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today 		"The things we want are really the times we share."

"The most important things we bring with us are within us."

"If I had only one thing I would take a smile over an iPod."

~ Rob Hueniken

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Kindness

Celebrating endless love

by Rob Hueniken on Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Today we celebrated the truly endless love of family and friendships — the love that each of us can be part of.

I had the honor of helping to celebrate the life of my daughter-in-law’s grandfather. Bruce lived to be 91, and he and Ida had been married for 70 years. That is a long life of love.

My daughter-in-law’s sister, Laura, is a wonderful photo archivist, and put together four big photo boards, showing Bruce’s life in hundreds of moments.  It was fascinating to see the history and younger days of the wonderful family my son has married me into. His marriage has added to our family’s love.

Looking at the many photos one could easily see how the love of family was so important to Bruce, and how that joy had been, and continues to be, shared and multiplied through his friendships, children, grandchildren and now great-grandchildren. This growing and expanding of love is truly endless love — not the pop song “endless love” between two people, but the ever-widening sharing of time and caring that everyone can be part of.

By gathering to honor him, we were reminded of what a great treasure it is to have a loving family and friends, both in good times and hard times.

A wise man once told me that to grow love we need to act lovingly to others. Love is more than a feeling — it is an action. Together we create love.

I urge you to try harder with your family, friends and co-workers, to be the one showing kindness.  Help to build community and friendships one smile at a time. Be a nucleus for love.

Let’s be the farmers growing love, tending our relationships, both small and deep, so that each day there can be more love. And remember each day, in small ways and larger, to be celebrating love — the most important thing we get to share.

Celebrating-endless-love-2
Bruce and Ida, ten years ago, celebrating their 60th anniversary. They went on to 70 years, and to show how each of us can widen our circles of love. Let’s be part of a growing network of friends and family.

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Tagged as: Anniversary, Culture, Helping, Kindness, Life, lifestyle, Love, Making more of today, People, Personal, Rob Hueniken, Social Change

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The wind beneath wasp wings

by Rob Hueniken on Saturday, August 29, 2009

While having lunch outdoors yesterday my friend and I were visited by two wasps.  The wasps in our area rarely sting you if you let them be, but “letting them be” usually involves them hovering around or crawling on both your food and yourself.

We kept hoping the wasps would go away but they persisted. It was too nice a day to eat inside and swatting the wasps with our forks was not going to be effective.

While we coexisted with the wasps we noticed that they liked my friend’s Caesar salad more than my Greek salad, so my friend got to spend more time with the wasps.

wasp-cloud

But at one point a wasp flew slowly over my plate, very low – about an inch above the plate – and I saw the pepper and dry spices on my plate move around. The wind from the wasp wings was actually strong enough to create a tiny dust storm!

I had never thought before about how strongly wasps need to beat their wings in order to fly. But I realized at that meal that it is equivalent to a person blowing very gently – just enough to shift some pepper from an inch away.

It is a subtle reminder that everything we do can have a secondary effect, both on our world and on others around us.  People are much bigger and noisier than wasps, and how we drive, walk, and behave have effects beyond just moving us around or getting our things done.

What we do affects our world, far more than the wind beneath wasp wings.


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Tagged as: Animals, Awareness, Culture, Insects, Kindness, Life, lifestyle, Making more of today, People, Personal, Rob Hueniken, Social Change

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A Later Perspective with More Compassion

by Rob Hueniken on Thursday, August 27, 2009

It’s amazing how unchanging our perspectives can be over time. I had a chance yesterday to see how revisiting some details from my past could give me a new perspective and understanding of a situation.

Yesterday I got to reminisce at a party with a classmate from my childhood days, who I hadn’t seen in 30 years. This person was not a close friend of mine at that time, but a neighbor who lived just up the street from me. It was great to see her, and as we talked, the evening slipped away and back to grades 3 to 12.

escher_sky_water_fullWe shared stories — some of them unknown to each other, and some of them shared experiences from different perspectives.

As with all childhood reminiscing we revisited the chance to laugh about our teachers, like our highly-strung languages teacher who couldn’t keep control of the class. This teacher had been an easy target for mischief making.

As one of the guys in the class I remember many times speaking out of turn and working hard, not at languages, but at making the class laugh. I recounted how some friends found mushrooms in the schoolyard, and ran around pelting each other, as well as this teacher.

A new fact I learned last night was that this teacher liked shoes and had extra pairs in her car. The girls in the class would sometimes find her car unlocked, and stack the shoes on the dashboard – giving again the message “We don’t like you”.

I hadn’t thought about this teacher in a long time, and I realized, with a new perspective of compassion, that this teacher was the subject of a lot of ridicule by her students. It made me sad, and I wished that I and my classmates had acted differently at the time.

Everyone knows that children don’t have the full picture.  What is surprising is how even adults, who know there must be more to any story, can still maintain the same perspective we had as children.

I think we do learn from our past mistakes, and for me, revisiting the pain inflicted on a teacher has given me a renewed intention to be kind to those in my life.

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Tagged as: Culture, Helping, Kindness, Life, lifestyle, Making more of today, People, Personal, Rob Hueniken, Social Change

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