Tool For Tuesday: How Do You Apologize To Someone Who’s Dead?

Posted on March 25, 2014 by dianabletter

What happens if you didn’t have the chance to say you’re sorry to someone who has died?

This happened to my friend, Lily. She never got along with her mother-in-law, Vivian. Vivian was—well, Vivian. A bit of a know-it-all, someone who always knew better than everyone around her about everything from architecture to zoology. Lily wasn’t sorry when Vivian died. But years later, upon quiet introspection, Lily realized she could have been nicer, warmer, and more accepting. Vivian was her teacher, really, because Lily began to see a little bit of Vivian in herself. Didn’t she judge other people, too? Didn’t she stray into criticism when she could be more accepting? Didn’t she offer advice when nobody had asked for it?

You know that expression: if you point your forefinger at someone else, three fingers are pointed back at you.

Lily wanted to make amends to Vivian for not treating her as respectfully as she could have. But Vivian was long gone. So here’s the question: How do you apologize to someone who is no longer around?

She asked the universe to help her find a way to make amends. Lily decided to put it out there and to be ready. She wanted to be extra nice to every Vivian she met. Not long after, Lily met a woman who lived down the street who turned out to be named…Vivian. (Don’t you love the way the cosmos arranges things?) Lily asked if Vivian needed help around the house and ended up shoveling her walkway and buying her groceries now and then.

This Vivian is not that Vivian, but Lily felt she still righted part of a wrongAnd Lily also said that from now on, she will make an effort to be less judgmental and more accepting of people who remind her of her mother-in-law. And she realized it hadn’t helped her marriage to complain to her husband about his mother. Who wants to hear it?

“I also learned not to wait to say I’m sorry or to make amends with people,” Lily told me the other day. “Because I don’t want to have to say again that I figured things out when it was too late.”

Tool For Tuesday: Unfinished business? It’s never too late to find some way to right wrongs. And don’t put off saying you’re sorry until tomorrow, because tomorrow might never come.

The spark for this post came from Marylin Warner‘s thought-provoking blog, “Things I Want to Tell My Mother,” here:

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

 

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Hermann Hesse: On Walking the Road to Reach Our True Selves & Nine Other Inspiring Quotes.

Posted on March 23, 2014 by dianabletter

 

The blossoms on our orange tree. I wish I could also share the aroma. Divine.

The blossoms on our orange tree. I wish I could also share the aroma. Divine.

Each man’s life represents a road toward himself. —Herman Hesse

Here are nine other inspiring quotes for today to think about.

Practice forgiveness. First forgive yourself. Then forgive everyone else.

We each live with joys, sorrows, challenges, disappointments, fears, dashed hopes and regrets. Welcome to the human race!

Every day, we can ask, please show me how to be in this world. Show me how to be me in this world.

Everything in our lives, including the pain—especially the pain—can be used for our healing.

I can be tough on myself but easy on others.

The goal is the freedom that comes with being self-sufficient. That doesn’t necessarily mean living alone. The people in our lives don’t have to know anything about this goal or the steps we take to get there. It means reaching a new, lovely, confident place when we have a smile on our faces and the secret in our hearts: we have found peace in our own skin. We will never again be victimized or ordered around or fearful of being abandoned. We have come to the place where we have found our true essence, and we will never abandon ourselves again. —Jane Joseph

I’ve started to realize that waiting is an art which achieves two things. Waiting can be very, very powerful. Time is a valuable thing. If you can wait two years, you can achieve something that you could not achieve today, however hard you worked…however many times you banged your head against the wall.—Dennis Wholey

Never dismiss or discount the universe’s power to work in ways that remain a mystery to you. And that idea segues into:

Another person’s good fortune can remind us that magical, wonderful, amazing things can happen to anyone, at any time.

 

Posted in Acceptance, How to Change Your Life, Self-care | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Tool For Tuesday: Everything We Do Out of Guilt Turns Into a Future Resentment.

Posted on March 18, 2014 by dianabletter
REMEMBER: BE LESS YOU TO BE MORE YOU! Purim 2014, a reminder that we are students of life, and that includes pretending to be who we're not.

REMEMBER: BE LESS YOU TO BE MORE YOU! Purim 2014, a reminder that we are students of life, and that includes pretending to be who we’re not.

We’re students of life. We sometimes do things we don’t want to do because we want to be nice or because we’re afraid of hurting someone’s feelings or because we have a high tolerance for emotional pain and think, “Oh, it won’t be so bad.”

But everything we do out of guilt turns into a future resentment. Either on our part or on the other person’s.

One of my daughters was invited to a wedding and she told one of my sons, “I don’t want to go to the wedding.”

“So, don’t go,” was my son’s answer.

But then the guilt set in. “The bride really wants me to come…” (Don’t we all know that brides are in a total blur about who’s even at the wedding!)

We have a hard time saying no. But that shouldn’t stop us. Let’s pretend we’re the kind of people who don’t have trouble saying no. And allow ourselves the right to do what we know in our hearts is right, even if people around us think it’s wrong.

This Tool for Tuesday is an anti-tool. It’s a warning. Everything we do out of guilt turns into a future resentment.

Check out Bar Rafaeli‘s Purim costume:

 

Posted in Acceptance, Self-care, Tool For Tuesday | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Are You Waiting for Heaven? Or Is Heaven in You? Some Notes On Heaven and Hell.

Posted on March 16, 2014 by dianabletter

I read a story about a wise man (how come these stories always feature a “wise man” and not a wise woman? Never mind!) Anyway, the man  had a dream that he got to heaven and was very disappointed. All he saw were other wise men studying around a table.

Oh, I’d be disappointed, too if that was heaven. But the message was this: It isn’t that the wise men were in paradise. Paradise is in the wise men.”

We have a chance to make our lives heaven or hell. We can find something—one little thing—to do to make our situation a bit better.

The same is true about hell. Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski was asked, what’s the difference between a religious person and a spiritual one?

A religious person is afraid of going to hell. A spiritual person has already been there.

Rabbi Twerski heard a woman once tell this story, “I am a football fan, a rabid Jets fan. I’ll never miss watching a Jets game. One weekend I had to be away, so I asked a friend to record the game on her VCR. When I returned, she handed me the tape and said, ‘By the way, the Jets won.’

“I started watching the tape, and it was just horrible! The Jets were being mauled. At half-time they were behind by twenty points. Under other circumstances, I would have been a nervous wreck. I would have been pacing the floor and hitting the refrigerator. But I was perfectly calm, because I knew they were going to win.

We don’t know what will happen. But we can trust that things will turn out OK.”

Life is a journey between two forevers. We can decide to do one little thing today that helps us find a bit of heaven.  Like Ted Danson on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” — Everything’s “heaven” with him. The comment if he had a piece of gum, “I’m in heaven.”

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Tool for Tuesday: Rude Awakening? Use It as a Spiritual Awakening.

Posted on March 11, 2014 by dianabletter

Sometimes we need a rude awakening to reach a spiritual awakening. My friend, Lily, was called out for being critical of—well, just about everything. The restaurant’s menu was not extensive enough. Or too “all over the place like a Greek diner.” The movie was too long. Or too short. The weather? Always too hot or too cold. She wasn’t even aware of how judgmental she was. She had an opinion and thought we all wanted to hear it.

Maybe she was ready to face something about herself. When her friend suggested it was something she could look at, she first got angry, then got defensive, and finally felt that burn of recognition that comes when we face an unpleasant truth about ourselves.

But that’s the critical moment. That’s when we can use a rude awakening and transform it into a spiritual awakening. That’s when we step out of denial and decide that self-improvement is needed.

But don’t be too down on yourself. Think of this as home-improvement. A house needs work occasionally. So do we.

Tool for Tuesday: We can use a rude awakening as an opportunity for a spiritual awakening.

Here’s a current event example of how we can use a rude awakening for change. The stolen passports on the missing Malaysian airline flight demands new procedures…

 

Posted in How to Change Your Life, Tool For Tuesday, Transformation | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Self-Improvement: Change One Small Thought at a Time

Posted on February 28, 2014 by dianabletter
Choose to be: The Kind of Person Who Goes With The Flow

Choose to be: The Kind of Person Who Goes With The Flow

My friend, Joelle, just had a birthday. She got cards and calls from everyone she loves—except for one friend.

“I built up a real resentment,” Joelle said. “It didn’t matter that 50 people remembered my birthday—the fact that this one person didn’t kind of ruined my day.”

That happens to a lot of us—we are in a field of clovers but focus only on the one piece of litter. I once gave a lecture to a roomful of women who seemed to like my speech. They laughed a lot. But all I can remember is two women who sat in the fifth row, their faces blank, their eyes stone cold. They didn’t seem to like me and I couldn’t shake the image of them. Instead of focusing on what is good, I could only focus on the one bad thing. Their disapproval seemed to erase the applause.

Maybe it’s instinct? Back when we were foragers, we had to keep our eye out on the dangers. We had to look for the poisonous mushrooms if we wanted to stay alive. We had to concentrate on what might harm us. This might be holdover behavior—we don’t even know we’re doing this.

But then Joelle had a revelation. She thought, “I want to be one of those people who take things in stride, who forgive people automatically, we drop resentments as soon as they come up, who focus on the abundance and not the one thing that might be missing.”

And, ta-da! Joelle said she made a conscious decision to think differently. And it worked. “I suddenly felt like I really was that kind of forgiving person,” she said. She wants to be the kind of person who goes with the flow of the waterfall instead of stumbling on the stones.

Living our best chapter means trying new behavior. It also means thinking in a new sort of way.

It means saying, “I’m the kind of person who_____” and then filling in the blank in a new, creative way. “I’m the kind of person who doesn’t care if someone forgets my birthday,” Joelle told me. “Because I’m easygoing and cool.”

What new way of being can you take on today? Remember to be MORE you, sometimes you have to be LESS you.

Here’s an interesting article in The New York Times on changing our own behaviors and attitudes.

Posted in Be Less You To Be More You, miracles, Resentment | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Inner Peace: Yeah, You Got to Pour that Love Into Your Own Soul

Posted on February 23, 2014 by dianabletter

“You have to love yourself because no amount of love from others is sufficient to fill the yearning that your soul requires from you.” — Dodinsky

We are good people. We shower love on everyone around us—except ourselves. Somehow we forget that we need to treat ourselves with as much respect as we do others. I’ve heard one woman say that she treated her pets better than she treated herself.

But how do we love ourselves when we feel busted, broken or like failures? How do we keep getting up each morning and cheer ourselves on? It isn’t as easy as it seems.

When my first book, The Invisible Thread: A Portrait of Jewish American Women came out, I walked down to the mailbox at the end of our driveway every afternoon, waiting for a certain letter that would tell me: You did good. You are OK. You have our love. I don’t know who might have sent the letter but it never came. I was waiting for something that I had to find within myself.

You can search the whole world, but you’ll never find anyone who deserves your love as much as you. I read that somewhere, while standing in line at a supermarket. Sometimes I forget that. But if we don’t love ourselves, then every relationship we have is skewered. Because we’re either looking for someone else to fill our well, or we fill someone else’s well, thinking we’ll get love in return.

Every blade of grass has an angel that bends over it and whispers, Grow, grow. (The Talmud.) We each have our own angels. We were created for a purpose. There is only one of us here on earth right where we are, right now.

Reminder: I can go through life feeling bad about who I am. Or I can accept that I was created for a reason. Instead of  bemoaning what I don’t have, today I will celebrate who I am and what I’ve got. And all I can do is the best I can do.

Posted in Gratitude, How to Change Your Life | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Snowboarder Jamie Anderson: Life in 5 Words

Posted on February 9, 2014 by dianabletter

“It’s all about the moment.” That’s Jamie Anderson after winning the gold in slopestyle at the Sochi Olympics on Sunday.

That’s all we have. The Moment. We can win the gold medal in our own lives if we focus on the only moment we have.

Posted in How to Change Your Life, Transformation | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Tool For Tuesday: Mark Your Boundaries.

Posted on February 4, 2014 by dianabletter
AT THE BORDER: THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN CANADA AND THE U.S.

AT THE BORDER: THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN CANADA AND THE U.S.

You are you and they are they.

Sometimes, we don’t know where we end and the people we love begin. We want to help people but sometimes we rob them of the failures that they need in order to grow and change.

We want other people to help us. Then we need to remind ourselves that if we don’t learn to rescue ourselves, we’ll keep staying stuck.

We need boundaries between us and the people we love. A kind reader pointed out to me that boundaries help us like the people we love. Without boundaries, we sometimes slip into resentments. Why? Because we’re doing too much for others. We’re indulging in savior behavior. We’re focusing on rescuing someone else and then forget about ourselves. Our own needs, our own desires. That’s also known as codependency, something Melody Beattie writes about so well.

Some people trample on our boundaries. They tell us too much. They want us too much. They cry for our help and accuse us of being selfish when we refuse to jump in and do exactly what they want, when they want. Remember, we should not confuse neediness with love.

My friend, Jane, always tells me: We each are given a certain amount of glue to heal ourselves. But we can’t give away our glue to heal or fix someone else. They have their own glue. They have to learn to use it.

Tool for Tuesday: Mark Your Boundaries. Fences make good neighbors. Boundaries make good friends.

Posted in Other people and us, Self-care, Tool For Tuesday | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

Mike Tyson: Life Is Hard But It’s Fair.

Posted on February 2, 2014 by dianabletter

 

I never thought I’d be quoting Mike Tyson. But here’s real wisdom coming from Iron Mike, and proof that we can learn something from everyone. Whoever crosses our path can be our teacher:

“We all feel so sorry for ourselves, but we shouldn’t. We have to fight that feeling and know that life is hard but it’s fair. People say life is not fair, but I believe that it is fair—it’s just so damn hard.” (From an interview by Sean Woods in Men’s Journal.)

Remember that self-pity is like rocking in a chair and expecting to go somewhere. It robs us of energy. It pulls us down. There is always something we can do to make our day better. We can go visit someone who has it worse. We can listen to a beautiful song. We can call someone we haven’t heard from in a while. We can take a walk and look for something new. We can read something uplifting and inspiring.

Life is hard. It is. But we have to remind ourselves that our feelings come and go. Our feelings are just feelings, they’re not facts. And they won’t kill us. They’ll pass and we’ll start to feel good again.

Transformation takes place when we accept the realities in our lives and then take small steps to make each day as good as it can be.

Posted in Acceptance, Thought For The Day, Transformation | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments