Month: June 2024

It usually has to do with the fact that the person with a lack of compassion hasn’t faced that kind of adversity.

For instance, someone who says that “you should just not break the law” has no experience with the court system. And someone who says “get a job and work” hasn’t been without money. The examples are endless.

When we can’t visualize ourselves in someone else’s shoes, we struggle to bring empathy to our imagination. The trap we fall into is this: We assume that our efforts count twice as much than the people around us. That we are doing the best we can but others are not. Meaning we are seduced to believe the problem is others. Not ourselves.

The story we tell inform us so much of our daily decisions. And that default setting we have affects us at levels we can’t even comprehend.

For example, someone with a lot of money can still cheat on their taxes, and someone who is insufficient can become desperate. Both lead to outcomes we could never imagine ourselves doing when money is removed from the equation because that is the real power of money. It changes the story.

The bottom line is this piece of paper or a digital number on our screen feels way more like a happiness index than a currency.

Who controls who?

The tricky part to grasp about improving mental health is that often; we fall into this trap that we don’t believe we can get better. Most of the time, we are stretched so thin with the world’s responsibilities that taking the few breaks we have to work on ourselves is a really tall order. On top of that, we haven’t built a culture that is very compassionate or understanding. Think about it. Ask anyone who has been through the prison system, a parent with kids, someone with a disability, an addict, someone with trauma, a veteran, a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, a senior, someone crushed by debt…the list goes on.

Whats missing is compassion for ourselves. And once we begin there, we can then extend to others.

When we are born, we are born alone. And when we die, we die alone. No one comes with us. The thing is, we make that journey to live without any knowledge, resources, or previous experience to speak of.

We are indeed stronger than we believe we are. And we don’t give ourselves (and those around us) credit that we are resilient.

It’s the in-between that we can share.

Doors close and open. The problem is when one door we intend to walk through is shut, we panic. Because we think our options are more limited since that one opportunity is gone.

That’s a fixed mindset.

Most doors are sliding. Right next to one is usually another.

We think that the hallmark of a good student is someone who quickly raises their hand cause they know the answer to the question or gets an A on a test.

That’s just saying they memorized the answers to that particular set of questions.

A good student is open to learning. And learning, as we know, is admitting to ourselves that we are incompetent at something, practicing until we become competent.

It is not just with students either. Good employees, good bosses, good citizens…have the title for being good at following directions while focused on short-term results.

We give up too quickly on those around us because they don’t want the same thing you do.

Short-term excuses are easy to find. Every day, we are inundated with interruptions, emergencies, and fires.

The long term, however, is something we can push out. “Someday,” we say, “when I have time.” Long-term goals have this way of becoming a dream because we forget to work the small bits every day that make it come to fruition.

If it’s a project you believe needs to happen, why not start with something small today? Just stack one brick. And then tomorrow, another. Then another. Maybe two on Sunday. Because of our culture of instant gratification, we tend to undervalue the idea of incremental forward motion.

Perhaps, instead of finding the long-term excuse for why something isn’t happening, we can flip the script and say we are building, and it’s taking time.

That’s because we have an expectation on what we think life should look like.

We see the unequal distribution of resources everywhere.

We see people doing things that we call good and bad. The heartbreak and sorrow life brings.

There is no answer to it. But I do know this: The sooner we can accept it, the sooner we can go forward. And life is so much better when it is shared together.

Living with it naturally puts us in a space of wanting more of it. That’s our default: fast, instant gratification. Of course, we notice way more inconvenience than the conveniences we have. The journey to needs in the modern world is shorter for most. Now, the pursuit is wants. And those wants seem to go further and further because there is no end to desire.

Priorities change based on what is urgent. But what often gets lost in the urgent is the long-term. The problem with the modern world is that we have built on this idea of finding out what is scarce and making a market around it. Making it seem like if you are not in the rat race, you are being left behind.

Perhaps then, we have to decide what urgent will fall on the wayside to focus on making the long-term an outcome.