influence

All my life, I've heard about "power and influence".
It was a phrase and almost a single word.

People with "power and influence" were important people.  They lived in big houses and were on the fronts of magazines like "LIFE" and "Times" or today, "Forbes" or "Wall Street Journal".  Their names were known in regular households and spoken by local newscasters.

Every town had their own people of "power and influence" and every local knew what neighborhoods they were most likely to live in.

Parents wanted their children to grow up to have "power and influence" although most parents were either more realistic or not feeling so lucky that they skipped encouraging them to also make some regular people plans with their lives.

The point is not that we have always had people with power and influence, but that we all have power, personal power, and we all influence others every day.  Maybe even every minute of everyday.

Ask yourself, "who is the most important person in my life"?

That person has definitely had influence in your life.

But you don't have to be anyone's "most important person" to have influence.

We are all constantly influenced, for the good, for the bad, its all influence.  We make choices based on influences.

Common influences are churches, spiritual leaders, school teachers, parents, grandparents, scout leaders, librarians, nurses and doctors, the landscaper, the tree trimmer, the bowling alley attendant that helps you learn to bowl.  There are coaches and bosses, mentors and preceptors, best friends and old coworkers that all have there moments of influence.  There are also incidental influencers, from eavesdropped conversations or from chance interactions--like the bench at the park or on the bus or in the checkout line.

So you don't have to be a winning politician to influence the creation of a better world.  You don't need to have millions of dollars to help make a positive change.  You don't even need a huge audience or an advanced and impressive education.  Every one of us, everyday is influencing the people we interact with.
Sometimes we influence people without any awareness of it happening, like when we help someone solve a problem or share a personal story that ends up later helping them untangle their own problems.
Sometimes we influence people by stopping to aid someone in distress--not necessarily disaster-level distress but maybe a flat tire or out of gas or even a dollar short in the checkout line.
Sometimes we influence people by not people-pleasing.  That sounds the opposite of a positive influence, but if you have ever worked with a person that is always consistent and always honest, it is so much more impressive than the person that brags up everyone and volunteers to do things they don't have the time for or the ability to do. People-pleasers usually influence us by teaching us what NOT to do.

None of us were raised by Saints or perfect people.  Seeing someone do something differently than we were raised to believe it had to be done is both educational and very freeing.  Those people that show us that, are very influential.  (like vegetarians, if you had said that was possible when I was a child, I would have looked at you askance--a meal was not a meal without meat, our home ec teacher would have started talking about protein malnutrition, my cattle rancher relatives would have had them committed or arrested or hogtied)

Think about the important things in your lives, about the people that influenced your life.  Consider who hears you and sees you, not just listens to you.  Name a few names of those people with "power and influence" and ask yourself, which of those people can disappear from my life and leave the smallest ripples.

Don't stand in awe of the people with "power and influence".
Thank some of those people that actually had a positive influence in you life.

AND

Use your influence, your personal influence in the lives of the people surrounding you, to make a positive change in the world.  Do it big or do is small but never think you have no effect so be wise.

That is real power and influence.

What we have all known since we were young.

This is going to ramble.  Childhood knowledge is rambling knowledge.  But kids are collectors--of rocks and broken things and wisdoms they hear repeatedly until they assimilate them as absolute truth.

If there is one thing that will always get a conversation going, it is letting people reminisce.

It is not just old grizzled grandparents that enjoy that, although, given enough time, we do collect more material than your average 5 year old.  But listening to children and psych patients and addicts and strangers at bus stops,  I have decided we all have a few memories that allow us to hop from subject to subject using only our past experiences

The one thing I have noticed is that the absolute truths of my memories, fear of nuclear war, alerting when a plane seems to be coming in low, opening the windows on the east side of the house when the sky turns that weird green, what will happen to you if you use a Ouija board, why you can't let eel get cold after its cooked (it becomes raw again!) covering your ears when it is windy (those nylon head scarves were not just a fashion statement, not letting your feet get cold in the winter, not eating fish and dairy together, why mayonnaise will kill you, why crisco shortening is better for you than cow butter.  (there really are a million of them)  All those long held truths will make a person under 30 laugh like a fool.

Of course I remember my father worrying about pregnant women eating strawberries, but he understood the reasoning behind eating clay.  And my mother convinced that communism, the same communism that was tried by John Smith in Virginia (Pocahanta's John, duh) was the same as the communism of the USSR and of the Peoples Republic of China and of North Korea  and of North Vietnam and of Cuba.  And it was evil, because if everyone worked and ate, the lazy people made out like bandits and the people that didn't like that were silenced-permanently.  (apparently internal consistency was not required in childhood absolute truths)

I know from my childhood that drug fiends raped and killed people while on marijuana or heroin, but that prescriptions drugs were safe and good for you.  I knew that antibiotics were always a good idea and would stop any disease and could never hurt you.  (I hated doctors because every time I saw one I got a penicillin shot in the butt--colds, allergies, whatever, just in case.  I ran from more than a few offices in undergarments)

I knew the United State was the only country in the world that never did anything wrong.  Our soldiers were all heroes, our wars always justified and aimed at saving the world.

Yes, I was born before Vietnam and before the civil rights movement and before a lot of things.  My childhood was plain vanilla, no diversity allowed, we were all white (with a cherokee princess as a great great grandma), we were all protestant, and we were all middle class, (although most of us were exaggerating on that) and we mostly came from farm folks--that was true, true-true, but most people lived off the land at one time.

We knew who was good and who was bad, who was right and who was wrong, and we knew our future roles in the world.

My childhood memories share little with those born in the 70's, and even less with those that came of age after 2000.  But we all have absolute truths, and many times those are flavored by things and times we are so immersed in that we don't know they are skewed.  They are all wearing colored glasses or listening to birds with hard rock playing in one ear.  There is no absolute reality.  We know what we know and that impacts everything we learn.

It is a little like being brainwashed, a little like being raised on propaganda, and a lot like being a human.  We all are subject to it, just based on how our young brains work, how parents want to protect their children, and how parents were also once children just like us.

Changing away from teaching our kids and grandkids unreal truisms is like changing the educations system.  The teachers in the system were once students in the system and most of those liked it enough to want to stay in it forever and don't want it to change what they liked or loved or remember fondly.  Just letting go of chalkboards, workbooks and rows of desks with the teacher standing at the front "teaching" has been a long and slow process.  The "It worked for me so it will work for them" mentality makes people hold on: parents, grandparents, teachers despite all the research showing how few students learn that way, all the poor results, all the failures to keep up with other nations can hardly dent that absolute truth of childhood memory.  Poor students don't expect their children to like school or succeed, good students don't understand why anything changed, even though they themselves peaked out in high school or college.

But while we all know what is true in our youth, even though our truths are not identical, we can all examine those truths.  It's not as easy as it seems, it takes self-awareness and fact-checking and not just accepting that if it was good enough for me its good enough for them, if it was ok then, its ok now.  We must care enough about truth, fairness, whatever it is that makes most of us want to know--not just believe--that the world really is fair.

We can learn to laugh at the ridiculous stuff.  Learn to be less black and white.  Learn to be more tolerant of those whose truths are not like our own.  And be more patient with those that are stuck.
But only after we get that our responsibility in the whole thing is figuring out that what we have known since we were kids--what we have always heard and always known--may have nothing to do with any objective reality.

Enjoy your memories, I know mine give me great joy--laughter, happiness, bittersweetness.  But don't get stuck in the world you knew absolutely--when you were a child.

The world has always been more diverse and complicated than that.