Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

What You See Is What You Get

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Decades ago when I was first learning to drive, one of the first things my driving instructor cautioned me about as soon as I got behind the wheel was that I would instinctively drive towards wherever I was looking. His words of warning have stayed with me over the years not only as an instruction for driving, but as an instruction for living.

One of the challenges we face in our society is that we are constantly bombarded by the news media with stories of catastrophe and violence that draw our attention towards an image of a world fraught with danger. Sure there is danger, that’s part of life. But there is also exquisite beauty, miraculous possibilities, innumerable instances of goodwill, heroic compassion, and just simple kindness.Continue Reading

Making Meaning

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How are you connecting the dots?

Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in his book Man’s Search for Meaning about his observation, from his time in a Nazi concentration camp, that those people who could find meaning in their suffering were more likely to survive than those who could not. He came to the conclusion that meaning is an essential human need.

One of the things that makes that so remarkable is how much power we have to create meaning. We may not always be able to control our circumstances, but how we interpret those circumstances and relate to them is by and large up to us.

When the ancients looked up at the nighttime sky, they connected the stars into pictures, constellations, that conveyed entire mythologies. Each of us in our own lives experiences moments of hardship, sorrow, blessing and happiness, which are like stars scattered across the sky of our lives. It is our choice how we will connect them, and, in so doing, what personal mythologies we will create.Continue Reading

Imagine That: Reflecting on 9/11

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Imagine what will happen when we tap the most potent resource of all.

If someone had told you on September 10, 2001 that it was possible, using nothing but a handful of box cutters and careful planning, to take thousands of lives, send the world’s largest economy into a tailspin and cause its most technologically advanced military to get mired down in an endless, impoverishing war, would you have believed it?

Doubtful. Most of us probably would have written the person off as a member of the fantasy-based community.

But then we woke up on that sunny September morning shocked to discover that one person’s fantasy can become another person’s reality.

Box cutters. Imagine that.

The attack of September 11th was, first and foremost, an act of imagination. A violent imagination, true, but imagination nonetheless. The great irony was that most of us allowed our own imaginations to be highjacked by our attackers’ narrative. Assuming our assigned role in the script we were handed, we eviscerated our principles of Constitutional law and human rights, launched a military attack, bled off our economic resources to the “War on Terror,” gave the green light to torture, and embraced government surveillance on all of us.  In other words, we began to live as a terrorized people.Continue Reading