E for Encourage

As I contemplated E words, several sprang to mind this week.
Exasperated – when people didn’t respond to me as quickly as I thought appropriate. 
Expectations – dashed again and again. 
Elevated – heart rate when things didn’t go as I expected. 
Ego – injured when my priority wasn’t acknowledged as another’s primary concern. 
Eager – to blame someone else for my lack of patience.

Enough. Stop my whining.

Engage. Step into my life. 

Energize. Start anew.

Making this reframe possible for me are those in my world who encourage me.  Charlie, most of all. Kate and Jess.  Many friends.  Even strangers.  I am truly blessed to be surrounded by love and encouragement. 

Every day, I have dozens of encounters, each with the potential for me to be the encourager.  Do I take advantage of those opportunities?  Do I build up?  Or tear down?


The word “courage” is from the Latin/Old French for “heart.” Encourage is to put your heart into someone who is downhearted until he or she is lifted up. The beauty of this arrangement is that both parties are nourished in the process.  It’s a true win-win situation.  Encouragement can be as simple as a smile, a nod, a gentle pat on the shoulder.  It can be just one word, a pep talk on the fly, a quick telephone chat, a greeting card, a letter.



To encourage myself to be a better encourager to others, I did a spot check to see how I encourage myself. (That’s a sentence full of encouragement.) Do my refrigerator and cupboard encourage healthy snacking and balanced meals?  Does my office chair encourage good posture?  Does my bed encourage sound rest?  My schedule encourage the lifestyle I want – with time for leisure or study or family or romance or whatever I value?  My shoes encourage solid support for my hardworking feet?  There’s room for improvement, but I’m not doing bad.

Now that’s encouraging!

D for Distance

This week, I’ve had a couple of different conversations about living the expat life.  It requires a different set of skills, one of which, if relationship is something you value, is being able to stay in touch with family and friends despite a geographic separation.
This got me to thinking about - distance.  Hence our D word for this week.

When Charlie and I got our first international assignment, my dad was concerned about keeping in touch – he was a talker (like me) and we typically chatted by phone, at least for a few minutes, every day.  But he feared that international calls would make this cost prohibitive.  Voila!  We introduced him to Skype and he became a Skype-aholic. He’s gone now, but rarely a day passes that I don’t Skype with Mom.  Or Kate.  Or Jessica.  Just this morning, we had a lovely three-way chat about our vacation plans for later this year.

I know what my mom’s pro time was at her latest check-up (if you don’t even know what this is and you have aging parents, ask them).  And what she had for lunch.  That one of her dear friends died this week and another celebrated a milestone birthday.  And that we both still miss Dad and think of him often.  We talk about everything, the big and small things.  Sometimes, the call lasts less than a minute, other times, it meanders close to half an hour or more.  Our relationship is solid.

I see the Littles online and watch them play in their playroom, eat their breakfast, do a new dance.  Thanks to Skype, we were present in the room when Stella was born.  We love the nights we see Kate on Skype with her morning coffee, the day in Arizona just beginning as ours is closing.
I once heard of a family, two siblings and their mother, who lived within a one-mile radius of one another – and went years – yes, years – without  seeing one another.  Distance is not a matter of miles. Don’t believe me?  Ask Einstein.  There’s this thing called the ERP Paradox – when two particles go off in opposite directions, a measurement of one particle still influences the measurement of the other particle.  In other words, we don’t have to be local to be connected.