“From what we get we can make a living, what we give, however, makes a life,” Winston Churchill.  We need a little reminder on priority right now.  Much of the world seems to have forgotten what it means to be human.  Emotion and feeling, while important, do not take precedence over the reality of what’s happening around us.  It’s so easy to look at the experience of the world and simply say, “Glad it wasn’t me.” We can be sad about it but we are more often just happy to have evaded the same fate as someone else.  What happens when it does happen to us?  Because we are only safe from that experience until the same thing happens.  I’ve experienced many instances where the weight of what was happening in my world was completely dismissed only to have the next person around me experience it and receive support I would have loved to have.  The point is we don’t experience life until we experience it.  We need to have the experience of something in order to give back and understand what is needed in a similar circumstance. 

Life, while extremely personal, is also incredibly interconnected.  We need each other and it isn’t about the size of our homes or our bank accounts—all of that is moot.  It is the extent of what we can build with each other, what we can create to make it better for more people.  I will tell you, I never felt more connected to those around me than this past Christmas while putting things together for everyone.  There was a presence in finding things for people and creating an experience for them.  That was 100% about giving something meaningful, making the entire experience meaningful.  This world changes quickly and the truth is we can lose everything in a blink.  We’ve created a volatile system and we rely on it too much.  What do we do when that system finally breaks?  All we will have is each other and the realization that we made it and now we have to find something else.  So why wouldn’t we make the most of every opportunity to be with the people who mean the most to us and to show them?  Show them how we feel while we still can.

Receiving for our efforts is great and that reward does feel good.  But when we see the spirit of someone else and we connect, we are able to open up a different type of experience.  We live differently when we shift our focus to what we can share rather than what we can get.  We see possibility in expansion rather than in hoarding what we have.  There will only ever be so much we can get but there is an infinite depth to what we can give.  Until we really know someone well enough to understand what they need, we aren’t living and until we can live and know what that feels like, no one will really understand us either.  We fill in the gaps with connection.  The feeling isn’t about what we are feeling but about how we are feeling.  Our emotions are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things—they are fleeting anyway.  But HOW we feel—do we feel healthy, happy, joyous etc.—is lasting.  We may not remember all the times we were angry or frustrated or when we got upset in traffic, but we will remember the look on someone’s face when we remembered them.  We remember how it feels to hug a loved one.  The visceral experience of exchanging life is unmatched by anything we have in our homes. That is a gift unmatched by anything we receive.