Wisdom Gets Passed Along in Stories
"Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering. Despite the awesome powers of technology many of us still do not live very well. We may need to listen to each other's stories once again."
— Kitchen Table Wisdom
Don't Label
"A label is a mask life wears. We put labels on life all the time. 'Right,' 'wrong,' 'success,' 'failure,' . . . Labeling sets up an expectation of life that is often so compelling we can no longer see things as they really are. This expectation often gives us a false sense of familiarity toward something that is really new and unprecedented. We are in relationship with our expectations and not with life itself."
— Kitchen Table Wisdom
Growing Older
"One of the blessings of growing older is the discovery that many of the things I once believed to be my shortcomings have turned out in the long run to be my strengths, and other things of which I was unduly proud have revealed themselves in the end to be among my shortcomings. Things that I have hidden from others for years turn out to be the anchor and enrichment of my middle age. What a blessing it is to outlive your self-judgments and harvest your failures."
— Kitchen Table Wisdom
Healing As Unique as a Fingerprint
"While an impulse toward wholeness is natural and exists in everyone, each of us heals in our own way. Some people heal because they have work to do. Others heal because they have been released from their work and the pressures and expectations that others place on them. Some people need music, others need silence, some need people around them, others heal alone. Many different things can activate and strengthen the life force in us. For each of us there are conditions of healing that are as unique as a fingerprint."
— Kitchen Table Wisdom
Perfectionism
"The pursuit of perfection is built into every professional training. Wholeness lies beyond perfection. Perfection is only an idea . . . The pursuit of perfection has become a major addiction of our time. Fortunately, perfectionism is learned. No one is born a perfectionist, which is why it is possible to recover. I am a recovering perfectionist. Before I began recovering, I experienced that I and everyone else was always falling short, that who we were and what we did was never quite good enough. I sat in judgment on life itself. Perfectionism is the belief that life is broken."
— Kitchen Table Wisdom
Something Healthy About Anger
"Often anger is a sign of engagement with life. People who are angry are touched deeply by the events of their lives and feel strongly about them. As an emotion, it has its limitations and it certainly has a very bad press, but my experience with ill people suggests that there is something healthy about it."
— Kitchen Table Wisdom
Trading Mystery for Mastery
"After years of trading mystery for mastery, it was hard and even frightening to stop offering myself reasonable explanations for some of the things that I observed and that others told me, and simply take them as they are. 'I don't know' had long been a statement of shame, of personal and professional failing. In all of my training I do not recall hearing it said aloud even once."
— Kitchen Table Wisdom
We Bless the Life Around Us
"We bless the life around us far more than we realize. Many simple, ordinary things that we do can affect those around us in profound ways: the unexpected phone call, the brief touch, the willingness to listen generously, the warm smile or wink of recognition. We can even bless total strangers and be blessed by them. Big messages come in small packages. All it may take to restore someone's trust in life may be returning a lost earring or a dropped glove."
— My Grandfather's Blessings
Our Service Will Bless Us
"We do not serve the weak or the broken. What we serve is the wholeness in each other and the wholeness in life. The part in you that I serve is the same part that is strengthened in me when I serve. Unlike helping and fixing and rescuing, service is mutual. There are many ways to serve and strengthen the life around us: through friendship or parenthood or work, by kindness, by compassion, by generosity or acceptance. Through our philanthropy, our example, our encouragement, our active participation, our belief. No matter how we do this, our service will bless us."
— My Grandfather's Blessings
Embrace Life Without Judgment
"Wisdom comes most easily to those who have the courage to embrace life without judgment and are willing to not know, sometimes for a long time. It requires us to be more fully and simply alive than we have been taught to be. It may require us to suffer. But ultimately we will be more than we were when we began. There is the seed of a greater wholeness in everyone."
— My Grandfather's Blessings
Meaningful Lives
"Most of us lead far more meaningful lives than we know. Often finding meaning is not about doing things differently; it is about seeing familiar things in new ways. When we find new eyes, the unsuspected blessing in work we have done for many years may take us completely by surprise. We can see life in many ways: with the eye, with the mind, with the intuition. But perhaps it is only by those who speak the language of meaning, who have remembered how to see with the heart, that life is ever deeply known or served."
— My Grandfather's Blessings
God Willing
"Like many Orthodox Jews, my grandfather never made an appointment or spoke of any event in the future without adding the words 'God willing.' It is actually a teaching of Orthodox Judaism that one does not make any promise without this tip of the hat to the authority of God. So whether someone said, 'I'll see you next Tuesday,' or 'We will have dinner in an hour,' Grandpa would invariably respond, 'God willing.' God might, after all, end the world sometime between now and the chicken soup. There was never any fear in his voice when he said this, just a simple reminding of himself and those around him of the nature of things."
— My Grandfather's Blessings
Befriending Life
"I've spent many years learning how to fix life, only to discover at the end of the day that life is not broken. There is a hidden seed of greater wholeness in everyone and everything. We serve life best when we water it and befriend it. When we listen before we act.
"In befriending life, we do not make things happen according to our own design. We uncover something that is already happening in us and around us and create conditions that enable it. Everything is moving toward its place of wholeness. Befriending life requires that we listen for that potential which is trying to actualize itself over time. It will be there whether we are listening to a tree, a person, an organization, or a society. It is always struggling against odds. Everything has a deep dream of itself and its fulfillment.
"Befriending life is less a matter of knowledge than a question of wisdom. It is not about mastering life, controlling it or exerting our will over it, no matter how well intentioned our will may be. Befriending life is more about harmlessness than it is about control. Harmlessness requires connection. It means listening to life from the place in us that is connected to the wholeness around us. The place in us that is also whole."
— My Grandfather's Blessings
