Author: clfuu

Our brains are programmed to respond to emergencies—we pay far more attention to sudden crises than to the large issues that build over time. A plane crash that kills two people gains far more attention than heart disease that claims hundreds on the same day. The threat of terrorism gets far more of a public response than does the threat of climate change. But sometimes what needs our attention is not the emergency, but rather the issues that niggle at the back of our brains, calling for a creative response.

What will you attend to today?

Imagine what the world would look like if you were so small that the hairs on a person’s arm appeared to you as a thicket. By comparison you are a giant, with no conceivable reason to be afraid.

What makes you feel big?

“On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking: Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.”
―Chris Cleave, Little Bee

What scars do you have that are as beautiful to you as stars?

Isn’t that just how it is? Most of the time the view is obscured, the light not very good, and you can’t quite see where you’re going. And then the path opens up, the light comes in, and you can see it all so clearly. Until you move a few steps further down the path.

What is the light like on your personal path at the moment?

Sure, there are those annoying people at work or in our families or on social media with whom we are always butting heads in an endless stream of pointless controversy or contradiction. But the position, head to head, is not so different than the much more constructive “putting our heads together.”

What would it take to move a relationship in your life from “butting heads” to “putting your heads together”?