Incidental Learning And Your Life

This will be all about wonderful sayings that I will connect together into an informative story. The first one is “tikkun olan" that means healing and restoring the world with social action and community service. The second one is “incidental learning can be an advantage in our life” (I made that one up). Someone else told me the next one. “If I am in your top one hundred people, if I can be in your life, position does not matter, whether I am 1 or 100 on the list, and if I can be of assistance to you, that is all that matters.” This person, my physician assistant, is surely in my top one hundred people, and he is very high up on the number count. There is another one that is useful, too. "Listen to others, but don’t lose your voice.” Do what you can if possible to help others. It can be of manual service like taking a senior to a doctor’s appointment and waiting for them , because they have no family or friends to do this. That would be tikkun olan. Try to be in the top one hundred people of someone special to you and say and do things for them that will make them happy. Even saying something nice and calming is important and could be the highlight of their day. Say something that will let them feel good about themselves at this time in their life. Show them you care. It will be worth everything to them and to you. Years ago, I was going to write a column on dance for a dance studio newsletter. The owner said to me that I had to write a general column, not about me or others who danced, just a plain generic column. I said no. When I write I praise, encourage, and inspire people who accomplish things. I cannot write a generic column about invisible people with no names, no faces and no specific achievements or realizations. I want to praise others and even myself as an example. I have written over 600 columns for Patch and The Frederick News-Post and every one of them praises someone or a group of people and even me. I did not compromise my beliefs to write for him. Incidental learning is when you learn something new that you never had an interest in before now. It means you took in some information and you will use it sometime, somewhere and it will benefit you and others. The next saying is to be anywhere on someone's top 100 list. I know I was number one on my Mom’s list all my life and when I became an adult, I wanted keep helping her especially after Dad died in 1964. She did not need me financially, she needed me emotionally and I was there for her. She made her own way, lived alone, worked at an interesting job for the State of Maryland and had a pleasant social life with her lady friends, who also were widowed. She traveled some out of the country; even taking her first airplane ride when she was about sixty. I encouraged her to do this and to travel and she had fun late in life. The last one is listening to others. People like to be listened to when they tell you something. Do not look away and act bored, uncaring and ready to leave their presence. This makes them feel inadequate and unimportant. George Eliot once said, “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” Do not get on the list of what you might have been. You can be whatever you desire and make sure you keep on desiring it. elita sohmer clayman