Your Life In A Day
With the passage of time, all such actions or lack of them, appear less significant. And anyway, since the cells in our body die and are renewed, replaced by different ones, we do in a literal sense become difference individuals. The connection I have to the boy I once was is now so fragile that it requires an act of conscious 'faith' to maintain that we are in any significant sense the same person.
- Sebastian Faulks, Engleby, Vintage Press (Random House), 2008
Today ain't like it used to be. But then, you aren't either.
As Faulks suggested in the quote, our physical self changes every day. In fact, there is no part of your body that still has the same cells as it had 15 years ago. Over that period you have been completely rebuilt.
In a world obsessed with the shape and appearance of the human body, that might seem disappointing. Especially as strings of genes in our DNA don't always and forever reproduce themselves exactly. Over time, they tend to lose code at their tail ends. Even our replacement parts don't reproduce exactly.
So what is the real you? Your body changes over time, completely replacing itself repeatedly over your lifetime. Your brain's memory contains all the same stuff it did 15 years ago, but it has added 15 years worth of learning and experiences to itself. If you attempted to count the new information your brain has added over the past 15 years it would be so staggering you wouldn't be able to count it if you took the rest of your life. Your brain has changed markedly over the past 15 years.
Your personality has changed. Sure you retain many of the same habits, relationships, values and so on, but if you could meet the you of 15 years ago today you might not recognize yourself. You don't even look the same in the mirror.
What identifies you as you? How do you know you are the same person?
Let's add a little perspective. Do you remember a movie or television program you watched over the past week or month? Was it real? Was there a real program you saw or maybe it was just a memory? In fact, you can't prove you even saw it. Memory proves nothing, as the recall of witnesses in recent court cases has shown. Some memory has been altered over time, some is purely invented.
For that matter, you can't prove you existed yesterday, or that there even was a yesterday. As shocking as it may seem, maybe today and the world you know about today came into existence when you gained consciousness this morning. If you believe that someone can create a movie in which you participate as viewer and in which you find yourself thinking that it's really happening at the time, then why could it not be possible that a whole past, an entire history, was created when you woke up today?
I know, it's not the way you have been taught to think. It's not what you have been lulled and trained into believing.
You have family members, loved ones, neighbours, work friends who aren't with you now as you read this. You can't prove they even exist, at this moment as you sit reading this. You trust that you can move from where you are to some other place and you will find them where you expect.
You may be right. But you can't prove it. When you move to one of these places, you change your own reality. You change from the present NOW to another NOW. Once there, what you are doing in this NOW will be equally as unprovable. It might be just a created memory, like your memory of that movie or TV program. What we know as memory and history could be entirely self-created memory.
The only reality you can depend on is this one, the one you are in. If you hope to be remembered by someone in a future NOW, then you had better act in ways that will cause you to be remembered. If what you do in this NOW only benefits you, then others will have no reason to remember you later. Why should they? They will be busy with their own NOW of the moment.
That may give you some insight into what you do with your time, the time you think of as NOW, as your own. Do you want to be remembered or not? Memories of people who think only or mostly of themselves don't last long. People remember (or create memories of their NOW moments) others who helped them, who cared for them, who showed them that they mattered.
If you believe that your body, your own personal NOWs, are all that are important, you have no reason to believe in a God. God serves no purpose if all your NOWs will eventually vanish and be forgotten. If there will never be anything left of the YOU you know when you die, then there is no need for God, no afterlife. Not even any purpose to what you are doing in this NOW. If nothing of you will continue to exist after you die, then life has no purpose. Does that make sense, that everything around you has no purpose?
Look around you. Does it seem as if all this could have happened by accident? The moon is as old as earth, as are the other planets in our solar system, yet they have nothing remotely similar to the reality of NOW you live in. Why? Cosmologists and science fiction writers claim there are likely many other civilizations out there somewhere in our universe, but they have absolutely no evidence to support their claims or speculations. No one has any evidence that the NOW you live in is anything but unique.
Does everything change constantly or does it all remain the same? Or do--gasp!--some things change constantly while others remain the same? Sorry, that last statement doesn't make sense to a thinking person. It's inconsistent, unlike anything in evidence around you. Everything you know changes, though some things change slower than you can detect so it seems as if they remain the same. Rocks change just as surely as the universe itself changes. We have evidence. At least we have memories of evidence we believe we read.
Your body changes when you die. Many of the bacteria that cohabit your body with "you" today--there are more of them than of cells in your body--may live on in other environments when the life that was your body has dissipated. Your body cells may separate into various atoms and molecules, but they won't disappear. Even if someone were to burn your body, the matter would change into energy, as Einstein proved. Remember e = mc2
Does that mean that when you die you are gone, or not? Are you comprised of your body and nothing else? Every atom that was your body remains and becomes something else. Does the part of you that you think of as "me" disappear? In nature, nothing disappears. It's the natural Law of Conservation. Why would the "you" that you spent so many years creating disappear? That's assuming you believe there is something more to you than animated cells.
If the "you" you created disappeared at your death, that would defy nature's laws. It would defy everything you have come to believe is real. Stuff doesn't disappear, it just changes.
You created something. You created you. Maybe you didn't create everything you know as real, but you created something. Does that make you a Creator? Does that make you God? Well, sort of. For that to be strictly true then there would have to be 6.7 billion other Gods on the planet. That doesn't make sense.
What makes more sense is that you, as creator, are part of a larger Creator, a system. You can't hold the whole system together. But you can be a component of it. You can't be God. But you can be part of God. God can be part of you. This isn't a religious lesson, it's an exercise in logic.
Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of Christianity and the figure believed even by Muslims as the Son of God (Jesus and his mother are both mentioned in the Qu'ran), taught that. Read the Gospel of John. Read it straight, not filtering what you read through what you have been taught. If you grew up in a Christian family, your beliefs were more those of Paul, not so much of what Jesus taught. Paul, a Greek, taught what he believed and attributed it to Jesus and God. That's what inventors of religions do, they never give themselves credit or their followers wouldn't believe them. Read the actual words of Jesus, not their context because the Church of Rome doctored up the context of the few words of Jesus that were recorded.
Jesus taught that God is within each of us, not up in the sky somewhere. He said that we could find God within ourselves. We just have to look.
Having read this far, you have had a peek at possibilities relating to existence, your own and that of the world you know. Look further. Never mind the crap you have been taught by others. (Sorry, that was rude. I detest being asked to "have faith" in something for which there is no evidence when real evidence of something different is all around us.)
God, the purpose of life and the continuance of you after the death of your body are not subjects about which you need to "have faith." The evidence is all around you. Nature gave you some of it. Your brain can now give you more. If you want to know what life is about, study your surroundings and think it through.
What is real may not necessarily be what is around you. NOW is like that movie you saw and remember. Reality is much more significant, more grand, much superior to what you see in advertising or hear in your place of worship. Or to what you see as you look around the room you are in.
Look for it. Start now.
One final point. While you are creating you, create something worthwhile, something worth enduring. Keep in mind, if you want to be remembered, don't be too generous at helping yourself because selfish people aren't remembered fondly.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children who can think for themselves as adults, who will pay attention to what is real instead of advertising disguised with smoke and mirrors.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Showing posts with label fraud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fraud. Show all posts
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Monday, July 28, 2008
We Need Better Lightning Bolts
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
- Bill Watterson, comic strip artist (1958- ), in his comic strip Calvin & Hobbes
If only...
Those who claim that organized religion is on the wane may be correct. A few key reasons come to mind.
First, religion is supposed to benefit the individual believer, yet it more often benefits the leaders of the various segments within each religion. Religion benefits the leaders more than the individual followers.
Second, historically as well as at the present time clerics have been widely known to be among the worst violators of the sins their religions speak against in commandments.
Third, the massive expansion of media coverage of violations of the law among religious leaders among religious leaders has made following some of them like belonging to an organized crime family.
We must be suspicious of any religious leader who claims that what we do on earth is supposed to be solely to please God. While most of us want to be cooperative and follow religious and moral rules, we must question what kind of God had to create humans to be his servants and slaves. Does this sound like the beautiful and beneficent God our clerics tell us about?
Why did God give us free choice so that we could violate what he wanted of us? Isn't that like a master-slave relationship where the master gives the slaves free reign to do what they want, then punishes them with eternal damnation if they do anything other than what they have been commanded to do? That doesn't even make sense.
Clerics have over the centuries attributed every bit of misfortune to breaking of God's commandments, resulting in everything from fires and floods to AIDS, bankruptcies and divorce. Enough people believe this nonsense that the rumour mill keeps churning behind the scenes even when the real causes and sources for natural disasters and personal misfortune can be proven.
It's God's way of paying people back for their sins, say some. But isn't that what the hell they threaten us with is for? Either we should be punished here on earth so that we can all go to heaven cleansed or we should have free reign here and pay for our sins eternally after we die. If we get punished both here on earth and in hell, isn't that double jeopardy?
If the strongly religious people truly believe that their God is all-powerful and will punish sinners accordingly after they die, why do the self-righteous want to punish people here on earth? Are they concerned that God might miss a sinner? Or do they have God-envy?
Let's look at the self-designated upright pillars of society in a different light. If we examine their behaviour carefully, ignoring their message while focussing on what they do, they are really closet bigots. In fact, the self-righteous may be the most prejudiced people we have in our communities. They ignore that part of their holy book that says "Judge not that ye be not judged." They tend to be the most judgmental people we have in our societies. Yet prejudice, they claim, is a sin. One for which they personally have no intention of paying any penalty.
On the surface, every religion is designed to help guide an individual through a complex and confusing life. In practice, most organized religions are tax collecting agencies who want to control the behaviour of their taxpayers so that they will give more.
If God is ashamed of anyone in our society, he could find no better objectives than the highly religious.
Every religion has good at its core. Every religion goes corrupt over time. Every religion has people who profit from donations and who know how to maximize them for their own benefit. Every religion has people whose prime objective is to bend the minds of the followers to do their will.
That's what religions do. Not what they say they do, which is quite different, often quite the opposite.
Attendance at religious services is declining in most parts of the world where people are well educated. Not because the core of religion is at fault--because it isn't--but because educated people understand fraud and choose to avoid it.
This doesn't mean that belief in any doctrine is disappearing. I suspect the opposite. I think that we have more people who believe in what the core of the religion they were born into teaches while attendance at places of worship declines. Of course there will always be places where charismatic speakers can charm large audiences. We also have advertising that sells product well and politicians who can get themselves elected by making all kinds of promises they have no intention of fulfilling once elected. It's hype. It works. It brings in money.
I find it ironic that I have never met an atheist who is anything other than a good person who tries to do his or her best for their family and their community. What they don't believe in is the false gods that organized religions use to manipulate the minds of their followers. Most haven't yet figured out how to find the real God.
The more self-righteous among us rail against false gods. Maybe they should look into a mirror.
Where are those lightning bolts when we need them?
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can tell truth from fiction, what is worthy from what is deceptive, what is real from what is devised by the greedy for their fraudulent purposes.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Bill Watterson, comic strip artist (1958- ), in his comic strip Calvin & Hobbes
If only...
Those who claim that organized religion is on the wane may be correct. A few key reasons come to mind.
First, religion is supposed to benefit the individual believer, yet it more often benefits the leaders of the various segments within each religion. Religion benefits the leaders more than the individual followers.
Second, historically as well as at the present time clerics have been widely known to be among the worst violators of the sins their religions speak against in commandments.
Third, the massive expansion of media coverage of violations of the law among religious leaders among religious leaders has made following some of them like belonging to an organized crime family.
We must be suspicious of any religious leader who claims that what we do on earth is supposed to be solely to please God. While most of us want to be cooperative and follow religious and moral rules, we must question what kind of God had to create humans to be his servants and slaves. Does this sound like the beautiful and beneficent God our clerics tell us about?
Why did God give us free choice so that we could violate what he wanted of us? Isn't that like a master-slave relationship where the master gives the slaves free reign to do what they want, then punishes them with eternal damnation if they do anything other than what they have been commanded to do? That doesn't even make sense.
Clerics have over the centuries attributed every bit of misfortune to breaking of God's commandments, resulting in everything from fires and floods to AIDS, bankruptcies and divorce. Enough people believe this nonsense that the rumour mill keeps churning behind the scenes even when the real causes and sources for natural disasters and personal misfortune can be proven.
It's God's way of paying people back for their sins, say some. But isn't that what the hell they threaten us with is for? Either we should be punished here on earth so that we can all go to heaven cleansed or we should have free reign here and pay for our sins eternally after we die. If we get punished both here on earth and in hell, isn't that double jeopardy?
If the strongly religious people truly believe that their God is all-powerful and will punish sinners accordingly after they die, why do the self-righteous want to punish people here on earth? Are they concerned that God might miss a sinner? Or do they have God-envy?
Let's look at the self-designated upright pillars of society in a different light. If we examine their behaviour carefully, ignoring their message while focussing on what they do, they are really closet bigots. In fact, the self-righteous may be the most prejudiced people we have in our communities. They ignore that part of their holy book that says "Judge not that ye be not judged." They tend to be the most judgmental people we have in our societies. Yet prejudice, they claim, is a sin. One for which they personally have no intention of paying any penalty.
On the surface, every religion is designed to help guide an individual through a complex and confusing life. In practice, most organized religions are tax collecting agencies who want to control the behaviour of their taxpayers so that they will give more.
If God is ashamed of anyone in our society, he could find no better objectives than the highly religious.
Every religion has good at its core. Every religion goes corrupt over time. Every religion has people who profit from donations and who know how to maximize them for their own benefit. Every religion has people whose prime objective is to bend the minds of the followers to do their will.
That's what religions do. Not what they say they do, which is quite different, often quite the opposite.
Attendance at religious services is declining in most parts of the world where people are well educated. Not because the core of religion is at fault--because it isn't--but because educated people understand fraud and choose to avoid it.
This doesn't mean that belief in any doctrine is disappearing. I suspect the opposite. I think that we have more people who believe in what the core of the religion they were born into teaches while attendance at places of worship declines. Of course there will always be places where charismatic speakers can charm large audiences. We also have advertising that sells product well and politicians who can get themselves elected by making all kinds of promises they have no intention of fulfilling once elected. It's hype. It works. It brings in money.
I find it ironic that I have never met an atheist who is anything other than a good person who tries to do his or her best for their family and their community. What they don't believe in is the false gods that organized religions use to manipulate the minds of their followers. Most haven't yet figured out how to find the real God.
The more self-righteous among us rail against false gods. Maybe they should look into a mirror.
Where are those lightning bolts when we need them?
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can tell truth from fiction, what is worthy from what is deceptive, what is real from what is devised by the greedy for their fraudulent purposes.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Intellectual Obesity And Information Diarrhea
The internet and technology associated with it have opened access to quantities of information unparalleled in human history. No emperor of Rome, monarch of the British Empire or ruler of any other empire has ever been able to acquire information the way anyone with a computer can today.
A friend wants to buy a garden tractor. He is able to research many different brands, compare quality and durability within brands of each manufacturer and among the various brands available on the market. Having selected a few for further research, he accesses several blogs and forums to learn about the experiences of users of each and gets warning about what to avoid. Then, trailer behind his van, he can pick up the best buy he has made by playing each seller against the others.
Not long ago I was contacted by a college student from Australia as a source for material she was researching on a topic on which I have expertise. Others, strangers every one and representing six different continents, have contacted me for information and advice about problems they have experienced. To them, I am accessible due to the internet.
However, this unprecedented access to information by millions of people comes at a cost. That cost is time, as a researcher must wade through mountains of information that is more advertising and propaganda than fact, and that takes time. Google can only point to sources, not to the most factual and succinct sources.
Children use the internet to learn about all sorts of topics. The media warn us about the dangers of pornography and adult web sites for kids. And they caution parents to monitor the activity of their children on social sites like Facebook.
But the media can't help children or parents to distinguish between factual information and political propaganda, religious come-ons, sites that outright lie about the products they sell, warranties on products they sell that aren't worth the paper they could be (but aren't) printed on, or "research" that could better be described as personal hobby than oriented to scientific method.
In short, the internet is the greatest source of trash information in human history.
Yet children and adults read this stuff. If it's well written, readers tend to become believers. Form, rather than factual substance, gives it street cred.
As television viewership declines, reading of material on web sites increases dramatically. This contributes to what retired Canadian educator Jim World calls intellectual obesity. Kids and adults can have heads crammed full of misinformation, trivia that may be attractive but serves them no good purpose (think the style and content of supermarket tabloids) and opinions-turned-beliefs on topics about which they have very limited verifiable facts.
In general, schools don't teach how to distinguish between facts, lies and propaganda, whether on the internet or on television. A small part of one course I took years ago focussed on political spin, editorialized news sources and propaganda. It may have been the best time I ever spent in school. Most people never get that experience, so they become prey for the wolves of the internet. Internet wolves know their sociology.
Humans being subject to human nature, the more they know, the more they want to tell others. Rumour and unsubstantiated fact has always been a part of human dialogue. But it could usually be distinguished as rumour and ignored or treated accordingly.
Today we have kids and adults who believe the most outrageous things because they read it on the internet. In North America, over half of all adults use the internet as their primary source for news and information. With a few rare exceptions, most of it is not subjected to scrutiny the way newspaper and television news reports are.
If US President George W. Bush could use newspapers, radio and television to spread lies about weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist in Iraq, then use the lies to start a war, what could happen when the unfiltered internet is used to brainwash people in every country of the world about the lies or misinformation its sources want to spread?
Don't call it information diarrhea if the term offends you. But let's not pretend that the internet is a source of verifiable facts. It's not. Most web sites are supported by companies or organizations with something (product or idea) to sell or individuals who want their ill-considered and often poorly formulated thoughts to be recorded for posterity.
Do we need more laws to protect us? No. The present plethora of unenforced and unenforceable laws on the books now prove that method doesn't work. More laws just make the bad guys get smarter to avert and avoid them.
The only way to protect people from misinformation and religious or political propaganda on a global scale is to teach children how to identify fact from fiction, truth from propaganda, sham from gem. That means changing part of the curriculum in high schools.
The other day I discussed with a friend the twice in my life that I have used skills I learned from two years of trigonometry in high school. I struggle today to comprehend how the average person could use calculus in their lives when they can't tell truth from lie, don't know how to think for themselves and believe everything that is carefully presented as if fact by a politician.
Being able to tell fact and truth from what is not is an essential life skill. If it's not taught in schools, most people will not learn it. They will be potential victims waiting to be victimized. This has always been true, but never more important than in this 21st century.
This world does not need any more victims or people who are too stupid to distinguish between truth and lies. We need to teach every child.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to make their children savvy about the ways of the world that could make them victims if they can't protect themselves.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
A friend wants to buy a garden tractor. He is able to research many different brands, compare quality and durability within brands of each manufacturer and among the various brands available on the market. Having selected a few for further research, he accesses several blogs and forums to learn about the experiences of users of each and gets warning about what to avoid. Then, trailer behind his van, he can pick up the best buy he has made by playing each seller against the others.
Not long ago I was contacted by a college student from Australia as a source for material she was researching on a topic on which I have expertise. Others, strangers every one and representing six different continents, have contacted me for information and advice about problems they have experienced. To them, I am accessible due to the internet.
However, this unprecedented access to information by millions of people comes at a cost. That cost is time, as a researcher must wade through mountains of information that is more advertising and propaganda than fact, and that takes time. Google can only point to sources, not to the most factual and succinct sources.
Children use the internet to learn about all sorts of topics. The media warn us about the dangers of pornography and adult web sites for kids. And they caution parents to monitor the activity of their children on social sites like Facebook.
But the media can't help children or parents to distinguish between factual information and political propaganda, religious come-ons, sites that outright lie about the products they sell, warranties on products they sell that aren't worth the paper they could be (but aren't) printed on, or "research" that could better be described as personal hobby than oriented to scientific method.
In short, the internet is the greatest source of trash information in human history.
Yet children and adults read this stuff. If it's well written, readers tend to become believers. Form, rather than factual substance, gives it street cred.
As television viewership declines, reading of material on web sites increases dramatically. This contributes to what retired Canadian educator Jim World calls intellectual obesity. Kids and adults can have heads crammed full of misinformation, trivia that may be attractive but serves them no good purpose (think the style and content of supermarket tabloids) and opinions-turned-beliefs on topics about which they have very limited verifiable facts.
In general, schools don't teach how to distinguish between facts, lies and propaganda, whether on the internet or on television. A small part of one course I took years ago focussed on political spin, editorialized news sources and propaganda. It may have been the best time I ever spent in school. Most people never get that experience, so they become prey for the wolves of the internet. Internet wolves know their sociology.
Humans being subject to human nature, the more they know, the more they want to tell others. Rumour and unsubstantiated fact has always been a part of human dialogue. But it could usually be distinguished as rumour and ignored or treated accordingly.
Today we have kids and adults who believe the most outrageous things because they read it on the internet. In North America, over half of all adults use the internet as their primary source for news and information. With a few rare exceptions, most of it is not subjected to scrutiny the way newspaper and television news reports are.
If US President George W. Bush could use newspapers, radio and television to spread lies about weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist in Iraq, then use the lies to start a war, what could happen when the unfiltered internet is used to brainwash people in every country of the world about the lies or misinformation its sources want to spread?
Don't call it information diarrhea if the term offends you. But let's not pretend that the internet is a source of verifiable facts. It's not. Most web sites are supported by companies or organizations with something (product or idea) to sell or individuals who want their ill-considered and often poorly formulated thoughts to be recorded for posterity.
Do we need more laws to protect us? No. The present plethora of unenforced and unenforceable laws on the books now prove that method doesn't work. More laws just make the bad guys get smarter to avert and avoid them.
The only way to protect people from misinformation and religious or political propaganda on a global scale is to teach children how to identify fact from fiction, truth from propaganda, sham from gem. That means changing part of the curriculum in high schools.
The other day I discussed with a friend the twice in my life that I have used skills I learned from two years of trigonometry in high school. I struggle today to comprehend how the average person could use calculus in their lives when they can't tell truth from lie, don't know how to think for themselves and believe everything that is carefully presented as if fact by a politician.
Being able to tell fact and truth from what is not is an essential life skill. If it's not taught in schools, most people will not learn it. They will be potential victims waiting to be victimized. This has always been true, but never more important than in this 21st century.
This world does not need any more victims or people who are too stupid to distinguish between truth and lies. We need to teach every child.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to make their children savvy about the ways of the world that could make them victims if they can't protect themselves.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Thursday, May 01, 2008
This Painless Pleasurable Gift Could Save A Life
We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.
- Mother Teresa
Without going into excruciating detail in analysis of kinds of smiles, let's just say that they come in two basic types. With one type, the emotion is in-coming, with the other it flows outward.
Some people smile at how they benefit from a particular situation. They might smile with glee as they leave their bank with more cash in hand than they withdrew from their account because the teller made a counting error. They don't care if the bank lost money. It didn't, but the money to make up the difference would come from the teller's pay. The customer may still not care, only interested in his personal benefit.
Another person might smile at the hurt of another. They delight at the suffering of someone because they feel it makes them superior. Or because the person suffering was falsely accused of doing something when the guilty party was the smiler.
A kidnapper would smile at a child before grabbing the child and forcing her into his car and driving away.
These smiles all involve benefits or perceived benefits for the smiler, sometimes (often) at the expense of another person.
Mother Teresa would not even acknowledge those kinds of smiles as real smiles. She only knew smiles that emanated love. One look at that exceedingly wrinkled ancient face and you knew there was love behind it, nothing but love going out to whoever received the smile.
When we give a gift to a charity, most of us know nothing of where it will go, how it will be used. When we smile a warm smile at another person with the objective of helping that person to have a better day we don't know how much good it will do. We know where it will go and who it will benefit, but we don't know how much or in what way it will benefit that person.
I am reminded of a time many years ago when it struck me that no one entering or leaving the bank branch I used regularly either smiled at others coming toward them or held the door open for them. I decided that I would follow that practice anyway. Every time I went into or out of that branch, I held the door for someone and smiled warmly at them.
About a year later I noticed that some people were holding the door for me, a few even smiled while doing it. Two years after that almost everyone I met going into or out of that branch held the door open for me if they went through first. Many smiled, not all.
Why the change? I submit that someone started it. Someone made a snowball and started it rolling downhill. I would like to think that it was me, but that doesn't matter.
What matters is that when I go through the door of that bank now, someone ahead of me will almost certainly hold the door open for me and will likely smile at the same time. It's the smile and the gesture that count, not the fact that I might have begun something that spread.
I have read comments written by people whose lives were saved by a smile. Two that I can remember--one man, one woman--were thinking of ending their lives by their own hands. Someone did something nice for them, they smiled warmly, and the depressed people decided that the world might not be such a bad place after all. After that, the world looked different to them. I don't know the rest of their stories, but they don't matter.
Does a smile really have that much power? Can such a small gesture make such a huge difference in someone's life? Remember that for someone who is severely depressed, enough to consider taking his or her own life, nothing makes sense anyway. A smile given freely and warmly to them might be worth more to them at that particular moment than winning a lottery.
In fact, winning a lottery is something related to our impulse toward greed, which may well be something that is crushing the emotional wellbeing of a dpressed person.
Small gestures that show you care about others make huge differences in their lives.
When you smile warmly at someone who looks miserable, who looks as if the world just ran over their lonely lifeline and split it open, then you see that face transform into a smile in return, even if it's a weak one, you feel as if your life truly is worthwhile.
As the agencies that collect blood for medical purposes say, "It's in you to give."
A smile costs you nothing. Except a measure of emotional giving. Some have trouble making that gift. For them, those who smile for their own benefit, giving a smile to hlep someone else is not something they do.
The ultimate test of the value of a smile is when you smile at the person in the mirror and that person smiles back. It means the person in the mirror likes you.
Take that to the bank. And hold the door open for someone while you're there.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want their children to know the value of a smile and the real worth it has when smiles are given to others. It's an important life lesson.
Learn more about these life lessons at http://billallin.com
- Mother Teresa
Without going into excruciating detail in analysis of kinds of smiles, let's just say that they come in two basic types. With one type, the emotion is in-coming, with the other it flows outward.
Some people smile at how they benefit from a particular situation. They might smile with glee as they leave their bank with more cash in hand than they withdrew from their account because the teller made a counting error. They don't care if the bank lost money. It didn't, but the money to make up the difference would come from the teller's pay. The customer may still not care, only interested in his personal benefit.
Another person might smile at the hurt of another. They delight at the suffering of someone because they feel it makes them superior. Or because the person suffering was falsely accused of doing something when the guilty party was the smiler.
A kidnapper would smile at a child before grabbing the child and forcing her into his car and driving away.
These smiles all involve benefits or perceived benefits for the smiler, sometimes (often) at the expense of another person.
Mother Teresa would not even acknowledge those kinds of smiles as real smiles. She only knew smiles that emanated love. One look at that exceedingly wrinkled ancient face and you knew there was love behind it, nothing but love going out to whoever received the smile.
When we give a gift to a charity, most of us know nothing of where it will go, how it will be used. When we smile a warm smile at another person with the objective of helping that person to have a better day we don't know how much good it will do. We know where it will go and who it will benefit, but we don't know how much or in what way it will benefit that person.
I am reminded of a time many years ago when it struck me that no one entering or leaving the bank branch I used regularly either smiled at others coming toward them or held the door open for them. I decided that I would follow that practice anyway. Every time I went into or out of that branch, I held the door for someone and smiled warmly at them.
About a year later I noticed that some people were holding the door for me, a few even smiled while doing it. Two years after that almost everyone I met going into or out of that branch held the door open for me if they went through first. Many smiled, not all.
Why the change? I submit that someone started it. Someone made a snowball and started it rolling downhill. I would like to think that it was me, but that doesn't matter.
What matters is that when I go through the door of that bank now, someone ahead of me will almost certainly hold the door open for me and will likely smile at the same time. It's the smile and the gesture that count, not the fact that I might have begun something that spread.
I have read comments written by people whose lives were saved by a smile. Two that I can remember--one man, one woman--were thinking of ending their lives by their own hands. Someone did something nice for them, they smiled warmly, and the depressed people decided that the world might not be such a bad place after all. After that, the world looked different to them. I don't know the rest of their stories, but they don't matter.
Does a smile really have that much power? Can such a small gesture make such a huge difference in someone's life? Remember that for someone who is severely depressed, enough to consider taking his or her own life, nothing makes sense anyway. A smile given freely and warmly to them might be worth more to them at that particular moment than winning a lottery.
In fact, winning a lottery is something related to our impulse toward greed, which may well be something that is crushing the emotional wellbeing of a dpressed person.
Small gestures that show you care about others make huge differences in their lives.
When you smile warmly at someone who looks miserable, who looks as if the world just ran over their lonely lifeline and split it open, then you see that face transform into a smile in return, even if it's a weak one, you feel as if your life truly is worthwhile.
As the agencies that collect blood for medical purposes say, "It's in you to give."
A smile costs you nothing. Except a measure of emotional giving. Some have trouble making that gift. For them, those who smile for their own benefit, giving a smile to hlep someone else is not something they do.
The ultimate test of the value of a smile is when you smile at the person in the mirror and that person smiles back. It means the person in the mirror likes you.
Take that to the bank. And hold the door open for someone while you're there.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want their children to know the value of a smile and the real worth it has when smiles are given to others. It's an important life lesson.
Learn more about these life lessons at http://billallin.com
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