I'm Not Even Sure Where This Came From...

Are any of you Gilmore Girls fans?

If you are thinking that I should have said WERE any of you Gilmore Girls fans, then your answer is no. Those of us that truly love that show bought all 7 seasons on DVD and continue to be fans :)

I love that show. It's quick and funny and the characters are awesome. It doesn't hurt that it's all about a single mom raising a daughter and I am a single mom who is raising a daughter. It doesn't hurt, either that they have the relationship that every mom wishes she could have with her daughter. The sad truth is, that only happens on TV. Sometimes you have to be the mom, not the friend. Those are my words of wisdom for today :)

 

As it is with many of the books I read, I put myself in the shoes of the characters way too well and some parts of the story are hard to watch. The episode when Gigi is born and they show flashbacks to what Lorelai went through when she had Rory borders on traumatic even more then when one of them loses a boyfriend/fiance/husband, or when Rory leaves for college.

If I can put myself into the position to understand and feel compassion for a TV character, why then is it so hard to have compassion for real people. In today's society we 'see' the people that need our help, but we don't really see them. We tell each other that it's not our responsibility. We let ourselves feel good about putting a couple bucks into a donation bucket, but we could do so much more if we told each other something different.

We could start with:

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. ~Dalai Lama

It is lack of love for ourselves that inhibits our compassion toward others. If we make friends with ourselves there is no obstacle to opening our hearts and minds to others. ~Unknown

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these human beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another ~Thomas Merton

If we held each other accountable for the amount of emotional and physical need around us it would change everything. If we stopped making excuses for ourselves and each other, things could be different.

When I started typing tonight I didn't expect to end like this but here it is, it is our fault. Not yours, mine, or theirs, it is the fault of us all that the world is the way it is. If we all do one compassionate thing every day, it would be a start and with that kind of start, we would soon have a noticeably better community.

With a more healthy community would come better countries... You see where I'm going with this. No, I'm not wearing my tye-dye shirt. I am looking at myself, at you, and at that guy down the street and if you have even the tiniest bit of imagination, you'll see it too.

It's called potential.