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Learning to Listen: A Humbling Lesson

I can't stop thinking about her. As I watched her walking away, already almost to the end of the mall parking lot, pulling her backpack tight around her shoulders as if it could make her invisible, I debated for a split second asking my friend to drive me up to her so I could beg her forgiveness and ask for a do over. But I didn't.

Instead I've turned our encounter over and over in my mind until it has become like a stone polished smooth by ocean waves. My prayers vacillate between petitions to make me a better person and then feeling too full of hubris by making it about me and asking God to just simply watch out for her.

It was a routine event I've experienced many times but I wish I could go back in time and open myself to being present and listening to another human speak to me.



I had dinner with a group of friends and had planned to pay for my portion with a credit card. The credit card I gave the server was declined. I had been fairly sure that I had room on that card but when it was declined I panicked a bit and hesitated to give her a different one unsure if I had mixed up balances or if there was a problem (I've been a victim of identity theft in the past but it turned out I had forgotten a yearly fee that had automatically processed that day). So, with the help of a couple of my friends chipping in, I spent my remaining cash on my share of the bill.

As we left and were getting into my friend's car a woman approached me and asked in a very soft voice if she could ask me a question. She asked a second time, a bit louder, to be sure I heard her and knew that she was directing her question to me. I didn't answer. Instead I told her sharply that if she needed help I was very sorry but I did not have any cash. Taken aback by my curt lecture, she slunk down and hurried off.

As I got in the car I realized that I had half my meal left over in a doggie bag. I had been so busy focusing on my worries and embarrassment and feeling of lack that I completely forgot what I had right in my hand. When I am approached by panhandlers I am often in a rush and alone. Not that it excuses my impatience but it makes me unlikely to stop and dig through my purse to find my wallet and open it up on the street. Also, given the recession and the fact that I live in a large urban area, simply running errands and going to the grocery store means that I can encounter half-a-dozen requests for aid or more in a single morning. But I feel helpless in the face of relentless need. I think to myself, better to give to a good organization rather than trying to pick and choose between individuals. The result is that I have already answered "no" before I am even asked.

I didn't give the woman in the parking lot a chance to speak. I don't know what she wanted to ask me. I just assumed, my heart hardened by the weight of so many requests. If I had allowed her to ask me what she wanted perhaps she would have requested money or indicated a need for food. I still had two dollar bills in my wallet and some change in addition to the bagged up food I planned to take home to have for lunch the next day. If that is what she needed, I could have given that to her. I had a check in my wallet, a bed to sleep in and kitchen to return to - I could live without a few dollars and some leftovers. Maybe she could not.

I have not been immune to the difficulties of the recession many of us have struggled with. But there for the grace of God go I. This I know. I wish that I had stopped and listened to the woman who wanted to ask me a question rather than the voices of fear in my head. I wish I had remembered the the stories I've never forgotten of similar encounters and how women I admire reacted in similar situations guide my actions instead. And I can only hope the next time she asks that she is heard.

How do you handle being approached by strangers? Do you have a standard response or do you respond based on the request? Is there a way we can best help those individuals in need especially given the economic difficulties so many face these days?

The stories I've never forgotten:

Jen Lemen: Everything We Needed: A Story about Vince, Me & the Streets of DC

The guy starts to talk, but I cut him off. “Tell me,” I ask him warmly, feeling like it’s old home week. “What do you need? Tell me what you really need.”...

I don’t know why I do these things, but I think it has to have something to do with wanting to feel the common threads that tie us all together. You can do something nice for someone which is all fine and good, but when you can connect–human being to human being–that goes so much farther than ten bucks at the Sunoco ever will....

What do you need to know today? I hope someone comes your way to help you know it in a powerful way.

Julie at Tangobaby: please please please let's help her

I met this beautiful family on my way home from a photo shoot today. I walked past them, just like the other people on their way home. I admit it. I saw her and sailed on by. I read her sign ($60 for a motel room... you know what kind of motel room $60 will get you in this city).

But I had seen the tears in her eyes, too, and so halfway down the block, I yelled at myself inside my head for being an asshole and went back. I had $30 in my wallet and gave it to her.

I'm not telling you this story so you can think I'm some sort of hero, 'cause I'm not.

Carolyn Tyler at KGO-TV: Homeless woman helped by Good Samaritan

When Julie Michelle got to the end of the block she turned around.

"So you go back and?" asked ABC7's Carolyn Tyler.

"Give her my $30 and tell her I would do more but I just lost my job," said Julie Michelle.

If she had not lost her job, Julie says she never would have been walking around the day she met the young woman.

BlogHer CE Mata H: A foolish thing I do when I am anxious about money

I have developed my own cure for those moments of anxiety which I offer here. I do a stupid thing. Something so stupid that if I had real reason to be anxious, I would be unable to do it-- consequently the doing undoes the anxiety. It is the Zen of financial anxiety for me. (I do not recommend this as a financial strategy - I am not a money doctor - your mileage may vary and all the usual caveats.)...

I gather up all the coinage in my pocket or at the bottom of my purse -- I wait until no one is around, and I throw it away. As I do it I know that if I had real reason to be fearful, I would never do this. So the fear leaves.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

What Have You Done Today?

Often, doing > analyzing.

Building something (like a company) is hard and I admire people who are.

We live in amazing times.

I am really 'effin privileged. (h/t Amy Gahran at Contentious)

Prosperity 2010: The Year of Puppies, Unicorns, Rainbows, Wonderment and Light

I am grateful to 2009 and the lessons I've learned but I still have to stifle the urge to tell 2009 to #suckit! Annus horriblus or a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year - call it what you will but I'm saying good bye to 2009 and hoping declaring 2010 will be annus mirabilis.

Like many, I don't do resolutions. In the past few years I've taken to the practice of choosing a guiding word or theme for the year. Last year my word was fearless. I plastered it on my vision board and focused on living fearlessly (which to me means living in love because I believe in the concept of love and fear being the two basic emotions that are the basis for everything in life). The problem is that in order to live fearlessly you have to have the opportunity to meet fear with love, that is, to love the scary.

And 2009 served up the scary by the metric ton. The good news is that I not only survived but I did a pretty good job of building my fearless muscle. But I am ready to say lesson learned and move on. Move on to easier, happier and less challenging times.

So I'm declaring my 2010 hashtag: #puppyunicornrainbow. Srsly.

O.K., not so seriously. But my carefully chosen word of the year is prosperity. The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines prosperity as: the condition of being successful or thriving; especially : economic well-being

And while I certainly chose my word, in part, for the love of money aspect of its meaning that is not all. I want to thrive and I want to help myself and others prosper - in joy, in knowledge, in fun, in entertainment, in connections, in laughter and in life. Financial security and abundance can help facilitate all that and more.

I want a more prosperous world in addition to a more prosperous me. I want a world where people flourish and thrive because they have enough wealth to feed themselves and their family, to have clean water to drink, to have access to health care and medicine and education. Certainly there are other necessary conditions but economic empowerment is a huge block in that foundation.

I want more prosperous colleagues. I want to see those around me and those whom I admire from afar to have the confidence to charge what they are worth and get it, to - in the words of Havi Brooks - biggify their thing and for everyone who wants to engage them, be they big corporations or individuals, to have the funds to support healthy commerce and exchanges of goods and services.

I want a prosperous economy that supports governments so that they can do the things they are charged to do like maintaining infrastructure and that which we want them to do like supporting services for battered women and sick, hungry and homeless people.

I want individuals to have meaningful work to do so not only can they earn a living but so that they can have meaning and purpose to their days that many find is sucked from their souls by endless unemployment. No more living in a tiny plastic bunk or pimping out a Chihuahua to pay the rent. It is obscene that in the United States we have millions of people with no income other than a couple of hundred dollars a month in food stamps.

You may have noticed that I mentioned, but did not choose as others often do, abundance. I had among the good and the lessons and the strength and character building experiences of 2009 an abundance of suck. Abundance can bring much that I do not want. I purposefully chose prosperity instead. 2010 is only about the does-not-suck, dammit!

So my darlings, go boldly forth into 2010 to live long and prosper, beautiful people.

Much love,
Maria

Going Complaint-Free, Again

A little over a year ago I started the Complaint Free World Challenge to go 21 days without complaining, gossiping or criticizing. It took me about seven months to successfully achieve 21 consecutive days without engaging in the negative talk but I did it and it felt great. Shortly thereafter my business and life slowly but surely began to feel the negative effects of the economy. Recently I realized that instead of finding positive and creative responses to the opportunities financial pressures create, all too often I find myself slipping into blaming the recession, frustrated into paralyzed inaction (where do I begin?) and resentful of others because they appear to be cruising along in a motor boat while I struggle to paddle a canoe in their wake.

Of course that is all an illusion. It is a reality I choose to create for myself and which I bring to life through my actions and attitude. It's not a pretty Maria and not one I like seeing in the mirror in the morning or at the end of a long day before I go to bed.

Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz I remind myself that I've had the power all along. I can choose how I respond to circumstances and I can create new ones. And so I am working on doing just that. I've taken lots of positive forward action in the past several weeks. As part of that work I am revisiting the Complaint Free World Challenge. My purple bracelet is back on my wrist. And already I can tell it is helping.

This time around I am not focusing on switching wrists and tracking days but rather on using the bracelet as a visual reminder to re-direct my thoughts and words towards me and what positive action I can take rather than lazily falling into gossiping, complaining and criticizing. It absolutely feels great to blow off steam. And I willingly open myself to friends who need to vent. While I cannot control what anyone else says or does I can decide how I will react (do I just offer to listen and not join in?) and what I do with that energy. What I am trying to not to do is to wallow in the easy comfort of putting all the blame for my circumstances on the recession or on others and instead choose to take positive action.

Another interesting influence going complaint-free is having this time is that I am reducing my consumption of news and reality TV. It is a very odd development in the world of a life-long news, information and pop-culture junkie. But with this recession the news is so relentlessly negative. I feel it eating my soul. And when I allow that noise into my life the temptation to curl up in a little ball and never leave my sofa is great. I find it much harder to not complain, gossip and criticize if I am on a steady diet of the stuff from the media.

I suspect I will return to my steady media diet when things pick up and the airwaves are not filled with non-stop stories of people losing their jobs, losing their homes, the growth of modern day shanty towns and the population of homeless children plus the relentless nit-picking, blame and schadenfreude generated by an economic crisis that nothing and no one seems able to fix.  But it will be interesting to see how the changes wrought by a little piece of purple rubber stick and create lasting change in my life.

Have you found yourself complaining more as the recession lingers and the news is relentlessly negative? Have you tried the Complaint Free Challenge? How is your success going?