There is a mandate for any group with enormous powers of communication to show people how to be better.

Showing people how to be better is a task fraught with complexities on so many levels as to at first seem far more daunting than one might expect.

Most people, myself at the top of this list, blanch at any opportunity in which we are confronted by lessons that we are not desirous of learning.

I would presume that this starts with growing to that early age where you recognize you are about to get one of your parent’s lectures that you just do not want to have to listen to.

At that moment, we are confronted by a dichotomy in which we need to be respectful to our parent, but our brain is trying desperately to roll our eyes and head for the hills (or at least to the presumed sanctuary of our bedroom).

Many of the most valuable lessons that come to us through life are the ones that find their way into our mind through non-confrontational, non-forced, exemplary circumstances.

It might come through someone else’s act of heroism in which we witness behavior that we ourselves might wish to emulate. Or perhaps it comes through watching someone successful at something that we are not successful at and recognizing the disparity between the two so that we might begin to modify our behavior in favor of what we see working for someone else.

But even if we wish to emulate that behavior, we are still confronted by our own personal need to grow, perhaps in ways that we are not feeling desirous of growing, or even aware that we must grow in.

When I was 16, my friends and I would grab a bunch of firewood from our house and we would go down to the beach and have a nice bonfire and spend the night on the beach enjoying each other‘s company. I was considerably more insecure at that stage and found myself using put down humor as a presumed equalizing variable. If I could better some other person in a put down contest, I must be smarter, or so I thought! So imagine my feelings when my friends were all going to the beach one night and I presumed that was going to join them and they told me they prefer if I did not come because I’m always putting everybody down. OMG😲 

I sat with my comeuppance on that Saturday night, alone and dispirited. How could that possibly be? That night, I determined I must change. I looked at my friend Dave, who is one of the people receiving this message this morning and everybody loved Dave. He was so warm and so friendly to everyone, and never a put down coming out of his mouth. So I decided I would start to emulate the qualities that Dave demonstrated so that I might release this negative stigma I had caused for myself.

I do not think I have used put down humor since.

I shared this on Easter and Passover weekend because each of these religious holidays are celebrating lessons. And as I was getting ready to make a case for the Jews having built the pyramids in Egypt as slaves, I decided to do some research. One after another reputable articles all dispelled this myth. With enough factual evidence, it became clear to me that perhaps the Jews did not build the pyramids at all. Religion does it’s best to bolster the best behavior in people through the filter of that particular religion’s viewpoint. But that does not necessarily make everything that a religion is teaching factually accurate.

Coming back to this morning’s aphorism, it is incumbent upon those who have influence to show people how to be better. It’s one thing to talk the talk and another to walk the walk. Thank you, Dave for helping me change my life, considerably for the better❤️

Happy Easter and Happy Passover!🌟🌟

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