Please, make no mistake, that waitress, that waiter, they’re important.

Today, I happened to glance over at four women sitting at a table on the patio of a sidewalk café. They appeared to know each other well. They spoke casually as they began perusing their menus.

Jauntily approaching their table was the waitress, stepping out of the café. She asked if they’d like something to drink. Each of the women stopped momentarily to consider the waitress’ question, but before any of the other women answered and without consulting the other three the fourth woman, without looking up at the waitress, haughtily replied “You can bring us all waters, for now.” She then proceeded to begin telling the rest of the table what she thought looked interesting on the menu, essentially “dismissing” the waitress.

Wow…..I must say, I was flabbergasted by this woman’s callousness. I was also struck by her comfortable willingness to completely invalidate the relevance of another human being. Additionally, she was doing this to a person who was graciously “serving” her.

I, in my time, have worked in many diverse of occupations. My career has been a fascinating and constantly winding path for me, always rich and full of diversity. I don’t like to sit in sameness for too long.
However, one of the professions I have never explored is being wait staff.

Yet, while I have never been a server or a waitress I have ever been aware of how much I admire the work they do and the occupational hazards they face, as today’s view was reminding me.

Their profession is a complex and intricate one. It is one requiring infinite patience to be well done.

The best waiters and waitresses I have watched are some of greatest managers of human behavior I have ever observed.

Food and drink can only carry an establishment so far. If people don’t feel appreciated or well tended to by the wait personnel they will not keep coming back.

Yet that delicate balance of humanness has two sides and there are humans on both sides.

The person who serves you is the person who you serve.

I do not mean to confuse you.
Allow me to explain.

Not one of us came here greater than any other one of us.


Not one of us, because of
where we live,
how much money we make,
what we own
where we go to school,
what we do,
how we worship,
what we play,
where we work,
what we drive,
who we’re married to,
how many degrees we have,
what clubs we belong to,
how many pairs of shoes are in our closet,
what we drink,
who we know
is greater than any other one of us.

Not one of us came here greater than any other one of us.

The person who is serving you is committing their energy to your comfort.
They are attending to your needs. They are being kind to you.

They deserve our consideration.
They deserve our respect.
They deserve our appreciation.

Often they will they will tell you their name. Try to catch it. Then try to use it in a caring way when you’re speaking to that waiter or waitress. You know what I mean; it’s nice when people remember our names. It acknowledges that they recognize us. We humans like being recognized in caring ways, no matter what our profession is.

Many CEO’s the world over count experiences when they were wait staff, in their youth, as priceless learning opportunities. Some of the most valuable times being when those whom they were serving treated the errors, the youthful CEO-to-be made, with kindness or generosity. They report those situations provided them with powerful lessons in benevolence. In addition, numerous Fortune 500 executives have noted they hire, in high regard, the person who treats the wait staff as highly regarded. Moreover, they do not give a second thought to the candidate who does not give the wait staff a second thought.

Many of these executive’s also report that their final decisions about whether to trust signing onto a multi-billion dollar business deal can hinge on their observations of how pleasant and considerate the other CEO is their exchanges with the wait personnel. This demonstrates to them the open-mindedness, fairness and collaborative energy the other Chief Executive brings to the table.

We have a great amount to learn from one another,
perhaps, almost as much as we have to teach one another.

But first, we must begin by valuing each other.

Whom you serve is the person who serves you.

Close your eyes

When you close your eyes, what do you see?

I’m not asking you about the times when you’re laying down on the sojourn to sleep.
I’m asking you a simpler, more complex, question. What happens when you purposely close your eyes with no intention but to see what’s inside your “vision” when your eyes are closed and you begin to wander?

I mean this not as trickery. I assure you.
Moreover, it can only be a question whose final answer belongs only to you.

However, I would quickly wager you that the answers you would give me would be completely different from my own. Additionally, carry that bet further, I'd put more down and assert further they’d be different still from the person shopping next to you at the market, standing ahead of you in line at the bank or sitting beside you in the doctor’s office waiting room.

You see, our inner world, or our internal construct, belongs to us.
As we close our eyes, we begin a journey inside.
This is where our silence and, yes, our noise within ourselves all begins.
Here we start to be alone with ourselves in a way unique to each of us.

We close our eyes and begin sensing the trail of our onliness.


Therefore, these next questions have not a thing to do with whether or not your individual eyes can see an ocean’s blue or the sun set or a seagull fly. They have nothing to do with the mechanics of the eye.


With that caveat, I ask you:

Are you seeing or unseeing?

Are you unsighted or insightful?

Do you envision or are you a visionary?

You see now what I mean; these questions do not have anything to do with our eyes. They are about our hopes, our minds and our hearts.

So I think, no, I believe, that You see a whole lot when You close Your eyes.
You see possibilities.
Now look closer.
You are the possibilities You see.
And if You look closer still, well,

You are the possibilities You seek.

First Day? Last Day?

First Day? Last Day?

Click link above to listen to audio podcast

This moment is ALWAYS the first moment that begins the rest of the your life. If this moment is both the first moment of the rest of your life and the beginning of the last day of your life, how is your perspective on your life changed? What will you do differently? How will you love differently? How will you treat the people in your life differently? Starting today...

Paranormal activity...is it true?

Here I go again, true confession happens here a whole bunch. C’mon, let’s face it, I can’t ask you to be honest with yourself if I don’t start the conversation with my own honesty, right? Well, at least that’s the way I see it. So let’s jog back to the question.

Paranormal activity, is it true?

Well, perhaps it is.
I’ll be the first to tell you that I have seen amazing things happen in my lifetime that defy easy explanation.

That, however, is not really what makes me scratch my head. What puzzles me is why, when we think of “paranormal activity” do we most often conjure images of the negative?

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m a pretty strong horror film buff. So, I have no intention of discussing this from some moralistic, standing on the mount position. I wouldn’t even know where to begin that treatise.

By the way, I tend to go in for horror films that lead me down the path to the intensely psychological horror haunts within our own palpable imaginations. Some great examples would be films like the original versions of “The Uninvited” or “The Haunting”. Or throw me in front some Hitchcock and pass the popcorn, yes, with plenty of butter. But, you get the picture. (No pun intended, no really!)

But, back to the point, why, when we think of “paranormal activity” do we most often conjure images of the negative?

How about we turn the prism of this term “paranormal activity” a wee bit and allow this light to refract from a slightly different perspective. Perhaps then we can appreciate a wider spectrum of its colorful options.

Working in hospice I have had people share with me, sometimes within months or hours prior to their passing, that loved ones who have preceded them in death have come to them, visited them. They typically report that these visitations bring them great peace about the event of their own passing that awaits them. The reports of occurrences like these are well known by those of us who have worked closely with people who are near death. And I will tell you, many explanations are offered for why it happens and one of those explanations is “paranormal activity”.

However, now look broader with me for a moment. I find it fascinating that major religions throughout the world, continuously give honest credibility without hesitation or question, in their great books of wisdom, to human beings talking to disembodied spirits and entities or to inanimate objects that may suddenly project voice and personality. Now think about it, again we can find all kinds of words to wrap around those tellings, but logically wouldn’t the term “paranormal activity” work pretty cleanly?

Now these same powerful tomes, the very ones, which have come to define powerful civilizations and underpin many of the laws that conduct them, discuss extraordinary events and awesome feats created or caused in what can be considered to be supernatural ways or could this too be thought of as “paranormal activity”?

Hmmmm, what an amazing thing “life” is……..

So, paranormal activity, is it true? You tell me.