#603 - Once More With Feeling

Act Two:

In this episode, I learned that when you meet someone how has experienced something horrible, like witnessing friends being killed in battle, its best to just listen.

"My best friend Brock asked me about recovery of bodies on the battlefield so I told him how that worked and when I was done I realized it was fine. I was fine. What Brock did that was some important and so good is that he didn't say anything about it, he just looked at me in the eye until I was done. When you see a monster, you look away but he just kept looking at me in the eye."


Act Three:

What do you do when a bomb disposal robot learns more about what happened than it should have.

"I am having some trouble keeping Mr. Owen Jackson reclassified as unsecured ordinance ... my processor is struggling because a person is not ordinance and a person is now ordinance. I see now, I have to make things simple."

#557 - Birds & Bees

How do you talk to young children about difficult subjects, sex, rape, death, suicide, racism? Now that I have two beautiful adult daughters, I want to ask them some of the same questions that were raised in this wonderful episode. Listening to #557 was difficult. I heard children speak in ways I had never heard before. I can't wait to share this episode with my girls to get their perspective.

As a young parent, my heart always told me to be transparent, to give children all the information they needed so that they could make their own informed decisions and opinions. But did I? Was I over protective? Should I have given them more? Could they handle it? Would I damage their young beautiful minds. As I learned today, I may have been over protective. Yes, like I was taught, I passed on the cliche phrases, "Be respectful", "Do unto others...", and "Don't judge others until you walk in their shoes." But was that enough? Did I miss an opportunity to create better people, to create advocates. If you are a parent, listen to #557, and ask yourself some of these questions. If you are a child, walk in the shoes of these children. Thank you TAL.

#579 - My Damn Mind

For some reason, changes, events, work and life gets in the way of many of the things that you enjoy. It appears that over the last 5+ years, life got in the way of these blog posts. Although I continued to listen to TAL sporadically, I forgot how much I enjoyed sharing my favorite episodes with others. My township built a new walking trail in Chester County Pennsylvania. In the early days of this blog, I walked on the local roads braving the blind curves listening to the TAL podcast. That was on my old iPod, which by the way still works but have no use for since it is now stuck in IOS version 4.1.2 and won't accept new apps worthy of downloading. I'm on an iPhone now and semi-retired and walk the new trail.

I listened to #579 and realized how much has changed in these 5 years. I can't understand why many hospitals across our country have made conscious decisions to put the hospital employees first and the public second. I thought it was supposed to be the other way around. The statistics are staggering. Listen to this story about a young man who needed serious help and got the opposite. Then read about what you heard in the New York Times.

I have some podcasts to catch up on some my next few posts may be our of order as I work backward.