I got McNOTICED
yesterday morning
going through the drive through
for my egg McMuffin. . .
as he took my money,
he was staring at me
and then said,
“Sir, you had the funeral service for my grandmother,”
he swallowed hard
and his eyes filled up with tears and then he said,
“You did really, really good. . .thank you.”
We both paused
just short enough for those behind me
to begin McHONKING. . .
I swallowed just as hard
and thanked him for
(literally)
McNOTICING ME!
We both
McLAUGHED
and bid each other a good day. . .
GET McNOTICED
and more. . .
do something to make sure you’re never
McFORGOTTEN!
PEACE AND CONFLICT
WHERE DO WE TURN??
WHO DO WE TRUST??
WHAT TO BELIEVE??
All good questions that have been pop corning around in our heads for nearly a month now as Covid seems to be subsiding or at least becoming manageable.
The very least I could do as an ongoing becoming a better Caring Catalyst is to share some fo the resources I’ve consulted over these past few weeks to make some sense of what’s happening a half of a world away from most of us. Hence, I wanted to share:
The Greater Good Resources for Peace and Conflict
They gathered articles that explore the roots of peace, war, and reconciliation; offer resources for well-being and activism; and most of all, remind us of human goodness.
The folks at the Greater Good Science Center, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is provoking a range of emotions: sadness, anger, fear, and more. We’re reading the news every day and wishing that there were more we could do to help.
As an educational nonprofit, the folks at the Greater Good Science Center, understand the best we can do, perhaps, is to remind ourselves and their readers that peace is always possible, the vast majority of people resist killing, even the most violent primates are capable of change, there are steps we can all take to bridge our differences, and activism can make the world a better place. They’ve gathered articles below to help you understand the roots of peace, war, and reconciliation; get involved in activism; and support your well-being and your children’s—including reminders of human goodness in times of conflict. This is just one humble beggar showing another hungry beggar where he got some much needed sustenance.
If you’d like to find a more direct way to support the people of Ukraine, the Greater Good Science Center editors shared their friends at KQED recommendations who created this excellent list of organizations addressing the human crises that war creates. We hope you’ll consider making a donation to one of them.
Click to jump to a section:
Promoting peace and reconciliation
Reminders of human goodness
How political apology and forgiveness works
Resources for well-being and activism
Resources for children’s well-being
Promoting peace and reconciliation
- What Can We Learn From the World’s Most Peaceful Societies?: A multidisciplinary team of researchers is discovering what makes some societies more peaceful than others.
- Why Is There Peace?: Violence is declining, argues psychologist Steven Pinker. What are we doing right?
- Truth and Reconciliation: Forgiveness is not just personally rewarding. It’s also a political necessity, says Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He explains how forgiveness allowed South Africans to imagine a new beginning—one based on honesty, peace, and compassion.
- To Resolve Conflicts, Get Up and Move: Researcher Peter T. Coleman has found an unlikely path to peace: Move your body to help your mind get unstuck.
Reminders of human goodness
- Hope on the Battlefield: Military leaders know a secret: The vast majority of people are overwhelmingly reluctant to take a human life.
- Courage Under Fire: When the Bosnian civil war broke out, Svetlana Broz searched for the humanity behind the horrific headlines. She found stories of people who risked their lives to help victims of the war—and who inspired others to follow their example.
- Worlds Without War: Ethnographic studies find that not all societies make war. In other words, war is not intrinsic to humankind.
- Beyond Sex and Violence: Contrary to the typical view, violence is something humans resort to out of fear—or try to avoid altogether.
- Peace Among Primates: Anyone who says peace is not part of human nature knows too little about primates, including ourselves.
How political apology and forgiveness works
- The Forgiveness Instinct: To understand the human potential for peace, we have to learn three simple truths about forgiveness and revenge.
- The Greatest Test: Forgiveness improves health and strengthens relationships. But can it help heal the scars of civil war?
- Making Peace Through Apology: Some apologies encourage forgiveness and reconciliation between groups and nations; others only make things worse. Here’s how to tell the difference.
- What Makes a Political Apology Seem Sincere?: When is a political apology likely to be well-received? A new study explores the contributing factors.
- How Should a Group Apologize to People They Harmed?: A new study investigates which components of an apology foster forgiveness and reconciliation between groups.
Resources for well-being and activism
- Six Tips to Avoid Being Overwhelmed by the News: Here’s how to cope when all the negative news is triggering you.
- How to Sustain Your Activism: These three principles can help activists avoid burnout and continue working toward a better world.
- How to Renew Your Compassion in the Face of Suffering: Mass suffering can make us feel helpless. Focusing on solutions, rather than emotions, may be the way out.
Resources for children’s well-being
- Nine Tips for Talking to Kids about Trauma: In the midst of tragedy, kids will have questions. How do we respond?
- Five Ways to Support Students Affected by Trauma: Teachers can help students recognize their strengths and build resilience.
- Can Parents Teach Peace?: A recent study suggests they can, at least some of the time.
LET US WORK TOGETHER
TO BE CARING CATALYSTS ENOUGH
TO NOT JUST WORK TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE
BUT ACTUALLY
BE THE DIFFERENCE NEEDED NOW

THE POWER OF ONE
CAN ONE PERSON ACTUALLY BE A CONTAGIOUS CARING CATALYST. . .
TRY PROVING IT DIFFERENT TO
DR. PAUL FARMER

Ellen Barry and
Paul Farmer, a physician, anthropologist and humanitarian who gained global acclaim for his work delivering high-quality health care to some of the world’s poorest people, died on Monday on the grounds of a hospital and university he had helped establish in Butaro, Rwanda. He was 62.
The cause was an “acute cardiac event,” according to a statementby Partners in Health, the global public health organization that Dr. Farmer helped found.
Dr. Farmer attracted public renown with “Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World,” a 2003 book by Tracy Kidder that described the extraordinary efforts he would make to care for patients, sometimes walking hours to their homes to ensure they were taking their medication.
He was a practitioner of “social medicine,” arguing there was no point in treating patients for diseases only to send them back into the desperate circumstances that contributed to them in the first place. Illness, he said, has social roots and must be addressed through social structures.
Though he worked in the world of development, he often took a critical view of international aid, preferring to work with local providers and leaders. And he often lived among the people he was treating, moving his family to Rwanda and Haiti for extended periods.
News of Dr. Farmer’s death rippled through the worlds of medicine and public health on Monday.
“There are so many people that are alive because of that man,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a brief interview, adding that she wanted to compose herself before speaking further.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s top medical adviser, broke down in tears during an interview, in which he said he and Dr. Farmer had been like “soul brothers.”
Remembering Paul Farmer (1959-2022)
The pioneer of global heath died on Feb. 21, 2022. He was 62.
- Obituary: Dr. Farmer, a physician and anthropologist, sought to bring high-quality health care to some of the world’s poorest people.
- ‘Mountains Beyond Mountains’: The 2003 book by Tracy Kidder told Dr. Farmer’s life story. Read the first chapter here.
- His Writing: In “Fevers, Feuds and Diamonds,” Dr. Farmer examined the inequalities that worsened Ebola’s spread in West Africa in 2014.
In the latter part of his career, Dr. Farmer became a public health luminary; the subject of a 2017 documentary, “Bending the Arc”; and the author of 12 books.
In 2020, when he was awarded the $1 million Berggruen Prize, given annually to an influential thought leader, the chairman of the prize committee said Dr. Farmer had “reshaped our understanding” of “what it means to treat health as a human right and the ethical and political obligations that follow.”
Dr. Farmer, who never settled into the easy life of an elder statesman, was vigorously involved in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, prodding the Biden administration to drop intellectual property barriers that prevented pharmaceutical companies from sharing their technology.
“It’s not just about health security, in the senses of defending yourself,” he said. “It’s not just about charity, although that’s not so bad. It’s also about pragmatic solidarity with those in need of assistance.”
“When you settle on a problem, devote the resources to it and have at least some ability to incorporate new information, every time, it gets better,” he says. “I don’t have any experience, anywhere, where you just apply yourself, along with others, and then do not see progress. My optimism has pretty honest roots. “Although,” Farmer adds after a brief pause, “I would probably be an optimist even if not.” “I’m going to sound very touchy-feely-ish, but it’s [about] compassion and empathy and fellow feeling,” Farmer says. “You can’t do anything in public health without fellow feeling.”
Paul Edward Farmer Jr. was born on Oct. 26, 1959, in North Adams, Mass. Paul’s mother, Ginny (Rice) Farmer, worked as a supermarket cashier, and his father, Paul Sr., was a salesman and high school math teacher.
When Paul was around 12, his father bought an old bus and fitted it with bunks, converting it into a mobile home. Paul, his parents and his five siblings spent the next few years traveling, mostly in Florida, living for a time on a boat moored on a bayou. He credited this period with giving him “a very compliant GI system,” a knack for sleeping anywhere and an inability to be shy or embarrassed.
After graduating from Duke University, he moved to Haiti, volunteering in Cange, a settlement in the central Artibonite plateau of the country. He arrived toward the end of the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier, when Haiti’s hospital system was so threadbare that patients had to pay for basic supplies, like medical gloves or a blood transfusion, if they wanted treatment.
In a letter to a friend, he wrote that his stint at the hospital wasn’t turning out as he had expected. “It’s not that I’m unhappy working here,” said the letter, excerpted in Mr. Kidder’s book. “The biggest problem is that the hospital is not for the poor. I’m taken aback. I really am. Everything has to be paid for in advance.”
Dr. Farmer decided to open a different kind of clinic. He returned to the United States to attend Harvard Medical School and earn a degree in anthropology, but he continued to spend much of his time in Cange, returning to Harvard for exams and laboratory work.
Over the years, Dr. Farmer raised millions of dollars for an ever-expanding network of community health facilities. He had a contagious enthusiasm and considerable nerve. When Thomas J. White, who owned a large construction company in Boston, asked to meet him, he insisted that the meeting take place in Haiti.
Mr. White eventually contributed $1 million in seed money to Partners in Health, which Dr. Farmer founded in 1987 along with Ophelia Dahl, whom he had met volunteering in Haiti; a Duke classmate, Todd McCormack; and a Harvard classmate, Dr. Jim Yong Kim.
The clinic in Haiti, at first a single room, grew over the years to a network of 16 medical centers in the country, with a local staff of almost 7,000.
Among them was a teaching hospital in Mirebalais, about 40 miles north of Port-au-Prince, that opened in 2013 and offered chemotherapy drugs, a gleaming new $700,000 CT scanner and three operating rooms with full-time trauma surgeons. There, poor patients with difficult diseases paid a basic fee of around $1.50 a day for treatment, including medication.
Partners in Health also expanded into Rwanda, where Dr. Farmer helped the government restructure the country’s health system, improving health outcomes in areas like infant mortality and the H.I.V. infection rate.
Dr. Farmer died in Butaro, a mountain town on the border of Uganda where he and Partners in Health collaborated with the Rwandan government to build a complex devoted to health and health education. Dr. Farmer had homes in Rwinkwavu, Rwanda; Cange, Haiti; and Miami.
Dr. Farmer also helped develop new public health approaches in Peru, Russia and Lesotho, among other places.
He was particularly proud of the fact that the clinics he helped build were staffed by local doctors and nurses whom he had trained.
Over the years, he kept in touch with many of his patients, as well as their children and grandchildren. He was godfather to more than 100 children, most of them in Haiti, said Laurie Nuell, a close friend and board director at Partners in Health.
Over the weekend, Dr. Farmer sent her a photo of a colorful bouquet of flowers he had put together for one of his terminally ill patients in Rwanda. “Not my best work,” the accompanying text said.
“He had a very tender heart,” she said. “Seeing pain and suffering was very hard for him. It just hurt him. I’m a social worker by training. One thing I learned is about detachment. He wasn’t detached from anyone. That’s the beauty of it.”
As long as poverty and inequality persist, as long as people are wounded and imprisoned and despised, we humans will need accompaniment–practical, spiritual, intellectual.
– Paul Farmer –
CAN ONE PERSON MAKE A DIFFERENCE
CAN ONE PERSON
ACTUALLY BE
A CONTAGIOUS CARING CATALYST. . .
CAN YOU BE
THE CASE IN POINT
OF PROVING IT
(or not)
WHEN CHRISTMAS ISN’T (OVER)

IT WAS JUST TWO WEEKS AGO. . .
C H R I S T M A S
but it might as well be
TWO YEARS AGO. . .
Seriously,
does it feel like it was just
two weeks?
. . .and more importantly,
IS IT OFFICIALLY OVER?

When Christmas has seemingly been
CURB-SIDED
is it over
When Christmas Isn’t (Over) is it. . .
If you’d think so
If you’d bet on it
then read a real life
Act of Kindness
that took place at Heinens
a local grocery store
A truly vivid-in-color unforgettable act of kindness:
This morning I was grocery shopping at Heinens and as the grocery store clerk was informing me of my total I realized that I had left my debit card in my car. This adorable woman in line behind me comes running up to the credit card machine and offers to use her credit card and let me pay her back via Venmo. Once my transaction is complete, I head back over to her so we can exchange our info and settle up. She wouldn’t let me pay her back and bought my groceries! I was literally speechless and quite emotional. What she didn’t know is tomorrow is the ten year anniversary of me losing my eldest child in an accident and I’m always a little scatter-brained and off this time of year. That I just recently went through a divorce, have had to move, haven’t been able to go back to work so that I can e-learn with my two sweet kids and haven’t seen my family in months. I guess what I’m trying to say is that she could never have known all that I’m going through, and her extreme act of kindness has touched me so deeply and profoundly. I hear of these things happening, but I’ve never been on the receiving end of such a kind gesture. I would love to know who you are to formerly thank you. And seriously…I’ll pay you back! Thank you!!!

Well. . .
Maybe just maybe
CHRISTMAS
isn’t over until you say so
(or worse, SHOW it is)
m a y b e
WHEN CHRISTMAS ISN’T (OVER)
Carols play
Lights Sparkle
Bells Ring
Carolers Sing
Trees Get Decorated
Tinsel Glitters
Cookies Get Baked
Parties Get Partied
Gifts Are Given
Presents Get Opened
Hands Get Held
Kisses Last Longer
Hugs Are Tighter
Snow Is Prettier
Cold is Warmed
When Christmas isn’t (Over)
You Aren’t
When Christmas Isn’t (Over)
Begin And Begin And Begin
is the Refrain to every song
Without a hint of Evergreen
Without a warm glow of Candle Light
To lead you from
A Now
to
For An Ever
When Christmas Isn’t (Over)
BOOK IT

Be the Everliving Proof. . .
((( I wrote this blog post about an unforgettable Act of Kindness last weekend after I saw the blog post on the Secret Bay page way before the the annivisary events that took place at the Capital on 1/6 in 2021. We just observed the unfortunate events that took place a year ago, yesterday. Does it fit? Should I have scrapped the Post and harshly and vehemently denounced what appeared in living vivid color on our televisions/device’s and now what we are being reminded of a year later? Well, I chose to prove one of the points I have literally devoted my life: THAT CHRISTMAS ISN’T (OVER), isn’t a day or a Season so much as a lifestyle and now more than ever needs to be lived and most especially experienced. As a fellow Caring Catalyst, join me; please join me. )))
BEYOND A SEASON
CHRISTMAS IS BARELY 48 HOURS PAST US
AS IT STRUGGLES ALWAYS
TO NEVER LEAVE US
or worse:
BE LEFT BY US. . .
Just what is it
that makes any Season
A Lifestyle. . .
BECOME THAT!
W A T C H:
LOVE IS A GIFT THAT GOES BEYOND A SEASON
BE THE CURE FOR SOMEONE’S LONELINESS
THE SYMPHONY IN YOU IS ONLY AS MAGNIFICENT AS YOU ALLOW IT TO BE HEARD AND EXPERIENCED
THAT FACE
which hides a Christmas Wish
beyond a wrapped present
BE MORE OF AN OPEN HEART AND LESS OF AN OPENED PRESENT. . .
SEE
BE
FREE
That Difference
to/for Others
FOR THOSE WHO CARE ABOUT CARING FOR THOSE THEY CARE FOR
WHEN AN EACH IS TREATED LIKE NO OTHER
MAYBE THE GREATEST WAY TO CELEBRATE BEING IN A SNOW GLOBE WORLD IS NOT BREAKING IT BUT GIVING IT
EMPATHY, STAT!

QUESTION:
IF WE ALL NEED IT
IF WE ALL WANT IT
IF WE ALL POSSESS IT
WHY
WHY
WHY
is there a shortage of
E M P A T H Y
? ? ?
The World is in need of so very much
right now
and we may well find out
that pandemics
vaccines
boosters
and interventions
come and go
but
e m p a t h y
is still in need
of being
g i v e n
r e c e i v e d

For a More Empathic World,
People Have to Choose Empathy. . .
Can it be
that simple. . . ?
Most people know how to feel others’ pain, But they have to be motivated to do it. . .
ELIZABETH SVOBODA a freelance journalist for GREATER GOO, took a deeper look into this EMPATHY phenomena that hopefully, in just a blog post can help us all be a little bit better Caring Catalyst’s JUST BECAUSE!
In the late 1990s, Najah Bazzy, a nurse in Dearborn, Michigan, made a house call to an Iraqi refugee family to check on their premature baby. When she arrived, she was shocked by how barren their home looked. The family had almost nothing: no stove, no fridge. The adults slept on the carpet. The baby—who’d gone home on a ventilator—was in a laundry basket, wrapped up in a towel.

Viscerally feeling the family’s hardship, Bazzy swung into action. She collected her relatives’ extra appliances and household goods and dropped them off that same day. But the impact of her house call lingered much longer. As Bazzy reflected on the widespread poverty in her city, she promised herself she’d work to spare other families the pain she’d witnessed.
We tend to think about empathy as an automatic response, like a parachute that deploys when we see someone in distress. But a new study suggests that while most of us have the capacity to feel other people’s pain, we are more inclined to exercise that capacity when we have the desire to do so, as Bazzy did.
That means focusing on this desire—our motivation to understand other people’s emotions and perspectives—could be an important way to awaken our own empathy and promote a more empathic society.
The empathy reflex
Empathy sometimes feels as instinctive and immediate as pulling your hand back from a hot stove. “When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall on the leg or arm of another person,” philosopher Adam Smith wrote in 1790, “we naturally shrink back our own leg or our own arm.” This can seem like a very primal phenomenon. After all, when a child starts crying, others as young as one or two may join in.
But while empathy can activate in hair-trigger fashion, this activation is by no means guaranteed. Your response to a hungry person crouched on the sidewalk, or to a struggling refugee family, depends on a number of factors: What is your own past history? What does the person in need look like? Who else is with you, and how are they reacting to what they see?
In attempting to help people grow their empathy, past empathy training programs have tended to gloss over such situational factors. Instead, they’ve focused on strengthening people’s emotional acumen by teaching skills like “perspective taking”—training students to see things from someone else’s point of view—or how to pick up on others’ emotions. However, follow-up studies of these programs sometimes show that their impact fades over time.
“The idea that all empathy interventions need to bolster skills is an oversight,” says Harvard University psychologist Erika Weisz. “Most people already have those skills.”
But she’s noticed that people choose not to use them in certain situations. A Boston Red Sox fan might be capable of empathizing with a New York Yankees jersey-wearer, but in the midst of a three-run Red Sox streak, the Bostonian might not feel inclined to share in the New Yorker’s anguish.
In their new study, Weisz and her colleagues focused on instilling empathy by boosting people’s motivation to identify with others. The results were striking: When researchers fueled students’ desire to empathize, the students were more accurate at pinpointing what others were feeling two months later. Some of them also reported making more close friends.
Amping up motivation
Weisz and her team, including Stanford University psychologist Jamil Zaki, recruited college freshmen, who naturally have their antennae perked to the social nuances of their environment. “When students get to campus, they have this huge spike in openness to experience,” Weisz says. “We were in a good position to see how motivation works in the wild.”
The team tested three different ways to increase students’ motivation to empathize with others. In one study, participants read a letter that was allegedly from a freshman having a hard time adjusting to high school. They were then advised to write back and tell the freshman that they could work on building up their empathy—and that doing so would help them connect with their classmates.
This setup encouraged letter-writers to embrace the concept that empathy can be strengthened, Weisz explains. “When we ask a participant to endorse a statement to another person, they tend to endorse those beliefs themselves.” That, in turn, could boost their motivation to brush up on their empathy, because they believe their efforts will pay off.
In another study, the researchers gave students reading material that promoted empathy as a social norm, including testimonials from other students about the importance of empathy in their lives. Participants then wrote letters to high school freshmen that stressed how empathy was normal, promoted, and expected in their community. A third group of students, the “combined” group, took part in an activity that blended elements of the first two exercises, and a control group simply wrote letters addressing students’ academic challenges.
The results supported Weisz’s hunch that ratcheting up people’s motivation would strengthen their empathy. Participants in each study showed higher accuracy when asked to describe what people who spoke in a video were feeling, compared to the control group. These effects were “sticky,” as Weisz puts it, lasting for at least eight weeks after the studies ended.
Members of the combined group also reported making more close friends at college, possibly due to their empathic savvy—something Weisz says may set them up for success later in life. “Having that level of social integration is really important. It predicts all sorts of outcomes for well-being,” she says.
How desire drives empathy
Getting motivated to feel someone’s pain doesn’t necessarily involve thinking to yourself, “My friends understand what this person is feeling, so I’ll try to do so,” or “I can strengthen my own empathy, so I definitely should.” Like other kinds of influence, motivation often operates on an unconscious level, shaping our priorities in profound ways over time.
Bazzy’s life trajectory illustrates how this can work. Her hometown of Dearborn, near Detroit, was rich with refugees from different countries who were always ready to help one another. “Neighbors sat on the front porch and they shared food. Children would go from house to house,” Bazzy told CNN’s Kathleen Toner. “And just the amount of care that people had for each other—this is where I learned to love my neighbor.”
Like the people in Weisz’s study, Bazzy absorbed social norms that put a high value on empathy, motivating her to do the same. Other research suggests that social influences, especially early ones, can seamlessly promote this kind of value structure. In a seminal study of Holocaust rescuers, those who saved people from the Nazis often had compassionate role models within their families, which helped awaken their desire to serve others.
When the time was right, that deep-rooted motivation inspired Bazzy to serve her community on a larger scale. Helping the struggling refugee family and their premature baby reminded Bazzy of just how many people were in similar straits, and in 2004, she formally established a nonprofit called Zaman International to serve families in poverty all over metro Detroit. To date, Zaman has delivered essentials like furniture, food, and job training to over 250,000 people.
How to inspire empathy
Having demonstrated that motivation can influence empathy, Weisz, Zaki, and their colleagues are thinking about how this finding could improve empathy training programs. One of the keys, Weisz says, will be for program designers to take participants’ unique needs and desires into account. An effective workplace empathy course will probably look quite different from one designed for college students; what works will depend on what drives people’s motivations in each case.
If young employees at a startup are anxious to please their bosses, those bosses could focus on sending the clear message—through actions as well as words—that they value empathy in the workers they oversee. If a group of doctors pride themselves on being the best at what they do, facilitators could point out that patients with empathic doctors have better health, which reflects well on the doctors. And because middle schoolers are so attuned to their friends’ choices, Weisz has experimented with showing seventh-graders videos of their peers talking about the benefits of empathy.
“This approach holds promise to complement skill-building and create a menu of empathy-enhancing options that are tailored to people’s needs,” says Zaki.
Weisz’s study results also lend insight into how we can motivate our own empathy in various contexts, from volunteering to rescuing someone in dire straits. When you surround yourself with others who consider empathy a cardinal virtue, that social norm will likely start to rub off on you, as it did on the students in Weisz’s trials. And when you believe you can hone your empathic savvy through effort—a “growth mindset” approach to empathy—you’ll be more inclined to do it.
“People are excited and invested to increase their empathy if they think they can,” Weisz says. “A lot of people think of empathy as a static trait. Targeting motivations imparts lasting changes.”

TRUE OR FALSE
Pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst:
The only way to truly answer this
un-mathematical equation
is to
SHOW YOUR WORK
. . .NOW
is no time to talk of
e m p a t h y
IT IS TIME
to be
EMPATHY
(STAT)
THE FUNERAL
No matter what religion or spiritual path you follow (or don’t), there’s one topic that fascinates us all:What happens after we die?
Reincarnation? Eternal Heaven? Total blackness and non-existence? Something totally different?
No matter what we believe though, there’s a few basic facts about death that we all know to be true.
The first fact of death is the obvious:
We’ve all been born with a sexually transmitted disease
called: LIFE
and none of us gets out of here
A L I V E
YES. . . we are all going to die. Yes, every single person on this planet is going to die someday, somehow, somewhere.
The second fact is less obvious:
After we die, our lives will be etched in the hearts of others. We live eternally. Forever. In other people.
That’s what today’s video is really about.
It’s about the relationships we forge during our lives that are so powerful they impact people even after we die.
Today’s movie is called “The Funeral.” It starts with a little bit of humor, and it quickly goes deep and gets to the heart of the matter. . .a heart that beats like no other when filled with a love that death can’t begin to part let alone forget. . .
SO HERE’S THE DEAL:
THE DEEPER YOU LOVE
THE DARKER YOU HURT
so. . .
LOVE DEEPER, STILL
LOVE DEEPER, MORE
L O V E
EMPATHY IT UP
C R A Z I E S
T H I S
is just like us
. . .a mess
Until we come together
amazing things happen. . .
when your crazy
meets my crazy
and we know that it just fits
I T
doesn’t just feel like Christmas
it is
C H R I S T M A S
forever
NOW
Multiple that
with half the people in the world
with the other half people the world
And this world
just doesn’t become a crazy place
it becomes a craziest
of the craziest place
And
ON EARTH
AS IT IS IN HEAVEN
BECOMES THE CRAZIEST
OF THE CRAZIEST
NORMAL
OF ALL
FOR ALL
FOR AN EVER
ALL. . . .
Connect
them
l i n e s
A (SELF) CARING CATALYST

FAMILIAR. . . ?
Sometimes some of the worst care
is the lack we give
O U R S E L V E S. . .
Being A Caring Catalyst to Others
begins with being
A Caring Catalyst
to Ourselves
IT IS THIS SIMPLE:
We do the best we can with what we know at the time. . .
It is VERY unloving to expect more;
We often were not given the knowledge
or the tools while we were young. . .
Pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst:
Life is about learning.
Sometimes that learning can be painful.
Our challenge is that once we have learned the lesson
that we do not continue to repeat it. . .
For many of us, however,
we may have to go around the track a few times
before we are able to count it as a
m i l e. . .
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
There is no finish line
(PERIOD)
There is no competition
(PERIOD)
Self forgiveness is necessary on a daily basis
and SELF-LOVE even more needed
(MORE OFTEN)
in order to bring Compassion Care. . .
BEING A CARING CATALYST
means acknowledging
YOU DID THE BEST YOU COULD
. . .Now let it go

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