(no subject)

I didn't need to see the footage again. Really, I didn't. Except it hurt like it was tearing me open, so maybe I did.

Anyway.

Babies. Living, squirming, fragile, oh-so-strong babies. Thank you, ABC, for the reminder. For an image to hold on to that hurts in a better way, and to put at the center of this jumble of half-thoughts and feelings I call my mind right now.

I'm reading, for the record, Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I don't know what I expected from the book, but it's surprising me and that's a good thing. So when I mention "homework," for the next few weeks, I probably mean an exercise from the book. Today's came at a very right time for me. I thought, six months ago, "thousands of people did not wake up this morning and decide it was a good day to die." That's true every day, today included, anniversary or no anniversary... and life is too short to spend simply drifting. It's also too short to spend crying, resenting, mired in busy-ness that doesn't satisfy, defending against blows that haven't fallen, anticipating the worst, or fearing what we know or what we don't know or what we can't know or expect. It's too short to spend in any way that doesn't take me closer to being what I want to be or bring me more in line with what matters to me.

Homework? Identify what matters to me, and develop a series of resolutions based on that: a personal Constitution.

( first draft. )

to whom it may concern...

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(no subject)

One of the things that's ringing true about Habits is the concept of Emotional Bank Accounts. And pointing out that what may seem to me to be a deposit - something that would make me happy to receive it - may actually be meaningless or even counterproductive from the other person's point of view. I know I've been on both sides of that kind of situation before.

I'm a verbal person; words are my coin, I value them. And so I give them to the people who matter to me and the people who could matter to me. In my lexicon, an email out of nowhere with a few words is one of the greatest gifts ever, because it proves that someone thought about me and thought enough of me to say something - and caring words take more effort than any other. Don't believe me? When I was a kid, one of my teachers did an experiment. He had us all stand up and each of us had to say "I hate you" to someone else. It took us less than a minute... a class of maybe 25 kids. Then he had us say "I love you"... just one word changed. It took close to ten minutes.

I remember what it felt like, standing there, trying to decide to whom it would be safest to say those words. Who wouldn't tease me for it, who wouldn't use it against me, who wouldn't cause me to be a target because of it. Because even though he told us that it wouldn't matter and that they were just words we had to say, we knew better. (In the end, I picked a safe choice... one of the quieter girls. Not one of the ones who had many friends with whom she could giggle about it later, not someone disliked, because that would open me up to ridicule, and definitely not one of the boys, because that would link my name to his for the rest of the year.)

... It was a very long time after that before I said those words again. I'm not proud of that. I'm not proud of the line of thinking behind my choice then, either. But it brought home the lesson: WORDS COUNT. And they still do, though they come more easily now. The emotional currency hasn't changed, it's just that I'm a little richer now than I was then.

What's your coin? How do you show someone that you care about them, or what should someone do, to show you that they care about you?