Monthly Archives: March 2016

VERTICAL GAZE

Looking UpLet me come straight to the point.  Life is meant to be lived with a vertical gaze. Think about it. It’s true from the time we are born and beyond. Babies first learn to make eye contact looking up. Toddlers learn to walk by looking up toward their destination, almost always with hands raised high. Looking up is how we first learn, and how learning is always done.  It is an obvious, inescapable fact.

Child to parent.  Pupil to teacher.  Apprentice to master.  Creature to his Creator.

The real problem arrives when we think we’re big enough to shift our learning posture and begin looking down.  It first happens when we convince ourselves that there is no one in the room “bigger than me.”  My father called it being “too big for your britches,” and whenever I heard him use that phrase it never turned out so well for me.

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COURAGE, GRIT, AND THE LUNCHROOM LADIES

Grandma cateyesI grew up in the small southern town of Ashland, Alabama.  It was a wonderful place to call home.  It was “Mayberry” in more ways than one.  My grade school years coincided with the time known as the Civil Rights era– the 1960’s.  I began elementary school in a racially segregated world, but entered high school in a totally different world where blacks and whites graduated school together.  It was a changing time filled with uncertainty for everyone, especially in the Deep South.  But I had a advantage over many of my friends– my grandmother.

Grandma Nichols was different from her contemporaries.  She would have been perfect to play the part of Skeeter in the movie, “The Help.”  She was truly color-blind, in the symbolic sense.  She was gifted in mercy, compassion, and generosity– for black and white the same.  I stayed with her on Saturdays while my parents worked in their retail business.  We would spend much of our Saturday distributing leftover lunchroom food to needy families; checking on elderly persons in their homes; visiting patients in the nursing home; and cooking for folks who were sick.  Black, white, or green– it made no difference to her.  Compassion was for everyone.

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PERSONAL PARADIGM SHIFT

City RooftopParadigm.  Why did I choose it as the name of my blog?  Because it’s a powerful word.  It says more in eight letters than many entire books say from cover to cover.  Let’s look at the word itself.

Paradigm– pronounced as para-dime is defined as “a model or pattern of thinking that is repeatedly used.”  It’s like wearing sunglasses on a bright afternoon.  Everything you see has to go through the lens of those glasses and into your eyes before your brain can tell you what you’re seeing.  If you wear yellow tinted glasses, the world will look jaundiced.  And if you wear super-polarized lenses you might think it’s dusk, even when it’s midday.  Everything you see will be tinted by the sunglasses you choose to wear.  A person sitting on the rooftop of a skyscraper might be inspired by the incredible view, or terrified by the possibility of falling.  Energized by beauty or paralyzed by fear, it all depends upon his paradigm– his repeated pattern of thinking– about heights.

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