Good Morning Friends & Digital Neighbors! The sleet and snow shut down much of the town for the rest of the day and it ended up being a more quiet afternoon. I suspect with the colder temperatures today it will be more of the same. Getting Jackson back and forth from the office will be challenging since we will have to watch for patches of ice. On to the morning quotes from Ageless Wisdom! Words of encouragement - the other side of criticism. Happy Friday my friends!

There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great. - G.K. Chesterton Charles Dickens

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them become what they are capable of being. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

They may forget what you said and they may even forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel. - Unknown

Just like criticism, encouragement is best when preceded by thought and reflection rather than just impulsively given. When parents fret over self-esteem of their children, I think there is great potential for more harm by mindless encouragement. Mindless encouragement seems to either create paper-tissues personalities that can handle struggle and failure, or it creates skeptical cynics who recognize the emptiness for what it is.

Actual encouragement instills perspective, appreciation, hope and actual growth. G. K. Chesterton's quote are the people who I have come to truly appreciate. I don't care for the pretentious people. The inflated, self-important and self-promoting aren't of any real interest to me. The last celebrity I got excited about was Harley Race. When some Hollybore dies I don't care that they passed any more or less than the kindly old lady down the street. I am still curmudgeoning over the death of Princess Di from the late 90's and that delusional moment of life in the West. I am sorry the most articulate and attractive of the Royals passed, but didn't really effect my world all that much. So Elton John got to recycle a song, so there was that. 😎 I do think one of the things attractive about Princess Di's personality is her sense of encouragement. That was something she seemed to radiate more than most of her peers. Back to G. K. - lift people up to treat them as your equals (they already are), help them aspire to their better selves is a far better thing than keeping them in their place. Goethe understood that, well at least in his quote indicates he does.

That last unknown quote has been used at many funerals. People will remember how you listened to them, appreciated them, were there for them in crucial moments in life or were there for the long haul of so many ordinary chapters in our life. Time is the most essential gift we have to give to others. Someone would say love, but without time in the field, love is a pretty distant thing less real than the Tooth Fairy. If time is the foundation, love is the crowning of that experience. Within the gift of time are opportunities for authentic human interaction. No time for others - anything you say to them is ultimately empty. After all, you have no time. Examining how we spend our time is a good practice from time to time. It may make us more mindful of how we make times for others, and in those moments of giving of our time, the feelings that endure beyond the experience might be born. Happy Friday!

Somewhere in Iowa is this barn. 🌞