Wednesday Whiteboard Quote: Week of April 29

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" "Kind" said the boy -The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and The Horse

We are surrounded by varying magnitudes of kindness. Small acts include the driver who lets you cut over into the lane at the last second or the person at the check-out counter who lets you go in front of them when you're in a hurry. Larger acts include the coworker who covers your shift at work so you can spend the special occasion with your friend or the family member who steps up when it isn't necessarily their job. Even bigger aspects of kindness bring to mind the rain that shows kindness to us by helping our food grow and gravity that keeps us firmly planted on the ground as we spin at around 1000 mph (if you're at the equator).

The key is not whether kindness is happening, but whether we are in a position to notice it.

Our brain's wiring for survival leads to a focus on the dangerous and negative, but it's within our capacity of choosing to both find and pass along kindness. Noticing kindness is a muscle we train. It's similar to when you get a new car, and all of a sudden start noticing all of the other cars with the same color/make/model as yours; there aren't more of those cars, you are just actively looking for them. What if you actively looked for kindness? More kindness would show up.

Wednesday Whiteboard Quote - Week of April 22

When we waste energy on people or situations that aren't important to us, we sacrifice the energy meant for those we love.

How often do we find ourselves talking to the driver in front of us, yelling at the TV over a sporting event (ok, maybe that's just me...), huffing and puffing because the grocery store line is too long, or because we barely missed making it through the longest stoplight in town?

These seemingly insignificant moments of resistance impact us more than we might imagine. If every thought requires energy, and if we are energy machines, then these thoughts about the insignificant occurrences in daily life drain a significant portion of our energy; energy better used for ourselves or those we love.

Wednesday Whiteboard Quote - Week of April 8

"Why can't anything go the way it's supposed to?" "Oh, it did. It just didn't go the way you wanted it to. You may be a brave b***h, but you can't control the universe." -The Big C

Atlanta is notorious for its bad/reckless/dangerous drivers. Having lived in NYC for three years, I figured, "How much worse could it possibly be," when I moved to the ATL back in 2022. Well, let's just say I was never involved in a hit-and-run in NYC.  

Luckily, only the front bumper of my car was partially ripped off (see picture below) when the box truck trying to exit a convenience store by dashing across a few lanes of traffic misjudged the distance of my front bumper and just tore it up as he went on his merry way.  

Was it personal that the box truck hit me? No 

Did I take it personally? Yes 

Was the box truck supposed to hit me? Also yes  

What do you mean, "was it supposed to hit you"? Of course it wasn't! That person should never have been in a hurry and should never have tried to cut a turn too close and they should have stopped when they realized they had hit you.  

You see, we too quickly equate what we want to happen with what is supposed to happen based on all of the causes that came before. What is supposed to happen is what happened. Reality. It's super simple. When we fight with that, we lose.  

We behave as if our minuscule number of experiences should influence what is happening everywhere outside all at once. And then we take responsibility or beat ourselves up when something "goes wrong." Again, it didn't go wrong; it went the only way it could have gone based on all the countless moments that came before it. How many different moments before had to happen for that box truck's front left bumper and my driver's side bumper to meet? I'll wait. And I'm taking that personally and getting upset over a celestial meeting thousands of years in the making?  

Am I saying that we have to be elated and jubilant to pull over, call the cops, get in touch with insurance, go back to the store to try and get surveillance camera footage of the hit and run, deal with the autobody shop for repairs, on and on? No. But we definitely don't need to take it personally or waste any more energy on the "it shouldn't have happened," or "life is just so unfair," or "this always only happens to me."  

When we waste our energy on these and all the other "bad" (the times it didn't go the way we wanted) experiences we have stored, we sacrifice the energy meant for those we love.