I once gave a speech in my Junior High School Social Studies class.  The entire class found my talk hilarious.  They laughed from beginning to end.  The reason was that my fly had been unzipped throughout my presentation. I learned this later from my best friend who hadn’t said anything before I stood up in front of the class.

We are often reluctant to risk offending other people because we want them to like us. But are we doing them a favor? We can all think of times where we wished someone had said something to us so we could have taken a corrective action sooner.

Have you ever had a smudge on your face that no one told you about until late in the day? What about food in your teeth when you were busy grinning at everyone you met?

I prefer that you be authentic with me, and mention when you notice something about me you think I would be better served by knowing.  You can still be polite.  “Uh, you have toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe?” is a lot better than laughing at me as I walk out of the restaurant.

We each have one life to live.  Let’s help each other out, in a kind and respectful way, by letting each other know what is really going on inside our minds and hearts.  That’s the only way I know of in which we can truly connect on a deep and loving basis.

I often share my writing with friends and other writers and I trust them to tell me what they really think. I trust them to show me where I might have missed an opportunity to go deeper or where I might have written something that falls flat. I don’t expect them to politely pay me a compliment when they think my writing isn’t as good as it might otherwise be. That is why I share it with them.

I still sometimes forget to zip my pants, and I’m glad that a few people in my office will tell me.

I encourage you to ask your friends to tell you whenever you have a something green stuck between your teeth.  And, heaven forbid, please tell me if I ever have bad breath.

We’re all in this together.

Alan

I pay attention to words, and I’m especially sensitive to the subtleties of the positive and negative.

For example, the other day, I caught myself writing to a friend, “I can’t have lunch with you until I finish my next children’s book.”

I imagine that most of us would read that sentence without a second thought, but I revised it because I’d rather express myself in a positive way. I changed the sentence to:

“I look forward to having lunch with you as soon as I finish my next children’s book.”

Same message, but with a vastly different tone. Words such as “I can’t” or “I won’t” hit me in the face like a damp dishtowel. Words such as “I look forward to” and “I will” brighten both my outlook and my day.

When my children were young I taught myself to say, “I’d be happy to take you to the store as soon as you put the finishing touches on cleaning your room.” This is a “yes,” and my young children knew they were doing fine and had only a little bit of work to complete.

I could have said, “I’ve already told you twice that I won’t take you shopping if your room isn’t clean. Don’t ask me again until your room is clean. Totally clean.” If I said that I might have felt better for a moment about all of the other frustrations in my life, but to my children it would have sounded like a criticism, and that probably would not have gotten them to clean their room. Nor would I have gotten a warm and fuzzy response from a child I love.

There is a saying, “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” To prove this point you need look no further than the Monterey peninsula where the cypress trees, blown by strong onshore breezes, point away from the sea. Just like those trees, when you talk in positive terms you also think in positive terms, and you point both yourself and others toward happiness and success.

In writing my blog for the past five years I occasionally get stuck, and catch myself thinking, “I’m going to run out of time. This is hopeless.” But then I remember an old cartoon from the New Yorker. Two men are shackled hand and foot, facing each other, halfway up the very tall walls of a prison cell. The single window has bars, and is too small for either of them to squeeze through. Nevertheless, one prisoner is saying to the other, “I have a plan.”

He has plan, when most of us would have given up.

Each of us, every single day, is that onshore breeze bending twigs – the thoughts and attitudes of ourselves and others.

I’m going to have a very good day. And so are you.

Alan