Many people over as many days “make” my day actually. Some days it’s one of our grandchildren, or all of them too at other days. Other days my wife, Betty Ann, will make my day in the simplest of ways with loving gestures or actions. Even our dog, Gracie, will make my day, and often, especially when I pause to return her affection, remembering that she’s blind and that she still follows me all around the house and yard.

How do I let others know that they have made my day? By loving them in return, or, depending on the circumstances, by being fully present, making eye contact and being kind to those I meet.
– Kevin

A quote that has worked for me for many years is one that is often attributed to Plato: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”

During my three decades of doing social work, my bottom line at the start of meeting each new person was tenderly holding the premise that people tend to speak from where they hurt. We all hurt and we all, in one way or another, are trying to get to a better place, in our heads, in our hearts or within our bodies. Keeping this in mind as I interact with people throughout the day, in each aspect of my life, has always helped to lower the battle shields with everyone I meet.
– Kevin

For some reason today’s question has gotten me thinking immediately about the phrase, “to thine own self be true,” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The way I see it, my values, which inform and shape the way I live my life are basically on-going and the same from day to day. There are moments, sometimes whole days, when I am passionate about and focused on something that could be considered a personal value, though I never think of it in these terms. For myself though, I don’t have an experience of some values being deeper than others, unless, as I said, I get fired up about something!
– Kevn

When I am silent I can hear almost everything. And then if I go even deeper into that silence the ‘everything’ that is related to sound itself fades away too, which is wonderful. As a Quaker, silence to us, since we worship in silence, is akin to what a good pipe organ is to a Presbyterian or a revival is to a Pentecostal!

And silence has feet of its own, too. I have observed how silence is understood and practiced among artisans, from weavers to musicians and from writers to rowers. The beautiful thing about silence is that nobody owns it and it cannot be apportioned, sold and taxed.
– Kevin

Hello Deb, such a beautiful life story here. Thank you! My wife comes from a boating family and when I was young my mom and dad used to sail in small sailboats all around Boston Harbor. But I have no memory of that, actually. I farmed for a number of years before becoming a social worker and Quaker minister, and while we have always owned something that floated, we’ve never gotten into bigger craft due to time constraints and expenses. We have a 18′ Boston Whaler, that sadly has sat for five years unused due to my back issues. Even as my back improves, however, I don’t think that we will keep the boat. Living very near to the ocean, our whole family are beach goers and beach walkers which we all enjoy a lot.

I have been rowing with Whaling City Rowing in New Bedford, MA for 17 years and with my team, the Gray Buzzards, for all of those years. We row in and around New Bedford Harbor and along the New England coast during races, etc, now and then.

One of our team members, Doretta, is a therapist and yoga instructor and she sometimes leads dockside yoga sessions following some of our rows. She and I are planning to create a special type of rowing schedule that is as much about meditation, breath, deep listening, five-minute journaling, as it is paying attention to rowing speed and so forth. Time will tell how that turns out! My best, take care!