Just stop it!

I hate to see my friends and loved ones hurting.  In emotional pain.  Being mistreated by those they know and love.  Maybe I'm naive, but I think love should not involve deliberate pain. I know we all do and say things that hurt our loved ones, mostly unintentionally.  It's the intentional ones that irk me.

I've heard it said "you always hurt the ones you love".  Why is that acceptable?  It sounds like an excuse to me.  It sounds to me like a cop out to not have to expect, demand, more from people.  To believe the lie we tell ourselves that maybe we really aren't worth being treated better.  How sad?  No, not sad.  It's maddening!

Ladies, take heart.  Be brave.  Be strong.  Focus on the good in you.  Realize how great you are.  Make a list of all the positive things you are and have accomplished.  Nothing is too small.  Surround yourself with people who lift you up, but are also honest with you.  Sometimes, a little smack to bring you out of a funk and back to reality is what you need.

Guy, grow a pair!  Stop making yourself feel "like a man" at the expense of the women who love you.  Make the hard choices.  Put your family first.  Put a filter on your mouth.  Just because something pops into your head does not mean it needs to come out of your mouth. Your words carry a heavy weight, building up and tearing down in mere minutes, leaving emotional scars, creating rifts in relationships, devastating lives.

Now before you go off on me, maybe you need to look inside and see what is really causing this to bother you.  Have I hit a nerve?

Put down that phone

Call me old fashioned. Or maybe I'm a technophobe.  Lately, people's use (or misuse) is really bugging me.  Are people really so self-absorbed that they cannot go through a meal without looking at their phone?  Have we lost all sense of proper communication and actually think everything is OK to share through a text rather than a phone call?

Don't get me wrong.  I have a cell phone.  It's neither smart nor state of the art.  It's a phone.  It's for making calls.  Period.  I don't have it with me at all times, and just because it rings does not mean I need to answer it. I don't just give the number out to everyone I meet because, frankly, I don't want just anyone being able to call me.  And I don't always want to be found.

I know several people who treat their phone as an appendage, like it's physically attached to their hand as their fingers are.  If it rings, or beeps, or chirps or makes any noise whatsoever, it must be answered, looked at, fondled and caressed.  It doesn't matter where they are or who is with them.  I'm concerned that we have decided this is acceptable behavior, both as the one answering the phone and the one being treated as second-class.

Am I being harsh?  I don't think so.  I think people deserve my attention when I ask them to lunch, or we're sitting at dinner. If I am constantly glancing at my phone, or worse, texting/surfing non-stop, I am telling that other person they are not worthy of my time and full-attention.  I certainly don't want someone treating me that way.  I'm not a doctor or a police officer.  I am not so important that I must always be reachable, and must always answer my phone before it goes to voicemail.

We as a society have become so self-absorbed that we cannot focus on those around us, the ones who are supposedly so important to us, the ones we love.  We need to get over ourselves!

If you're happy and you know it

Have you ever stopped to think what really makes you happy?  And just what does "happy" mean?  The other day, as I was being scrutinized by a young woman trying to sell me 24k gold youth serum, I had cause to do just that.

She was a young, relatively attractive woman.  She was Egyptian with long, dark hair, brown eyes and youthful skin that looked moist and dew-y.  Though she was shorter than I, she tilted her head back and looked down her nose when she spoke to me, which accentuated her crooked teeth and drew attention to the strange piercing she had inside her top lip.

As she lunged, full-force, into her sales pitch she tried to make me believe that my happiness should be tied to my appearance.  While smearing $298 eye cream onto one side of my face, she told me I was "obviously a smart woman who knew the value of spending money to look good".   She made assumptions about what I spend on my hair and face while buttering me up with "you can't possibly be 45!"  (Does that really work on people?)

Then she moved in for the kill, er, sale.  "When you have wrinkles, and they WILL come, you will be so happy you bought this.  When you look good on the outside, you will be happy, inside and out".  Hmmm.  I looked her straight in the eye, sizing up if she actually believed what she was saying.  Sadly, she did.  I made a circle around my face with my hand, and I told her this (pointing to my face) does not determine my happiness.  It's true.  And it felt so freeing to say it out loud.  Her expression drooped as she realized she lost my sale, that I wasn't buying her script.  All she could do was concede defeat.

Since that encounter, I have been trying to put into words what happiness is to me.  Does it rely on some external factor that is unreliable and fleeting?  Is it merely an emotion, dependent on feelings that can be swayed with a word or glance?  Is it dependent on relationships with other people and their perceptions of me?  I think happiness contains a little bit of all of these but, ultimately, is found deep with in.  To me, it feels a lot like peace.