Good Morning, Afternoon, Evening, or whatever time it is to whomevers eyes may reach this post.
I’m a community volunteer, philanthropist, and a data processor/administrative assistant and it’s been 228 days since my last post.
Today is 229.
It’s a little after 1 in the morning where I am right now, and perhaps I’ll be in a position one day in my life to type these words while at a conference on education and philanthropy. Or while I pursue a masters in Peace and Conflict Studies and have just sat down after a day at a local TedXGreensboro or something of that nature, but in less than 4 hours I’ll be waking up to go work out even though my muscles are sore. And I’ll be working towards an achievable fitness goal with a foreseeable deadline that’s coming this coming Monday, April 4th, at 6pm. After I finish working out, I’ll shower up and go to my day job. And it will be there that, unlike here, I’ll be typing numbers and figures, shifting addresses around, balancing batches, and filing and sorting papers because that is what I’m there to do. I’ll leave for the day at 4:55 like always and do it again on Friday, and again on Monday all the way through to Friday and again the following Monday all the way through to that following Friday and so on and so forth, and somewhere in the midst of that I’ll turn 29 and celebrate the beginning of a new year of my life and go back to work and do it again and start over again on Monday and go all the way through to Friday at 4:55pm because that it was I’m there to do. And that is…predictability. It’s safe. It’s 40 hours.
But there comes times in my life where my calling comes up and knocks on my heart like “Hello, remember me? Please don’t give up yet..” and I happen to reunite with a very old chaotic friend in a spot in a town that gives me a view that I’ve never seen before. All I can do is look up at the stars and the clouds and look around me at one familiar face and many new ones who were put in my friend’s life and now mine for some reason or another. Maybe the reason is to remind me of this dream and the possibility of it.
I like to say that nothing is impossible. Nothing is…unrealistic or illogical. It’s just that some people’s reality may be further along than another persons. Another person’s dream might be farther away than their neighbor’s or their husband’s, or wives, but it’s there somewhere. My dream is to build the GSO Compassion Mission, a sustainable community center for education and growth. Situated on a half to a full acre of land, it is meant to grow and build itself along with the young minds that enter it from Title I school kids grades K-12 during the day, to curious minded ambitious adults and their families on the weekends, all the way through to homeless individuals at night who need a place to stay one day when it gets too cold and we have to put the white flag out and let them come. The GSO Compassion Mission is supposed to be a place of hope. A place of learning and possibility. It will feature classes in multiple areas by volunteers of multiple specialties, and it will be a place where children first and foremost from Title I K-12 schools can come and support themselves. Where they can learn how to support and grow themselves and go home and support and grow their families and their neighbors, their neighborhoods and their friends and their communities and so on and so forth until areas that nobody looked at start to get a little greener…and when people from positions higher up and see these kids and these families, these communities that seemed so dark start to brighten up without their financial backing and without their campaigns and their camera lenses, bloggers and media hounds, they’ll wonder what happened. I think The GSO Compassion Mission could be the epicenter of all of that, and so on and so forth ad infinitum and replicated in varying ways through the US and the world until these pockets of sustainable growth and purity expand out and touch each other and things are…better.
That’s just my thinking of course. And it’s all in my head. The same head that is attached to a body that will lay on a pillow in about 30 minutes, wake up and work out, shower up, and go to work. Process papers. Balance accounts. Do the work as best as possible and go home at 4:55pm and be predictable.
Today is the 229th day since my last post and I just came across people and an organization that’s not so predictable and I’m embracing that somewhere in the back of my mind and the bottom of my heart. I’m embracing unpredictability and so should you. Because it’s that unpredictability that makes the impossible start to seem a little bit more possible.
Recently opportunities have come across my path. Many doors have opened and I haven’t fully stepped across the threshold of those doors, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens when I do.
That being said, let’s talk about kids and education.
Recently I have had the chance to look at some local school systems and have found myself focusing on Title I schools in particular. For years we’ve talked of and heard talk of the school-to-prison pipeline. What that involves in terms of how problems in systems of poverty tend to have a ripple effect that goes from child to child, parent to child, student to teacher, teacher to system, and when the system breaks and schools become troubled, we wash our hands and say “ugh” in sheer disgust when it comes to Title I schools. We talk about how many problems there are there. What can be expected of these kids. What can be expected of these teachers. What can be expected of the systems they’re in.
And there in come’s the problem: expectations.
These kids, their parents, their teachers, and the systems that are trying to support them all are not stupid. When they run up against the expectation that they’re going to be difficult, hard to manage, inappropriate, angry, childish…well, why would they want to put in all that effort to prove anybody otherwise when literally every other card in their home life, personal life, and societal well being is literally stacked against them? And when they show no progress people say “well, what can you expect?” Our ability to not expect anything of these kids and their families and their systems is really just a way of us saying that we don’t expect enough out of ourselves to step out of ourselves and help you. It’s a bit too hard and I’m tired.
That’s when I say “Just stop it.”
Yes, just stop.
And so, with some looking into things (like the fact that last school year the lopsided triangle presented itself in the form of 49 Title I elementary schools, 11 Tile I middle schools, and 7 upper level schools (3 labeled as high schools and 4 labeled as “alternative), I’ve come to the conclusion that there has to be something. Other than fighting the glass ceilings and the bureaucracies and the systems in place. There’s got to be something more than that. And so, time and time again, I’ve found myself in a particular area within the Guilford County School systems hearing the same sentiment of “we need help” and I’d like to try to give it to them.
And that’s why I’m going to try and position the GSO Compassion Mission in High Point, North Carolina.
The GSO Compassion Mission is a self sustaining community center for education and growth. Sometimes when you come across certain areas that people don’t want to go, you don’t just pave over them with shiny black asphalt and change a street sign or two and call it a day. The people are still there. The problems are still there. The systems are still in place. You don’t put a crate in a town with school supplies, tell the kids to split it among themselves and say that the problem is solved. It’s not. You don’t have a community garden the size of a small patio and say the hunger crisis is averted. It’s not. You build, you bring people in, you help educate the people in those systems and you help grow the people in the systems and you show them that they can learn more and they can grow more too.
So that’s what I’m going to try and do. Hone in the concept of the GSO Compassion Mission and make it a place of service for those that are not only underserved, but those that could do a fair amount about it. And those are the children.
People say that you mean what you’re saying when you can say what you want to say when you aren’t mad. When you’re spitting mad, it’s almost like a stream of consciousness thing. You get so mad that you just start spewing words and in that stream of word vomit, you say exactly what you mean to say when you mean to say it. That’s why most people say to just sleep on it. And so I did. Here goes.
I’ll be doing a lot of configuring and focusing on the mission house in the next little bit here, and in configuring the mission house, it’s making me think of it’s potential nonprofit status. It’s also making me think of what nonprofit means. These days, there’s heavy pressure on nonprofits to keep their funding. It’s not the worst thing obviously, especially not if you need money to run your organization. However, a line gets crossed when you get so concerned about the funding that you lose track of your purpose because your new purpose becomes to not only get the money, but to keep the money.
You start making charts and diagrams and fundraising and writing grants and appearing on TV and posting on blogs and Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds and trying your best to be relevant on YouTube. Just so people who’ve funded you, people you want to fund you, and people who will fund you can see you being a presence online and having some sort of social capital. All of a sudden, the people you’ve sworn to protect–human beings with real families and real life dilemmas–are not people anymore. They are living beings who are a means to get your funding. And keep your funding. So instead of getting people in the door with a problem and out the door with a solution, you find yourself not so upset if people keep coming in the door. Because then your mission is still working. Your numbers are still up. Your nonprofit is still legit. Your funding is still coming. And if your funding is still coming, you’re still succeeding even if your clients/guests/patients are not.
And that’s not how nonprofits should be working. That’s not how I’d like to be working.
What would happen if the problems were solved? Think about it. If you’re an owner, a staff member, or a volunteer of a nonprofit organization, just think about: what would happen if the problems you’re trying to address in your organization were solved? Would you be ecstatic, or not so much? If the problems were solved, maybe those clients, guests, patients, or whatever you’ve chosen to call people in need, wouldn’t need you and your organization anymore. You might lose your funding. You might have to close your doors. You might end up being a bit less than relevant to those funders and grantmakers and YouTube commentators and facebook followers. But it’s not supposed to be about them or the government. It’s about the people you serve. It’s always supposed to be about the people you serve, first and foremost, because if you’re a true humanitarian or a true nonprofit, you would never want to create such codependent relationships where you can’t exist without people’s pain and struggle, and those people can’t thrive in life without your business.
It should be the goal of nonprofits at the very beginning to come up with things to solve, or more positive output than negative input. Nonprofits should not be limbo or purgatory for those that seek help or change in their lives. Let’s face it: the world outside is not like a nonprofit’s best day. A person in need can’t go out into the city that they try their best to call home, and just be accepted, have the proper training and the tools, get the proper education or the proper nutrition without going through so many loopholes and over so many hurdles. They just can’t. But a nonprofit can do it’s best to provide those factors so the world isn’t so hard. Or they can change the world.
**screeching car sound insert here**
Or. They can change the people in it for the better, which in turn changes not only their world, but the world as a whole.
The GSO Compassion Mission may be a huge project. Let’s face it. It is a huge project. I’ve just started to sit down and have some talks with a very helpful organization called the Center for Community Engaged Design (CCED), and they’re helping me with the interior design aspect, showing me how parts of the house may be even bigger than I thought. That’s not the worst thing in the world, because it’s better to expand than to shrink in some cases. These interior design meetings will help with funding, ironically enough, but whoever funds this project or pieces of it, will be funding themselves as much as anything else. You help others and you help yourself. You fund others and that comes back to you in kind.
The GSO Compassion Mission is a huge project but it’s not impossible. And yes, one of the extreme long term goals is to have this process–this mission house–be replicated across the country and then around the globe, fostering sustainable energy, educational innovation, and physically, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally transformed humans who take that positive transformation and use that to transform their friends, their neighbors, their families, their homes, their environments, and their worlds. And if enough people do take that energy and do that exponentially…well then, I think we’ll be on to something. And if that change is so positive that the original GSO Compassion Mission and Compassion Missions across the state of North Carolina, the United States of America, or even the world start to feel the need to downsize a bit. Or they start to close up shop and operate out of smaller office buildings or smaller plots of land or smaller greenhouses, well then–that’s not a problem. That’s never going to be a problem because that means we’ve done our job. And we’ve done it well enough that we’re not as necessary anymore. And that should be fine, because it was never about us to begin with. It was never about me to begin with. It’s about the people that can be served. And that’s all it should be about. And if, over time, after all of these things have been accomplished and the funding is gone and it’s time to close up shop and go home, then that’s what we’ll do. Pack it up, go home. Be with our families, our husbands, our wives, our friends, our pets, ourselves because we’ve all been along for this crazy ride and coming to a stop isn’t the worst thing in the world. And we should just know that we’ve done what we’ve needed to do and it’s done.
No biggie.
My goal with this initial GSO Compassion Mission is to have it be sustainable enough to the point where it puts out more energy than it takes in. Where people can generate positivity and profit or revenue on their own so that the funding isn’t necessary and people start to see their investments come back to them in kind. Where the GSO Compassion Mission gives back to the people it serves, it’s community, and it’s funders one step at a time. One whole human at a time. And throughout all of that, if I have to walk away from it or pass it down to someone else, or watch as a predecessor has to close the doors, I’ll be fine. I’ll continue to do my work, raise my kids or my dogs or cats or be with my significant other and just live my life and tell my kids about this one house I built this one time. And all the people it helped. All the lives it changed.
Eh, I’m getting way way ahead of myself. The point is: people first, then profit. And if you do it right, the people will make that profit happen for you, nonprofits. It just might not be the kind of profit that you find valuable now, but when hindsight becomes 20/20, it will be all the profit you need.
That’s right, we’re all poor. Every one of us. From the homeless child on the streets to the number one person on the most recent Forbes 400 list. We are all currently experiencing poverty. We are all poor.
There are many definitions of poverty and being poor. Firstly, there’s “the state of being inferior in quality or insufficient in amount”. Secondly, there’s “the state of being extremely poor”. Lastly, but not least, there’s simply “the state of not having”. Some of us deal with being poor better than others.
Some of us just stay inside because we know that when we have a few dollars to spend, nothing is on sale and there’s nothing we could buy that would help us get out of our current situations. When we go outside with two nickels to rub together, everything’s on clearance. Everything’s on sale. Everything is supposed to “help” us. However, we know that when we put on the same clothes that we wore yesterday and the day before and wander out into the day, there are ads everywhere. And so some of us buy. Some of us spend spend spend more than others. There are cars going back and forth passing us by and we smile as the wind and the exhaust fumes whip through our hair and caress the brightly colored bags that are supposed to help us get out of our current situations. They’re supposed to help us forget for a while. We get that adrenaline spike and we spend and we hop right back to our lives and forget for a while. Until Monday rolls around and we remember what a mess we’re in, who we’re working for, and why we’re working where we work in the first place. But on the weekends there are cars going back and forth and the bags in the back seats exponentially grow into small sacks in the front seat with a couple of boxes in the trunk and a red hot credit card that’s burning it’s logo into the backside of consumerists. Some of those consumerists are regular joes. 9-5ers who are just trying to work so they can spend half their paychecks on rent and the other third on that video game or that hair style or that blouse. Some of those consumerists are CEOs who get all their nice suits brought in a bit after spending $4 dollars at the higher end consignment shop just to look like they know what they’re doing when in all actuality, when they send those orders trickling down the ladder, they press send on those emails and call it a day and hope nobody has a question because that guy–that CEO–is just trying to make it through the day. Just like the working mother trying to support her kids. Just like the husband trying to support his wife during her 3rd bout of unemployment. Just like the temp trying to make a living. Just like the young lady in her mid-to-late twenties just trying to make it to thirty without coming off as a cosmic joke. Just like the man under the bridge or the lady in the ward or the nurse or the firefighter or the President of this country.
We are all just trying to make it.
We all don’t have something.
We are all poor.
And when it comes down to the bottom line, the short of the long or the long of the short of it all, we all put that Wednesday Addams smile on our faces and say we’re fine as we punch in because we heard from some article off of google that it takes more muscles in your face to frown than it does to smile. Or that the more you smile, the happier you are.
But that doesn’t make anything go away, does it? It doesn’t.
And we are in a society–a country–where all of the above is a known fact but we still come to work talking about the latest TV show. We still listen to those top 40 hits and mindlessly hum them to ourselves when we reach our breaking point and it just happens to be 2:30 in the afternoon. And the man under the bridge drinks another drink to calm down and go to sleep. The man up top smokes another cigar and drinks some dark top shelf liquor and goes to sleep. And it’s all so not fair.
There are people who work to change that. People like the lovely ladies and gentlemen at the IRC who work tirelessly during these winter months to feed and shelter hundreds of homeless people during cold and random winter months. People like the men and women who are trying really hard to get the Renaissance Community Coop up and running in order to get food into the mouths of the community. Even someone like myself who is working most nights and weekends to continue planning the GSO Compassion Mission–a sustainable community center providing so many resources to contribute to the growth of the community, the city, and people as whole human beings. Not just the roles they play or the jobs they do, but as the people they really are.
And so, you have entities like the IRC, the Renaissance Community Coop, and the GSO Compassion Mission working on making everything a lot more equal than it’s been in the past so that we can all have a better future. But we have to start in the present. We have to start today.
We might not be rich. But news flash: we’re not poor. Nobody is. We are all trying to make it, which means we are all stronger than anybody gives us credit for. We will make these lives we live in more equal. We will make our lives better. We will make ourselves better.
“The courage to act is, ultimately, what the other six acts point to in your life. When it comes down to it, will you have the courage to act, to put yourself on the line?”
Those are the first two lines in this final act of courage. Day by day, I push myself to act on this seventh act moreso than others because what is life if you aren’t pushing yourself to do rather than to not do? Let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to not do! Like…a lot easier. But you get SO much more out of doing.
The GSO Compassion Mission is pretty much a daily exercise in the seventh act. For me, anyways. Why? Well, it would seriously be a lot easier to wake up at 7, leave the house at 7:30, get to work with 10 minutes to spare, fix my tea and scarf down a breakfast bar, type type type, verify verify verify, scan, scan, scan, log, log, log, clock in and out for my lunch and clock out to go home, go home, watch Netflix or hulu with my boyfriend then watch Netflix or hulu on my own while he plays video games until we both pass out on a couch or the floor, move to another couch or a bed, wake up the next morning and repeat.
But I can’t do that that often. Life is so much more than that. I love my job and all, but to be able to figure out how to balance a greater purpose with a work purpose is something else, you know. It’s hard, but it makes life more interesting. The work I’m doing on the GSO Compassion Mission is seriously a one-day-at-a-time sort of thing and I can’t afford not to work on it in any capacity on any given day because every day that something doesn’t happen on the GSO Compassion Mission is another day where someone else will adopt that “that’s the way life’s supposed to be” mindset and this is proof that something more can exist. If life can be dreary because “that’s the way life’s supposed to be”, then why can’t life be beautiful and have that be the way life’s supposed to be?
Yesterday during the day and yesterday after work was a rather perfect example of the contrast between the way life is and the way it’s supposed to be. Throughout the day I had contacted a couple of people about a couple of different things regarding the mission house. I contacted an art department head about the memorial/remembrance/memory tree sculpture to go in the backyard of the house. I contacted a company in Washington about waterproof paper that you can write on for the leaves of said tree. I contacted a very supportive lady in Kernersville about the mission house statement, attaching videos and the like. However, I did all these things on breaks and here and there during the day and so in some of my correspondences, they came off as hasty and rushed. Like, I didn’t have time to get out all I wanted to say or express all I needed to express and so things seemed…choppy at best, because there was no context. And that’s pretty much the pace of the whole day, really. Trying to get things across and figuring out how to explain the context fast enough so that the person you’re talking to doesn’t just say “I don’t know” and call it a day.
After work, however, I had to sit there and research for an hour or two what I was trying to say about the memory tree and convey the true vision of that tree to the art department head. I had to convey the purpose of the leaves to the paper company representative who’ll be sending me samples at some point. And I know I wouldn’t have been able to get that across in the fifteen minute break time or the hour lunch period or anything like that. It just wouldn’t be possible. And usually that’s where people stop acting. They stop doing things because there’s not enough time and it doesn’t seem possible. But there is enough time and it is possible. You just have to try to find a way to pause and just take time to act.
“…ask yourself this:Would you rather make your next Facebook statussay you’re having a tough time getting out of bedbecause you hurt your back or you’re having a tough time getting out of bed every morningbecause you’re depressed?That’s the stigma, because unfortunately,we live in a world where if you break your arm,everyone runs over to sign your cast,but if you tell people you’re depressed, everyone runs the other way.That’s the stigma.We are so, so, so accepting of any body part breaking downother than our brains. And that’s ignorance.”
A long time ago, apparently, in August of 2013 I was having a tough time.
I don’t remember a whole lot of it because I apparently tend to block out some things that aren’t the best time periods of my life. It’s not denial or ignorance or anything like that. It’s probably, more than anything else, a protective mechanism. I know some people who do it. For instance, before I met my boyfriend I wasn’t as stable as I am now. I’m not saying that he made me stable or he saved me or anything like that. I’m saying that, yes I’ve dated some other guys, but I never felt stable with them. I never felt like they wanted to be stable for me. I never felt like I wanted to stable for them. We definitely never wanted to stand on our own two feet or be stable for each other.
When I lived in my first apartment, at the tail end of that experience it was pretty much survival for the last year or year and a half I would say. I was constantly trying to come up with rent money off of minimum wage (like, $7.50 an hour) and money rationed to me by family but I never wanted to depend on that other part. I was constantly driving around town to pawn things to make rent money in hopes that not only would I make enough to cover rent, I’d make enough to put some gas in my car because I was probably pushing E driving around town multiple times in a day just to find the money to pay the rent. I never really failed at that mission. I also never ran out of gas. That’s determination for you, lol.
And so at the end when I was still working at my minimum wage theater job, my staff lead at the time worked two jobs and made a little bit more money than I did but still had a hard time paying for everything, and my assistant manager lived directly across the complex from me. Every single time I asked for an increase in pay or just more hours, they would deny me that chance and I would think to myself “How is it that my assistant manager can live across the complex from me, know how pricey this place is for him, and not even attempt to acknowledge the fact that I make $7.50 an hour and it’s completely okay to not give me more hours or advance me in the company?” I was the one starting to wake up in the morning to no power. No gas. I literally was adapting to cooking food over the pilot light in the faux-fireplace until the gas got cut off. At that point I started to adapt to reading with a hand crank flashlight I got for free at a free student lunch on campus. Nobody understood why I took the hand crank flashlight (or why I was so excited about the darn thing) as opposed to the key chain or the tee shirt or the duffel bag swag from an apartment complex that I probably couldn’t afford anyway. But me, with my optimistic/opportunistic attitude (thank goodness I have that personality), I saw that hand crank flashlight and said “Yes! I can read more at night”, hahaha. Oh goodness.
I got used to taking cold showers. Sticking in one limb at a time to acclimate to the cold and keeping showers to a minimum and taking them quickly. I did that in an apartment that was a little over 620 a month (not including utilities) right until I moved out pretty much. At that tail end of that whole experience, I met my current loving and understanding boyfriend. We’ve been together for 3 and a half years at this point and now I can definitely say that I’ve found someone worth being stable for, in addition to myself and my cat, my boyfriend’s friends as well as mine, and my family.
And so days when I’m not happy at all with the current situation of things or how people act or what people do or how people say things, I find the light on the other side of the tunnel. That light includes maybe a pay raise at work. It includes an apartment and my own kitchen. A media center in the living room to house my movies and my boyfriend’s video games and our collections of technology or gamer or science magazines that we might accumulate together. It includes better hair. It includes a better figure after working out more in the warmer days. It includes a better life that’s not a month away or anything, but it’s there someday. It will happen. That’s my light at the end of the tunnel.
But some people can never see that light. It’s just all dark tunnel. Complete tunnel vision with blinders and no light in the foreseeable future and not too much of an ability to even visualize that light. It’s just not there. And on top of that, the tunnel doesn’t flash visions of happiness or open fields or babies being born to happy parents. There are very personal and pointed demons, destruction and darkness.
*****
A year and five months ago, I was in a bit of a tunnel. I don’t think I was employed at that time. I was in the midst of an employment dry spell, constantly working on either making something of my own and not getting credit where it was due, or I was working in my boyfriend’s family store and wondering if there was ever going to be something more than irate customers with beer and cigarettes and lottery tickets in hand. I was in such a funk, I couldn’t even imagine the good customers who actually wanted to hold a conversation. Every time they did, I would feel like they were intruding in the one personal bubble I had–myself. It was a dark time. But oddly enough, in hindsight, this one lady in this one article I read was my light.
Her name was Mary Seymour. The sister of a woman I had worked with from time to time at the Interactive Resource Center, I never made the connection as I saw her article in O’Henry Magazine in the August 2013 issue. I didn’t even make that connection until this morning when I started to read an article by her survived sister, Liz Seymour, in the News and Record. I read the words:
“She developed a new inner strength and a new appreciation for her own uniqueness. She took up a type of mosaic work called shardware — broken plates and cups and saucers reassembled into intricately beautiful designs — that became a metaphor for the careful and creative way she reassembled her own life.”
–And I gasped. I suddenly remembered being in the store and escaping through O Henry Magazine to see how the other half lives a little bit. I remember flipping the page through high end ads and upper echelon experiences and feeling my soul open up when I flipped the page to Mary Seymour’s article. And that house. My goodness, that house. It was beautiful. I called my boyfriend and my mom and told them about this article and this house. It was so colorful and put together and it just seemed like such a solid representation of what it’s like to get to the other side of the tunnel. Like, when you finally get to where you’d like to be and your most intimate environment, your home, reflects that just as well as your best-pet-friend or your loved one when they look in your eyes and encourage your dreams. That’s what I felt when I read that article and looked at Mary Seymour’s house. To see that she had survived so many things in life so far and had taken up shardware as a beautiful representation of that…I was inspired. In that moment of the store and the cigarette smell and some of the slightly inebriated customers, Mary Seymour was my light.
Until recently when I saw on facebook and around local feeds around town that she was gone.
And until this morning when I saw her sister’s article in the News & Record and realized that house belonged to Mary Seymour. And she was gone.
*****
You see, depression is a hard thing. My boyfriend and I have had multiple instances in our own lives where people we love have either passed away from natural causes or they’ve taken their life. The older I get the more frustrated I get by the concept of suicide because to never be able to see how you can affect others or yourself or your environment in a positive way is just mind boggling. There’s so much life to live after the age of 21, 24, 27, 50…you know? So much life. So many more opportunities to do something great. You could literally have lived a life for 80 years and then when you’re 81 you could see the fruits of your labor and know that your life is complete. Or you could be 49 years old and when you’re 95 you feel like a kid when you experience something for the first time, like seeing a different part of the ocean or seeing the sun set over the Grand Canyon. Every day that we wake up is an opportunity to see something new. Do something better. Be someone different. Just be ourselves. And when I sit at my desk and type away people’s information into a system that doesn’t care a whole lot about how they got there in the first place, I hear one of the more abrasive coworkers say “So, what I’m saying is, when you wake up on Thursday, February 12th, will your money be in the bank already or do you have to go and deposit it?” And I always think to myself, “Mr. _______, some people don’t wake up. And if they don’t, I’m sure the last thought they have will not be “what about my bill?”
Life is intensely short and full of opportunity. And for those of us who survive the loss of friends, family and acquaintances to natural causes or tragic accidents or suicide, it’s then up to us to do something great in honor of that friend, family member or even acquaintance.
At the GSO Mission House, there will be a memorial tree in the backyard. A sculpture, unaffected by time and age that represents the tree of life. I hope that in time, if something happens to the world we live in and the mission house is no longer there, that memorial tree will still be standing and entities or people who come by that space will wonder what it is and be awestruck to see so many remembered persons and just know that there were that many people who were able to love and lose and move forward at the end of the day. It’s colorful leaves will bear the names of people whom we’ve lost along the way: my boyfriend’s father, my spiritual buddy, my grandmother, my third cousin/family member’s young wife, my uncle, my boyfriend’s uncle, my friend’s brother…All these people’s names will be written on colorful leaves and attached to this tree to be remembered forever and they will be represented in a colorful way to help those who were left behind remember their lives and not so much their deaths. And I would be pretty honored if even one of those leaves were attached by Liz Seymour in honor of her colorful sister, Mary Seymour, who touched not only my life in the most random of ways, but the lives of many other people as well. I hope to one day see that name on a leaf in the wind some day.
This is something that I struggle with these days, especially with my current living situation. It isn’t bad, but sometimes I feel like if I open myself up to some things, I automatically end up opening myself up to everything else is well. For instance, at the moment, my boyfriend and I currently live with his mother and her boyfriend. It’s a full house with two cats running around. And so, when I open myself up to my boyfriend, I inherently end up opening myself up to his mother and her boyfriend as well. It’s almost like dating three people. Let me explain.
The most recent instance was my boyfriend’s tooth pains. I used to have them all the time with my back wisdom tooth and now my boyfriend’s having those same pains. And so the other day, I took it upon myself to go to the grocery store after work and get him some of his favorite chocolate ice cream (to numb the tooth a little bit) and some chicken lasagna. It was something soft that also had chicken in it so he’d like it. So I come back from work the other day to find that my boyfriend’s mother has started this chicken lasagna in the oven (with no timer and a higher temperature to make it cook faster). Now, personal issue #1: I attach a lot of love to food, especially when I’m making it for my boyfriend. I like to have that space and time to cook something for him or for the both of us, especially when I have enough energy after work to do so. So, when I picked up this chicken lasagna from the grocery store, I was thinking about the whole process from setting the temperature to placing it in the oven, to seeing the bubbles come up from a hot lasagna, to seeing the look on my boyfriend’s face as he enjoys something he can eat that doesn’t hurt his tooth. And I made that meal for him. So when I get home and his mother has not only started the lasagna so it would be done by 6pm, but she’s put it in there without really reading the directions (because who needs those these days), it just makes me feel like the special moment of making food for my boyfriend is taken from me. Like the surprise factor is not so much a surprise. And then to top it off, my boyfriend starts eating the ice cream because his tooth hurts, in which case his mom turns on the dining room light like “Why are you eating ice cream? You’ll ruin your appetite!” And the whole purpose of the ice cream is to help his tooth not spoil his appetite…
At any rate.
See what I mean? Something as simple as a loving gesture of lasagna and ice cream turns into a whole ordeal with no directions and seemingly ridiculous consequences like a spoiled appetite. But it started with an intent to be vulnerable and to share love with my boyfriend in the form of food. But in opening myself up to that type of opportunity, I open myself up to the inevitable results of what his mom will think of it. What her opinion on the matter is, because after all, my boyfriend is her son and we all live in the same house where it’s even more possible for my boyfriend to be her son and for her to be his mother. We’re never too old to be our parent’s children is the lesson that’s learned here, lol.
But where the 6th act of courage comes in is when one continually chooses to be vulnerable and open to love even after some things just don’t work out. This can happen in relationships gone bad, surprises ruined, big moments that end up being reduced to something small or small moments that get blown out of proportion. Each time, if you don’t get the result you want, you have to dust yourself off and continue to WD40 the hinges of the doors to your heart and your soul. You have to stay open otherwise, you’ll close yourself off and what good would you be then?
I’ve always been an avid learner and I’ve always loved everything that comes with it. This includes going to school, being on time (at least 98% of the time), getting new school supplies, organizing everything…yeah. I’m a dork when it comes to learning new things. I’m finding that the older I get, the more I learn and nowadays that contributes to my growth as a general human being. I pretty much never stop learning, which can be great some days and a nuisance to others on other days 🙂
The first line in The 7 Acts of Courage in regards to the fifth act is “The courage to learn and grow is the commitment to challenge your assumptions…” A large part of the GSO Compassion Mission hinges on my own need to learn and grow and my wish to bring that about in others. Of course, as anyone knows, you can lead a horse to water and whatnot, but my genuine hope for the GSO Compassion Mission is to create the space for people to truly learn about themselves, their environments and the people around them. I also hope to create the space for action. Not just direct action in terms of social movements and all of that. I’m talking about how to can fruit. How to grow vegetables and prepare them for eating and different ways to eat home grown foods that will help every person who participates accumulate the tools (literally and figuratively) to start their own healthier ways of living even if they don’t live in the healthiest spaces. Like seriously, how cool would that be if you could grow your own potatoes and then use a portion of those potatoes to light a small garden indoors? I’m pretty sure that’d be somehow possible especially when you can make electricity from a potato!
But of course, not everything’s about farming and potatoes. It’s about connection. There are so many cultures and religions in the world that are talking about the same concepts and because of things like language barriers, visual differences and the like, we all look at “the other” like “how could you understand me when you’re so different” and so we think it’s impossible. However, nothing’s truly impossible as impossible as it may seem in the short term. Hindsight is often 20/20, so in hindsight please don’t view yourself as saying something’s impossible. You just might end up disappointing yourself.
The GSO Compassion Mission is all about growth. Growth as a whole human being. The concept of that is, admittedly, hard to understand to many people, but easy to understand once one is taught. There are so many avenues to pursue in the GSO Compassion Mission. So many ways to grow and to learn and to thrive (not just survive). There are rotating classes on various topics inside. There are spaces for learning and executing different food techniques. There are physical training classes outdoors (which could be brought indoors in the downstairs dining/speaking engagement room). There are prayer rooms which turn into spaces for inter-religious discussion and research in order to learn and connect with one another. A space for religious leaders to teach (not so much preach) about what they know and their religions and they can turn around 45 minutes later and hear something new about another religion. There’s a small library outside for reading with what hopefully will contain all the classics, educational texts as well as a few classic “pop culture” books for fun. There will hopefully be a meditation tree in the backyard. A collaborative effort among many members of the community to create a replica of the tree of life that allows the community to remember ones that they ‘ve lost in a very beautiful and meaningful and visual way.
To some, the GSO Compassion Mission may seem a bit scatterbrained. But hey. The whole human is not cookie cutter. You have to address all parts of the humans in the community in order to have a true community center, in my opinion.
Growth and Learning are beautiful parts of being a human and to finally have space where you can not only learn, but you can grow and spread that knowledge and light to others around you is an even more beautiful thing.
One of the supervisors at work is always telling people, whether it’s at morning meetings or around the office or in the hallway, to be accountable. This means being responsible for your actions. Being confrontable more or less.
I came up against this issue the other day. I had made a decision on a work problem and then lo and behold, so many hours later, somebody caught up with me wondering about a resolution to this that or the other problem when I had already managed to solve it myself. And so, right before I went on my break I came to terms with being accountable. I checked my work, I sent my email with my detailed response to the solution (that I had solved hours before on my own) and went to break fully prepared to be confronted on how I came up with/was able to handle that solution on my own. When I got back from my break, head held high I checked my email and saw one new email in my inbox. I exhaled and clicked on it and this is what it said:
“Thanks!”
Really? Thanks?! Okay….? lol.
And in that moment I found the courage to be confronted. I opened myself up to that. The Courage to Be Confronted. The ability to be accountable. It felt pretty good, although I think that moment was truly a spark in the darkness because really. Nobody really wants to be confronted or accountable for much of anything! But in that moment when I made my solution work on my own and I stood behind it, I found the courage to be accountable.
You can confront head on. You can confront from the side and kind of test the waters. You can “confront without confronting”, aka be passive aggressive with it.
Like I said, there are many ways to confront, but unfortunately not all things can be confronted. There’s practically a culture of non confrontation at the work place. How is one supposed to confront non-confrontational work practices? I don’t know. I find that non-confrontational work practices are deeply engrained and the only way to get out of it on the other side is probably to become deeply engrained in the management teams yourself. But you have to hack through all the brush of bureaucracy with a machete of wisdom and truth to get to the other side. It’s so frustrating.
Nowadays, even though there are many ways to confront, people just don’t do it anymore. At least not at work. At work there are general meetings across the board where meetings turn in to “What do you have to do today? Everybody good? Alright? Get to work! High fives all around.” Pretty much. Or “How are you? Good? Good! Get to work! Hive five.” And nobody addresses what’s confrontable. Like saying everything’s fine when it’s not. Saying that you’re getting stuff done when really everything’s in place so you don’t get anything done but you can’t tell anybody about the 4 Hour Work Week book under your passengers seat in your car that tells you about staying peaceful and time management skills. How it’s best to answer all emails at a certain time period. Or deal with certain tasks during a certain window on a daily basis. Nope. You put your book back under your car and get back to your desk piled with piles inside of piles of paper that you just can’t get to because that’s just not how work works. Sound familiar? So frustrating. I know.
I’m facing this particular conundrum and I’ve faced it for a while. I still don’t know how to handle it, but so far here are my options:
1) Clone myself so the original me can do my work and the clone me can handle the organization and the filing and the paperwork. Maybe throw in a third clone to show me what I’ll look like if I keep up my exercise regimen every day for a couple of months.
2) Get overtime to accomplish tasks (I can just hear my supervisor laughing in the distance…not gonna happen)
3) Obtain the power of invisibility or obtain an invisibility cloak like in Harry Potter so that I can go back after work and get all my paperwork done and when the desk is clear Monday morning and people are all like “what happened?!” I can just smile because my invisibility cloak worked. Mission Accomplished.
Or, I can just say to someone in charge, “Hey, I’m not able to finish my tasks. Can I get my tasks finished please?” But in a culture of passive aggressive complacency where for some reason it’s the norm to never be caught up or on time, that’s just hard to do. You’ll get a big laugh in the face and a pat on the back to send you on your way before you get the green light to be as productive as possible and get work done at work. Is that okay? Does that happen in the majority of work places today?
the GSO Compassion Mission 
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