Ray’s Daily
April 29, 2021
“At different states in our lives, the signs of love may vary: dependence, attraction, contentment, worry, loyalty, grief, but at the heart, the source is always the same. Human beings have the rare capacity to connect with each other, against all odds.”
Anonymous
Ray’s Daily first published on April 29, 2005
We had a speaker at my Kiwanis meeting yesterday who talked about networking and communicating. She talked about how we can connect with others to the benefit of both them and ourselves. I am paraphrasing her message, well maybe I am taking her message as I understood it and put my own spin on it. Here are my thoughts on how we can connect and enrich our lives.
You can’t connect if you are never in a place where you can meet others. Attend a club meeting, take a class, attend a lecture, take a trip, the list is endless, and when you do make sure you say hello to the people around you. The point is that if we limit our relationships to only close friends, fellow workers, and family, we will miss a lot of what life has to offer.
When we truly take an interest in someone else we refresh the human spirit and lay the foundation for sincere bonds of friendship. People are wonderful and complex, everyone is unique and learning more about them can be both fun and enlightening. And I am sure you will find that if you take an honest interest in others, they will take an interest in you.
It is our interest in each other that brings us together. Lasting relationships are built on interest, comfort, and most of all trust. Trust that we will listen to each other and do everything we can to understand. Often the very nature of our sharing implies a risk as we open up and let some of our more personal feelings emerge, we can only do that if we expect understanding and not judgment in return.
~~~
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.
Herman Melville
~~~
A teenager is:
* A person who can’t remember to walk the dog but never forgets a phone number.
* A weight watcher who goes on a diet by giving up candy bars before breakfast.
* A youngster who receives her allowance on Monday, spends it on Tuesday, and borrows it from her best friend on Wednesday.
* Someone who can hear his favorite singer 3 blocks away but not his mother calling from the next room.
* A whiz who can operate the latest computer without a lesson but can’t make a bed.
* A student who spends 12 minutes studying history and 12 hours studying for her driver’s license.
* A connoisseur of 2 kinds of fine music–loud and very loud.
* An enthusiast who has the energy to bike for miles but is usually too tired to dry the dishes.
* A young woman who loves the cat and tolerates the brother.
* A romantic who never falls in love more than once a week.
* A budding beauty who never smiles until her braces come off.
* A boy who can sleep till noon on any Saturday he suspects the lawn needs mowing.
* An original thinker who is positive that her mother was never a teenager.
~~~
Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.
Wayne Dyer
~~~
There was this West Va. sheriff and his deputy riding along the small town. They spot a car with out of town plates and decided to pull it over. The sheriff says “Where you from boy?”
The man says Chicago. Sheriff says, “Don’t lie to me son I saw them Illinois tags.”
~~~
Our boss told us that she is planning a salary raise.
One of the guys asked, “When does it become effective?”
The boss answered, “As soon as you do.”
~~~
The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
-William James
~~~
Have you ever realized that children are like dogs—loyal and affectionate, but teenagers are like cats?
It’s so easy to be a dog owner. You feed it, train it, boss it around. And yet it still puts its head on your knee and gazes at you as if you were a Rembrandt painting and bounds indoors with enthusiasm when you call it.
Then around age 13, your adoring little puppy turns into a cat. When you tell it to come inside, it looks amazed, as if wondering who died and made you emperor. Instead of dogging your doorsteps, it disappears. You won’t see it again until it gets hungry. Then it pauses on its sprint through the kitchen long enough to turn its nose up at whatever you’re serving. When you reach out to ruffle its head, in that old affectionate gesture, it twists away from you, then gives you a blank stare, as if trying to remember where it has seen you before. You, not realizing that the dog is now a cat, think something must be desperately wrong. It seems so antisocial, so distant. It won’t go on family outings.
Since you’re the one who raised it, taught it to fetch and stay and sit on command, you assume that you did something wrong. Flooded with guilt and fear, you redouble your efforts to make your pet behave. Only now you’re dealing with a cat, so everything that worked before now produces the opposite of the desired result. Call it, and it runs away. Tell it to sit, and it jumps on the counter. The more you go toward it, with open arms, the more it moves away.
Instead of continuing to act like a dog owner, you should learn to behave like a cat owner. Put a dish of food near the door, and let it come to you. Sit still, and it will come, seeking that warm, comforting lap it has not entirely forgotten. Be there to open the door for it.
And just remember…
One day your grown-up child will walk into the kitchen, give you a big kiss and say, “You’ve been on your feet all day. Let me get those dishes for you.” Then you’ll realize your cat is now a dog again!
~~~
Ten Things a Cat Thinks About
I could have sworn I heard the can opener.
Is there something I’m not getting when humans make noise with their mouths?
Why doesn’t the government do something about dogs?
I wonder if Morris really liked 9-Lives, or did he have ulterior motives?
Hmmm … If dogs serve humans, and humans serve cats, why can’t we cats ever get these stupid dogs to do anything for us?
This looks like a good spot for a nap.
Hey! No kidding, I’m sure that’s the can opener.
Would humans have built a vast and complex civilization of their own if we cats hadn’t given them a reason to invent sofas and can openers in the first place?
If there’s a God, how can He allow neutering?
If that really was the can opener, I’ll play finicky just to let them know who’s boss!
~~~
It’s lonely at the top, but you eat better.
~~~
I was listening to a lady who called a radio minister. The minister was a wise, grandfatherly gentlemen who had that calm reassuring voice that can melt all fear.
The lady, who was obviously crying, says,
“I was born blind, and I’ve been blind all my life. I don’t mind so much being blind but I have some well-meaning friends who tell me if I had more faith I could be healed and see again.”
The minister asked her,
“Tell me, do you carry one of those white canes?”
“Why, yes, I do,” she replied.
“Well, then… the next time someone says that to you, hit them over the head with your cane,” he said. “Then tell them… ‘If you had more faith, that wouldn’t hurt!’ “
~~~
Love is a force that connects us to every strand of the universe, an unconditional state that characterizes human nature, a form of knowledge that is always there for us if only we can open ourselves to it.
Emily H. Sell
~~~
Ray Mitchell
Indianapolis, Indiana
Management is not responsible for duplicates from previous dailies. The editor is somewhat senile.
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