The Ordinary Impact

From a young age, love just seemed like a natural feeling. I felt love for people until, whether implicitly or explicitly, people let me know that love might not need to be as open as I naturally believed it to be.Children love naturally. In fact, they love and trust so naturally that they need to be taught to be cautious about a stranger trying to give them free candy. We don’t teach people how to love because love comes naturally. However, we demonstrate how to love deeply, and we most certainly exemplify how to withhold love. And learning to withhold love is dangerous.  I’ve heard people use hateful words, (racially insensitive words, words that objectify women) and excuse them away because “they were raised in a different time.” Our hearts get trained to hate and to exclude and to accept injustice. On October 1, 1995, Nelson Mandela referenced this idea in a speech on the nature of love and hate: “ No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, ...

The idea of community intrigues me. We long to be individuals who are unique and independent, but in the long-term all of that feels empty. We all are drawn back to a community of people with whom we desire to share our stories. It's as if our memories didn't happen unless we share them. Social media has become irreplaceable and addictive today because it meets a need in all of us for community. I hear the naysayers (like myself) already: "Social media is not really community. Community is face-to-face connection, which what a generation of young people are missing." However, at it's very best, we use to to connect and stay in contact with a community of people. Essentially, we are able to shrink the world and use social media to be more inclusive and embracing of a community of people that we cannot regularly connect with face-to-face. We need community. We are drawn to it because we are wired for it. Family. Friends. Connection. Communication. Community. ...

From 1994-1998,  Sprite  sales skyrocketed. This increase in sales coincided with a two-pronged decision in their marketing campaign. In 1994, Sprite ended their upbeat ad campaign “ I Like the Sprite in You ,” and they began their new ad campaign with the slogan “ Image is Nothing. Thirst is Everything.  Obey Your Thirst .” Recently Sprite has focused specifically on the “Obey Your Thirst” part of the slogan, in my opinion, because our culture is driven by image. In general, we are suffering through plague of unhappiness. We long to be happy. We play hide-and-seek with it, but it seems elusive to us. It seems deeply hidden and, at times, unattainable.  Shawn Achor  emphasizes in his books that happiness is a choice. We can choose it, yet all too often we grasp at it and come up empty. I think it stems from the fact that each of us - at our very core - need to be known and loved; however, in our image-driven, social media-focused culture we settle for bei...