Dignity. Humility. Responsibility. Honesty.

Everyone agrees these qualities are good. Few realize that they are hard, hard, hard to live.

Without living them, not just believing in them, we can never heal. Just say it: I am responsible.

Every crime ever committed — every tragedy ever lived — has been the result of emotion taking control over our reason. I don’t usually quote bible verses but today I will because truth is real whether you believe or not.

“God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world.” John 3:17 (ESV) All I have to do is to love the unlovable and grace is assured.

Change is going to take some time. Even though we know this, it is good to remind ourselves that change will not happen overnight.

If I become emotional I look to myself as the cause not the people around me. This is a new behavior.

For a long time negative emotions were all I knew, a trait I inherited. All those years that I wallowed in negative feelings, I would read that the way to unlock positive emotions was to embrace the negative.

Being uncomfortable is not a crime. If we are brave, being uncomfortable is an opportunity to create something real from something we can only imagine.

We can’t live in the negative. I firmly believe that we have to take positive action to replace our negative actions.  

The pain of awareness is only worthwhile if we take action to repair the damage we have caused to our relationships. If we don’t fill that void left by stopping harmful actions consciously, something else will step into that gap without our consent.

All we have to have is the willingness to be aware and possibly uncomfortable. You never know when your positive words will break someone’s string of negative experiences.

The lesson of the great leaders for good is clear. While it is very difficult to do so, the best thing to do when attacked is to let it pass.

Even if public humiliation is involved in waiting for it to pass, wait it out. In time, the accuser will experience their downfall because they have been attacking everyone.

Eventually, someone with the firepower to do so will say, “Enough.” We just have to ride it out.

Nobody likes a hero that saves the world one day and then is a jerk for 10 years afterwards. Of course we can’t fix the whole wide world but that shouldn’t stop us from changing ourselves.

It wasn’t until I finally went to college in my mid-30’s that I figured out how important it was to do something to change systems of inequality wherever I encountered them. College prepared my mind to do the analysis systematically without skimping or hiding from myself when I found fault in my words or behavior.

The most painful part, and probably the reason people avoid looking at their biases, is admitting to ourselves that we have biases when we thought we didn’t. It means we use words like ‘colorblind’ to talk with people who are just like us to make ourselves feel better about injustice but we don’t actually do anything about it.

Words are the tallest fences, the thickest walls, the strongest fortresses. Because we don’t know how to use them we lose their potential, their power to heal and to harm.

It is my experience that words can separate or bring us together. When we are most powerfully torn apart, that is the moment when our words have the most power to bring us together.

We feel defenseless against threats from every direction against harm to ourselves and those we love, all because no one ever taught us that we already possess the most powerful protection: Our words. The answer to many of our problems lies in the power of words to create calm where there is chaos by removing the feeling of distance between us.

All my life I had done everything in my power to avoid stress. And then I came across the words of Martin Luther King Jr. on the topic of tension.

He said, “The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” This was like permission from God to be annoying as long as I could hold my temper.

No matter what it is we strive for we will inevitably run up against someone who has every intention of either stopping us from reaching our goal or taking it away from us once we have attained it. Martin Luther King Jr.’s methods are the only way I can see to keep what I have worked for without resorting to the tactics of the bullies we run into in every area of life.

The path to success is a crooked one. Beginnings are important because if they are well-aimed we can make it to the goal with only small corrections along the way.

We could be launching a life at twenty, restarting after a failure, or finding our way out of burnout. Most of us don’t succeed at something we love because we never start.

Once we are moving and as long as we have goals, we will be able to tell when it is time to make a course correction. I didn’t know about course correction until recently; I thought success was one long straight line.

It’s time to admit that humans need artificial intelligence. It’s no longer a choice; we can’t do without it.

Spend time in a high school classroom. The battle for attention is constant and technology is winning.

The teacher is the interface between technology, the digital divide, and the curriculum. The dictates of professionalism demand that teachers take command of the technological airspace to create content that students find engaging and challenging.