Can taking one, small step really change your life? Proponents of kaizen think so. (And for the record, so do I.) Kaizen is a means of making great and lasting change through small, steady increments. Kaizen’s practical roots are based in the Japanese management concept for incremental (gradual, continuous) change (improvement): breaking tasks into small, manageable steps.
The need to forgive may be as strong as the need to be forgiven.
By Robert Karen, PhD
O, The Oprah Magazine | From the February 2001 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine
In one of the most famous photos to come out of the Vietnam War, a small girl is running naked down the road with an expression of unimaginable terror, her clothes burned off and her body scorched by napalm. The man who ordered the raid on this child’s village in June 1972 was 24-year-old helicopter pilot and operations officer John Plummer. The day after the raid he saw the photo in the military newspaper TheStars and Stripes and was devastated. Twenty-four years later Plummer told an Associated Press reporter, “It just knocked me to my knees. And that was when I knew I could never talk about this.” The guilt over the bombing raid had become a lonely torment.
“The real voyage of discovery consists
not in seeking new landscapes
but in having new eyes.”
I consider myself to be among the walking wounded (as I believe… we all are)… and if we as a people have never felt the infinite void caused by losing a loved one… perhaps a Sister, Brother, Mother or Father or quite possibly, your Mother and your Father within a span of six months as I recently did…or you’ve not yet felt the sting of personal failure, the humility while asking for financial assistance, or needing a handout of food and/or possibly food stamps in order to feed your belly that’s been empty with an ache which seems like an eternity… or had to ask for help feeding yourself because you’re too sick to lift the fork. We all get a turn if we’re blessed to live long enough and that’s a fact… I used these examples from which I pulled from my own personal experiences in life; which indelibly shaped and molded who I am today at this very moment. From these many experiences I’ve come to realize life isn’t always easy, in fact, there are times it felt like a cruel joke, a nightmare that I could slap myself out of… but, if we are willing and prepared to see beyond the hurt, the loss, the pain, the embarrassment, humiliation and setbacks… It is then we are able to see that each breathe is a privilege beyond compare… I for one intend on enjoying each and every beautiful reprieve life offers me, vowing to view each and every loss of a loved one with the acknowledgement of how incredibly blessed I was to have spent time with them, loved them, been loved by them, cared for them to the end… I choose to view set-backs as temporary roadblocks; as an opportunity to shine my brightest.
