The Top 4 Ways We Can Come Together Right Now
Given current events, I just wanted to offer my thoughts and perspective on how we can come together.
Looking back on the past few years, and remembering all the various issues that have come up, and now seeing what’s going on in the world, I wanted to focus a post on coming together.
We need to be better, and we need to find solutions that work for everyone. It’s easy not to care about a situation, if it doesn’t directly effect you, and then when a situation does effect you, wonder why more people don’t care.
We all face challenges, some harder than others, but I wanted to recommend several things we can do in our lives right now to come together:
1) Focus More on Listening and Understanding Than on Explaining or Judging Others
I get it. Values are personal. They are based on experiences and what we understand to be true and important about the world. Heck, we probably base most everything we do around those values. But…
We should always be looking to improve our values!
And ones of the best ways to do that is to listen to the stories of others. By doing that, we can hear about new perspectives that we may not have experienced and these perspectives may help inform our value system.
2) Increase Capacity to Feel and Show Love
Practically speaking, a lot of us adhere to pack mentality.
And what constitutes a pack varies from person to person. For some, it’s their family or close friendships. For others, it’s their community or their country.
Similar to conditioning or strength training, we can slowly build our capacity to show love over time, and increase our pack size. We can do this in various ways including, finding ways to be inclusive of new individuals or groups or even providing emotional support to others. Among other things.
Our goal should be to go as wide as possible and aim to show love to strangers and enemies alike. Our love will NOT always make a difference and may fall short. But that’s ok.
Remember giving love comes without expectations.
3) Channel Pain Productively
While love should come without expectations, as humans, we sometimes expect others to match our capacity for love, which sometimes can lead to disappointment.
We wonder why others don’t accept and practice our values, the ones we “know” to be true, and why some others don’t appear to have any values at all.
It’s ok to feel pain, but just remember, at any moment, what is most important is not what emotion we feel but how we respond to our emotion. If we can accept pain, and find productive outlets and channels for it, we make “bad” energy good.
Also, if possible, we can even take action for a cause that will help solve our problem in the first place.
4) Foster Commonalities & Appreciate Differences
If we are truly listening, it shouldn’t be too hard to find commonalities in others.
Learn to find the similarities that bond us together, especially with other people, who on the surface, may seem unrelatable or different. If we can identify those similarities, we will be better able to relate to others and keep the focus on empathy.
Finally, learn to appreciate differences. Differences can add diversity and personality to the world. At their best, differences allow us to solve problems in new and innovative ways and can also provide a wide range of personalities to appreciate.
