The Caring Catalyst

Who Cares - What Matters

THIS IS US. . .ALL OF US

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Lots of people don’t watch TV|
Lots of people do.     .     .

Lots of people don’t watch
THIS  IS  US
Lots of people DO.  .  .

Some 4.97 Million watched this past Tuesday night
THE NEXT TO THE LAST SHOW
that had lots of
YOU-BETTER-GRAB-A-TOWEL
m o m e n t s
as we watched the matriarch, Rebecca Pearson
literally actively die in front of us
and what lots of hospice folks
COMPANION
(HOLD SPACE)
as a patient dies
and what they may be actually
(visioning)
feeling/seeing/sensing/experiencing
as they slip from this world
to the Great Whatever
lies beyond a last breath here
and a first breath
T H E R E

Nearly twenty-eight years of being a hospice chaplain has put me beside a lot of death beds of where I have companioned the dying and their loved ones.  I applaud the writers and the actors for pulling back the curtain and giving us a fairly realistic look at what THAT moment looks like. . .a moment each one or us will experience, without all of the lights, cameras, action settings but in a more real, intimate, personal way because all of the evidence-based data shares the irrefutable:
ONE OUT OF ONE OF US DIES

And here’s where  This Is Us Season 6, Episode 17 from this past Tuesday picks up.  After a long battle with Alzheimer’s, Rebecca (Mandy Moore) passed, and the way her family told her goodbye was beautiful. Viewers were taken inside Rebecca’s psyche (literally) as she approached death. For her, this manifested in the form of a moving train. Rebecca was young on the train, and the passengers were people in her life, past and present. Meanwhile, in real life, as Rebecca’s family said their final goodbyes, they appeared on the train. And the person leading her through this experience (a.k.a the conductor on the train) was William (Ron Cephas Jones).

At the end of the episode, after the family members have said their last words to Rebecca, she reaches the train’s caboose. “This is quite sad, isn’t it?” she asks William. “The end?” 

To this, William gives a beautiful, stunning speech to Rebecca. These are the last words she hears before going into the caboose (before she passes away). Read them in full, below: 

“The way I see it, if something makes you sad when it ends, it must have been pretty wonderful when it was happening. Truth be told, I always felt it a bit lazy to just think of the world as sad, because so much of it is. Because everything ends. Everything dies. But if you step back, if you step back and look at the whole picture, if you’re brave enough to allow yourself the gift of a really wide perspective, if you do that, you’ll see that the end is not sad, Rebecca. It’s just the start of the next incredibly beautiful thing.” 

With this, Rebecca hugs William and goes into the caboose, where a bed is waiting for. She lies down, and next to her is Jack (Milo Ventimiglia), reuniting the couple after decades of separation.

William’s speech epitomizes that moment—and it epitomizes This Is Us in general. If the show has taught us anything, it’s that nothing is forever. Any sadness or loss we saw the Pearsons experience in the present was always followed by a flash-forward, where we saw them happy, thriving, and doing just fine. Each storyline has shown us that no chapter is forever—the good ones end, and so do the bad ones. Life keeps moving, and we  move with it. It’s a comforting message for anyone experiencing a hard time. Chapters always, always come to a close. The great poet Robert Frost once said, “ALL I KNOW ABOUT LIFE CAN BE SUMMED UP IN THREE WORDS: IT GOES ON!

It’s something Chris Sullivan (Toby) told NBC Insider when talking about the legacy of This Is Us. “From the first episode, they show you tragedy and pain, but they also shoot you into the future and show you, ‘Oh, this family’s OK,'” he said. “We jump back and forth and see, ‘Oh my gosh, this father died in a fire.’  Then, we jump forward and see, ‘Oh, this family’s OK.’ Tragedy and joy are held in both hands…Everything cycles around.” 

Yes, it does. The series finale of This Is Us airs Tuesday, May 24 at 9 p.m. ET on NBC.

Hey.      .      .it’s just TV, right.          .          .

YUP.  Yeah, it is.     .     .until it isn’t

THIS IS US

ALL OF US

“If something makes you sad when it ends, it must have been pretty wonderful when it was happening”… and with that, one last car. The caboose.
This Is Us
(Now about THAT towel)

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

Your V o t e

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img_2262

The     V    O    T    E

y        o        u       r        s:

I’m not asking if you used yours

this past week.      .      .

I’m asking if you are

e          x          e          r          c          i          s          i          n          g

your  vote  at

this very moment?

I’m not asking

W      H       O

you voted for.        .        .

I’m imploring

W     H     A     T

you vote for

day by day

moment by moment?

History

was made

this past Tuesday

as America came to

v o t e

once again.       .        .

i m p r e s s i o n s

are more importantly being made

every moment

a vote

much more important than

what happens every four years

is the one

that we

m          a          k            e

countless times

a    d a y.     .     .

n           o           w ;

we are hearing

we are seeing

we are feeling

we are experiencing

a myriad of emotions

ever since

T H E     V O T E :

Grief

Anger

Shock

Fear

Disbelief

Elation

and we do what we do best

when any one of those things intrude on us:

T  U  R  N      A  W  A  Y

A  Suggestion:

Turn  Towards

I      T

D A R E.       .       .

EMBRACE   IT.     .     .

Why?

Because we can’t control the

u n c o n t r o l l a b l e.     .     .

Just because we like

fairytale like

h a p p y   e n d i n g s

seldom guarantees them;

The more sure bet guarantee is

c h a n g e

u n c e r t a i n t y.     .     .

There is brutal suffering in our world.     .     .

in  our  Nation

but there is an abundance of

C          O          M          P           A           S          S          I          O          N

to  confront that suffering.       .       .

The Buddhists

have an age old saying:

BEFORE  ENLIGHTENMENT,  CHOP  WOOD  AND  CARRY  WATER;  AFTER  ENLIGHTENMENT,  CHOP WOOD  AND  CARRY  WATER

Can you give that a  VOTE?

NO  ONE  IS  GREATER  THAN  ALL  OF  US

Can you give that a  VOTE?

LOVE  IS  THE  GREATEST  FORCE  IN  AND  OUT  OF  THIS  WORLD

Can you give that a  VOTE?

BEING  A  CARING  CATALYST  IS  A  CONSTANT  CHANGE  AGENT

Can you give that a  VOTE?

No one can ever take our  VOTE  away.       .       .

Especially

The one we choose to exercise

our

compassion

our

love

our

willingness to be open and affirming

our

openness to embrace

the uncomfortable

until it becomes

more bearable.     .     .

To  SHOW   UP

when it’s least popular

or even advantageous

Can you give that a  VOTE.       .        .

Then you’ve just

chopped a forest of wood

carried a Lake of water

and made history

that hopefully gets

r e p e a t e d

endlessly.     .     .

Can  you  give  that  a   VOTE?

L O V E

is

L O V E

Right Side UP

and maybe more especially

 UP  Side  down.        .        .

W i l l    you  give  that  a   VOTE ?

Congratulations on a Campaign well run

an Election well won

.        .         .now   l e a d

where aimless haven’t followed

and followers haven’t yet gone.       .       .

When The Wrong Way ISN’T

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Unknown

It was early.       .       .

right before 8:00 a.m.

and she spotted me right away as I walked off the elevator.

I was covering for him;

he was on vacation

and I had gotten the alert we had a new patient

that needed to be seen before the weekend

so that we would stay compliant.       .       .

I went over to the nurses station where she was standing

and I asked about the new patient and what room he was in;

The Nurse told me that he was in room 2223

and he had a  good night.

When I went to his room he was sleeping,

but not very soundly.     .     .

I gently knocked on the door

and introduced myself.       .        .

 I explained my role of being a Spiritual Care Coordinator

and it really being a fancy name for being a Chaplain.       .       .

“I know that you have just come on to hospice and there’s been a whole wave of folks to come in to see you, even me. But, sir,” I went on to explain further, “You’re so important to all of us that you get your own Nurse, Social Worker, Home Health Aide, Chaplain, and if you would like, a Music or Art Therapist or even a Masseuse.”

I’ve said something like this

in a script-like introduction 1000’s of times before

in my 22 years of hospice work.        .        .

“God Dammit,”   he whispered,

almost like he was just above silently praying the

“O u r   F a t h e r,”

and then he said it louder and one more time

L     O     U     D     E     R      still.

It was then that I saw that his eyes were more than misted,

that they had actually welled up to the point of overflowing their brims.     .     .

“It’s not suppose to be like this, it’s just god damn not suppose to be like this,”

he said, a little more composed tone as he opened up the lid to his oatmeal.

“Shit  balls,”

he said as he stabbed a spoon in the middle of it.

“This’ll   make   it   all   better.”

We both laughed.

“Are you in any pain? Do you hurt anywhere?”

“Not   really?”

“Are, are you afraid? Worried?”

He let his mouthful of Oatmeal do the talking.

S       I       L       E       N       C       E

.        .        .scares people into talking

.      .      .sometimes even shouting loudly

.      .      .or just making noise

—-any sounds

so as to break that highly polished

C r y s t a l      S I L E N C E

into small, jagged pieces

that might cut but not remain Soundless

any longer.     .     .

We feared the SILENCE—–

Neither of us.        .        .

We accepted it.        .        .

Embraced it.        .        .

Let it do our talking

and we L I S T E N E D.         .        .

More.          .          .we heard!

He stared down into his coffee cup

as if it was a magic mirror

waiting to tell him the secret of Life and,

.       .       .and of Death

He was really looking for the Answer

even while wanting to ask the

Ultimate     Question.          .          .

“Yeah, uhh, yeah, I’m a little afraid,”

he coughed, cleared his throat and then affirmed,

“But not of dying, but more of the how, the when, the hurt of it all.”

He didn’t look up from his coffee.

He did look up,

and without blinking, asked,

“Is that normal?”

“Yes, I believe it is because so many others have told me so.”

“That   they’re   afraid   of   what   happens   before   they   die   and   not   after?”

“Yes.”

“What,  what   do   you   tell   them?”

“I ask them what has helped them in the past when they were going through something so hard and difficult.”

S            I            L            E            N            C            E

“And now, now I am asking you.      .     . What helps you?     What do you need just right now,   not then,   just right here,   right now?”

“I   think   a   prayer   would   really   help.”

“Would  you  like  me  to  pray  with  you  or  would  you  like  to  pray  with  me?”

“I  think  I’d  like  you  to  pray  with  me.   .   .Would  you?”

“Yes sir.     .     .Yes,  I  would  be  honored.  Would  you  like  me  to  include  anything  in  the  prayer?”

“Whatever   comes   to   your   mouth.”

“God, we call you by many names and one of them happens to be ‘Our Father.’ It makes us all of your children. You have never lied to us, you told us there was a time to be born and a time to die; but you’ve promised no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mouth has told, no mind has ever imagined what you have planned for those you’ve enduringly loved. The truest and sincerest gift we have is our Fear and we wholeheartedly give it to you. If you can’t take it all away, please share it with us.       .       .”

“Thank you.        .       .This was great.       .       . I  really  appreciated  you  coming  by  even  when  I  didn’t know  how  bad  I  needed  it.”

“You gave me the gift, this morning, sir.       .       . Thank you.”

We shook hands without much shaking.         .        .

I held his hands in mine.      .     .

We locked eyes.        .       .

We didn’t blink.        .        .

Universal    language

spoken/heard-  -implicitly.       .       .

When I went out to the nurses station,

the Nurse was flustered.        .        .

“I’m   so   sorry.        .        .”

“What   for?”

“I   sent   you   into   see   the   wrong   patient.     .     . He’s   not   with   your   hospice,  he’s   with   another one.      .      . I’m   so   sorry!”

“Don’t  you  take  that  from  me,”

I said smiling at her.        .        .

“We  just  had  an  awesome  visit.          .          .

I don’t care if he was with our hospice or not…it was a great visit, for both of us.”

And then I laughed.      .      .

“Besides,  I  don’t  have  to  document  on  him  now!”

She laughed too, with a redness covering her face.          .          .

“But   you   do   have   to   go   see   your   real   hospice   patient   now.”

He       was       sleeping.          .          .

I      was      a        l  o  t        more      awake.          .          .

Communicated

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images-3

I’ve never liked it.      .      .

people   yelling.       .       .at   one   another

It never really happened much in my home as I was growing up.

I give my parents, my grandparents, my brothers, sister and extended family a huge

T H A N K        Y O U  

When it did  happen  it always made me sick to my stomach.

It made me feel like

I   had   to   do   something 

to stop it or at least interfere it;

switch the attention.

It shouted to me, at a young age,

N  O  N – C  O  N  F  R  O  N  T  A  T  I  O  N  A  L

 is the way I like things, personally, professionally and incidentally.

It was at recent gathering that I witnessed it.

No.      .      .

no this wasn’t two highly emotional, highly grieved family members fighting with each other.

I have seen plenty of those confrontations where police either had to be called to restore order or actually show up ahead of time to maintain it.

No–this wasn’t between family members or blended family members or a husband/wife.      .      .      .

This communication explosion took place between two people that really had no other vested interest of anyone else there except to be of some service to them.

It really took me aback because my first thought was maybe she was screaming at him because I was talking to him and keeping him from what she thought he ought to be doing instead of talking to me.

It wasn’t long or overly loud but it was pointedly upsetting to me.      .       .

at first.       .       .

until.           .           .

I witnessed his response.

It’s what he didn’t say that shouted the loudest:

N             O             T             H             I             N             G

He didn’t walk away.

He didn’t snear.

He didn’t make any hand gestures at her.

He didn’t give her stink eye.

He didn’t look down, up, or away from her.

He didn’t frown.

He didn’t cry or tear up.

He didn’t fain shame or embarrassment.

He didn’t laugh.

He didn’t yell back.

He did nothing.       .       .

.       .       .which seemed like a for ever until she walked away muttering,

not-so-quietly what:   “a useless jerk!”

When a person gives you a piece of their mind, it’s usually much more real estate than we’d ever like to receive, let alone, OWN.      .      .      .

Communication happens on many different levels,

in a multitude of different languages,

including Sign Language,

but rarely do we interact with exact-laser-pointed-silence.

I saw him a few days ago and I told him maybe what I should have told him  then,  

“I wanted to tell you how much I respected how you handled yourself when you got yelled at a few weeks ago.  I don’t know if I would have had the same reaction or even have been able, at least not to yell or respond back.”

“My dad,” he said in response to my compliment, with a smile on his face, “taught me that little gem.”

 My grandmother wasn’t overly kind to my dad and when she would yell at him for not doing things

‘the right way,’

he would give her that same response.

“When I asked my dad why he never said anything back, he told me that number one, he wanted to show his mother respect and number two, whenever anyone ever yells at you in front of anyone, your response of silence will always be louder than their words.”

“Maybe. . .maybe,” he said, “She might have a feeling that she looked more silly for yelling than I did for saying nothing.”

Hmmmmmmmmmm of the Day, huh?

There’s a lot of fights,

a lot of hurt feelings,

a lot of arguments,

maybe even wars–

that might not have ever taken place with this kind of response.

C O M M U N I C A T E D

Is something that we’ve all had placed down upon us.       .        .

not always in the most pleasant ways,

b u t.           .           .

Maybe the most powerfully poetic,

profound and even profane thing we can ever say is:

 

Professional Speaker, Author, Assurance Man