Choices are good, choices can bring us opportunity and choices can bring us freedom.  Choices can also give us the building blocks to create a prison inside of ourselves which enable us to freeze up and not be able to move in any direction for fear of making the “wrong” choice.  (more…)

Hello, my name is Lynn Kindler and I suffer from “terminal uniqueness”.  What that means to me is that I seem to “forget” and/or I am continuously reminded that I am not so very different from many people on this planet, most of the time (if not all of the time)!  On the one hand, I am very grateful when I come across a person or a group of “like-minded” people who think, feel and act the same way I do.  Yet, I still seem to believe that “we” come from a very small minority of people who feel this same way. Let me give you an example.  I really thought that I was one of the very few people who were perturbed, sad, disappointed, frustrated and afraid of the huge amount of development of big huge homes all over our fair city.  I really thought that I was one of the very few who was not all that excited about purchasing a huge monstrous home with extra square feet that we don’t need.  Then I flip open our city’s version of The Daily Planet, and what beholds my eyes but an article about how many people, your basic average Joe, are tired of the big huge developments going in all over the place and don’t have any attraction to buying a huge home with lots of wasted space.  

I still don’t know who is buying all the homes, but that’s another blog.  I have also come across people, with very little effort, who are even wearier of the automatic Chili’s Restaurants, Bed Bath & Beyond, and PetSmarts that seem to accompany each new large development that is created.  I did believe that I really was the only one that was irritated by the waste and the gross excess seemingly flung about with little or no thought. Yet, someone is buying from these places for these places to be created. Or which comes first the chicken or the egg. 

 So if there are more people who feel like I do, then what can we do together? It’s not enough for us to sit and kvetch about this behind the scenes. It’s also not enough for us to protest and write nasty letters.  It’s about how can we show and act our beliefs through our actions of how we lead our lives?  A realization that I had was that although I may not like the behavior of a group of people very much, individually, I am able to want the highest good for people. But put them in a group and I can sometimes become immune to the person behind the mask.  Just like I don’t want someone to throw me into a group and define me by that group because of my sex, age, race, beliefs, shoe size nor do I want to be someone who does this to other people.  

I am unique and special and different and I’m not unique and special and different.  It’s like I used to tell my brother when we were kids and talking about whether there was life on other planets or not, “If we are the only life in this Universe than that is a miracle and if we’re not the only life in this Universe than that’s a miracle”, either way it’s a miracle depending on how you look at it.  Where’s your miracle today?