Welcome to Spyder’s Web
I firmly believe that I am the person I am because of the experiences that I had. That includes my family, the community that I grew up in, the social and political things that happened in the world while I grew up. I would not be the person that I am without all of that input.
That continued into my young adulthood. It certainly continued as I learned from experienced teachers how to be a good and effective teacher. Looking back, I can even say, as a novice teacher my students and their behavior controlled me as a teacher. Outside factors control my social life and to a certain extent my relationships.
It would be difficult to determine the point of my life where that started to change. I would think that, as a teacher, the first place that change occurred was in my classroom. I had control of that world as I grew in confidence and skill. Students would act differently in my classroom than they did in other teacher’s classrooms. My classroom became a reflection of who I was inside. My empathy, my compassion, my discipline, my values, my work ethic, and my expectations were projected into my students.
Over time, the world didn’t change because of me, but my world changed. My world became a more positive place. The people I interacted with by choice became more positive people. People I interacted with superficially, even became more positive. That is because when I interacted with them I was positive. I started with a smile and hello. I would say thank you. I would ask how they were. I would ma joke or small talk. I would smile. I would while I was with them make them part of my world. Would that work all of the time, no of course not, but it did happen more often than not.
Further, I have pointed out in my mid-thirties that I went through an episode of clinical depression. The world was “gray” to me. I did my job, I lived, and the people around me were the same. But my experiences were colored by my inner darkness. My world was not the same positive world it was before then or after then.
A common theme in all of my writing is that we have and we make choices. We have the choice to be happy. If we choose to be happy, the world around us is different. The world is a more beautiful place if we are happy. The world is a friendlier place if we are happy. Think of how your world changes when something or someone makes you angry. For that time, until you become yourself again, your world, THE world is different. At that moment, something that you might laugh at any other time can make you angry. The only important world, the one you are in at that moment, is controlled by the “you” that you are at that moment.
A few of you may be aware that there was an election in a certain country in the world earlier this week. When the polls closed there was great joy in about half of the United States. There was great joy in millions or more throughout the world. Today, I was watching the news, before I started writing this. They showed hundreds of thousands of people throughout the United States celebrating. There were celebrations in a great number of large cities in the United States. I heard there were celebrations in other countries also. The election in the United States was the reason for all of this joy and celebration. The people that were joyful Tuesday night were not the people celebrating today. The external event was the cause of both. The internal condition of the people affected reflected the outer experience.
My internal condition controlled my reactions. When I went to bed Tuesday night, I thought the President of the United States had been reelected to a second term. My inner values of empathy, world community, compassion, wanting a level playing field for all people, and my belief that a man of good character should represent the country that I love, caused me to be lost for two days. I did not leave my house, I did not look at the news. My individual world would not have changed much no matter who was the president. My life was not dramatically affected by who was president. My quality of life under the last four or more presidents did not change. It changed but not because of them. It changed because of my job and my retirement. It changed because I chose to build a second home in Romania. I had no reason to be lost by external events. I was lost because of who I was inside. If I was apolitical, I would not have been affected. If my values were different I would not have been affected. If I didn’t care about life being better for other people, I wouldn’t be affected.
In order for Tuesday’s event to become a truly positive event there has to be millions of people on both sides whose internal conditions want to search for common ground, compromise, and a joint plan. It won’t take everyone. It will take enough to want to make a world that is more the inside condition of the vast majority of people. That way the external world can be a reflection of a greater number of people around the entire world.
