“Every gain made by individuals or society is almost instantly taken for granted.” -Aldous Huxley

Cleaning out my office to make room for the new CEO was a great visual journey of progress. In one way or another, every action and decision we made in the past has brought us to this moment in time. Handling and letting go of the myriad old versions of the business plan and my old notes that held long equations looking for the cost of goods brought back the active learning process that consumed me for weeks at a time at regular annual intervals. The business plan success we enjoyed at the Willamette Angel Conference in May did its job and our plan is now being re-invented by qualified people who speak the business planning language as a native tongue. As I sifted through the pages and pages of this work, I felt like I was holding real building blocks to a success story that I imagined.

The feeling blossomed when I come across the old drafts of manuscripts and book proposals that were the beginning of my new book, Love that Works, which is in its first print edition this month. I don’t know how far the book will go in spreading the message that is at the core of all my work, but I am excited to have this seed to scatter. It is the best of my best thinking about how to love people, keep promises, learn to communicate and show up for the people who make life meaningful.

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“You can’t touch love, but you can feel the sweetness that it pours into everything” -Annie Sullivan

For a long time I believed love happened in the giving and receiving of affection, attentive listening, and showing up. It was in the exchanges where I knew that love was circulating in my life. I never knew that the love that came in was actually sitting in me steeping and changing me just because it was in me.

Maybe for a long time, I was not a worthy container of love. As soon as it came in, the cracks in my self esteem and the doubts that trailed the love would let it leak away. It took me a long time to realize that love given or received is a substance that actually stays in you and sticks to you in drops with each kindness and loving touch.

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“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

A friend of mine gave me this quote framed more than twenty years ago when I was moving away to a new life. It has been hanging in my home ever since and has come to be one of the truths that I come back to over and over about learning to relate. As soon as we think we have a relationship figured out, we fall into the easy pattern of assuming we know someone. Then something happens that surprises us that wakes us up again to the truth that when it comes to the work of relationships, life is a spiral.

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“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” -Robert McCloskey

Again I am facing the painful awareness of the places where I continue to fall short in my capacity to relate. The ability to communicate at home, at work, and in life is a strong barometer and predictor of our success in the relationships that matter most to us. Our relationships thrive or fall victim to our willingness and capacity to disclose and listen to the people we care for.

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“To educate yourself for the feeling of gratitude means to take nothing for granted, but to always seek out and value the kind that will stand behind the action. Nothing that is done for you is a matter of course. Everything originates in a will for the good, which is directed at you. Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude.” -Albert Schweitzer

It occurred to me today that I have hit a roadblock in my positivity quest. Although I have experienced moments of deep gratitude over the last seven months in the process of seeking a positive life experience, I have not mastered any real practice of gratitude. I bought a gratitude journal but have never trained in the daily practice of writing in it. I can make a mental list in a moments notice about things in life that I have to be grateful for, but often even as I say them out loud, I feel the distance between the words and the feeling.

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“I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” -Walt Whitman

I have been reflecting on half a year of positivity questing this week. Trying to organize what I have learned in this time and trying to marshal it to step up when, even now I can forget how to be positive. Happily because I talk about it so much, when I can’t quite get there, I have many reliable reflectors in my family to remind me where to look

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“It’s so easy to think of the days gone by,

It’s a hard thing to think of the days to come,

But the grace to accept every moment as a gift

Is a gift that is given to some.

(Refrain) What can you do with your days, but work and hope

That your dreams bind your work to your play

What can you do

Every moment of your life, but

Love til you love it away.

There are sorrows enough for the whole world’s end,

And no guarantees but the grave

The life that we live and

The time that we spend

Is a treasure too precious to save.”

(Refrain)

Here is the song that has been on my mind as I have been standing on the shores of Lake Superior under a warm early summer sun considering who I am today. It has been a calm and happy day, continuous moments of wonder and recognition that life could be so sweet and last so long. My friend taught me this song, years ago in Northern Minnesota, and hearing it now again feels like a light house for the life that I am creating and is in turn creating me.

Standing on the banks of this amazing body of water and reflecting at the power and resources that it generates is inspiring. Here are a few facts about this place that has been revered by humans since recorded time: The great lakes provide 20% of all the fresh water in the world. One out of six Americans get their water from these lakes. It takes four hundred years for one drop of water from these lakes to make it to the Atlantic Ocean and they are the native home to prehistoric fish that live for hundreds of years (you guessed it Sturgeon).

Recreating on these banks again after so many years gives me a new understanding of what it means “to work and hope that your dreams bind your work to your play.” The positivity quest continues to teach me how precious the hours we have on this amazing planet are and that with the right attitude we can be a resource for the world like this majestic lake. We can fill up our lives and the lives of people we live with by loving all of it, no holds barred, til you love it away.

“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” -Carl Gustav Jung

The remedy is always inside of you. This has become a growing awareness as I have been working to articulate and grow my dreams for Good Clean Love. When I am doing my own internal work and can clearly see what I am intending and feel worthy of it, the world creates itself to the image. Conversely when the events of the world take up my attention and I perceive myself and my dreams by what is happening out there, I am lost to myself and anything can happen.

Actually, to be fair, anything can happen all the time. Living on earth includes the full spectrum of seeming opposites: happiness and sadness, winning and losing, love and hate. Being centered and clear in yourself doesn’t prevent you from experiencing both the joy and suffering that is inherent in life experience, but it does change how you experience it. Everything changes in how we learn to look and see.

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“Eighty percent of success is showing up.” -Woody Allen

The most positive thing you can do with your life is to show up consistently and authentically. It seems like stating the obvious, but in day-to-day life there are more people who check out of their relationships and quit on their commitments than you would think. Sometimes this is a conscious choice, but more often it is the small omissions and emotional laziness that gets the better of us, often without our knowing it.

It is easier oftentimes to not have the difficult conversation with your partner or teen. It takes energy to take a teenager to task about the basics, but when the issue is emotionally charged, the amount of energy required increases proportionally with the emotions involved. Balancing perceived freedom with reasonable responsibilities is an argument that has taken more than the ten minutes of negotiating out of me. Not uncommonly we all walk away exasperated and I wonder how it is that I cannot communicate what seems to be the most basic of agreements.

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“The day is committed to error and floundering; success and achievement are matters of long range.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

All of my children play something competitively. They try to win at a number of challenging sports or in musical auditions. We have witnessed all varieties of choking on the court, both tennis and basketball courts, scratching on jumps, falling off horses, literally. So many ways to skin the same cat, that of learning the fine art of loving what you do even when people are watching. Having the courage to put yourself out there for the heart of the game, regardless of outcome is the important takeaway.

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