Forgiveness
isn’t about reconciliation.       .        .

Forgiveness
isn’t something we do to make better another’s life.        .        .

Forgiveness
i s
a pretty selfish thing to do.

We’ve all heard it said,

“RESENTMENT IS A POISON ONE TAKES HOPING TO HARM ANOTHER”

S  O .     .     .

Is Forgiveness a Selfish Act

or   a

C        A        R        I        N        G              O        N        E   ?

In fact,

the most

c     a     r     i     n     g

thing you can do for another

is the most compassionate thing you can do for yourself

f          o          r          g          i          v          e

Pssssssssssssssssssssssssssst   of   the   Day:

ACCEPT

THE     APOLOGY

YOU     NEVER

R  E  C  E  I  V  E  D

o          f           t          e          n

Become more of a Caring Catalyst.

Professional Speaker, Author, Assurance Man