Life Lessons, 4/9/16, Memphis Airport

1. Don’t worry. When it’s long passed time to replace your “camelbak” water bottle, but you continue to forget to do so, you will conveniently leave it somewhere, likely a bathroom stall.
2. Several times the Torah mentions that a particular experience lasted 40 days. I used to think that basically meant, “a long time.” Now I understand that 40 days might be the blink of an eye depending on what the experience is and what it means to you. The same for 40 years.
3. It’s better if we don’t presume to determine what someone else’s experience means to them.
4. Without humor even awesome stuff pretty much sucks.
5. I want to walk through life in a state of perpetual wonder, but I’m not one to cry in public and I think the two go hand in hand.
6. If you work with kids you are, by definition, an optimist and forever young. Even if you don’t feel that way on Friday afternoon.
7. Spirituality is a doorway into all sorts of other topics– leadership, teaching and learning, the importance of play and more.
8. To sing with a group of adults who love to sing is truly holy.
9. Understanding the relationships that already in exist in a room is a non-negotiable necessity, especially if you’re standing at the front of the room with nothing but a lectern to both protect you and potentially alienate you from them.
10. We want to connect. We want to hope. We want to be inspired. We want to flourish. We want to help others do the same.
11. Ancient wisdom is still around because we need it to be.
12. Tragedy has the effect of uniting and dividing people. Tragedy compounds tragedy when it divides people who had been deeply united until the tragedy occurred.
13. Whatever it is, it’s worth the effort. Because the effort is itself a reward.
14. The beauty of the human voice resides in its infinite uniqueness and the possibility of all human voices joining together as one.
15. The cognitive dissonance of encountering people who don’t value whatsoever something that you value beyond measure can be really painful. The harmony of encountering people who do share in that sense of value, even if not to the same degree, is a source of celebration.
16. Not all rooms are created equal.
17. What’s happening in the room next to you is both completely beyond your control and often directly impacts what’s happening in the room you’re in.
18. Constructive vulnerability is an idea worth exploring.
19. It’s fun to make new friends.
20. And it’s wonderful to be confirmed in your firmly held conviction that most of the people on this planet are loving, kind, passionate, connected, and interested in leaving things in better shape than they found them.