Open the doors

We are a global community, and that means we have a lot to get over, before we can get down to the love stuff.

I remember when I was a child (when dinosaurs roamed the earth), we knew our neighbors, and what was going on in our little corner of the world, but we did not know anyone outside of our sphere of influence.

A friend of my parents had a HAM radio, and they could talk to people from different countries. They would sit in their “Radio Room” and talk to people around the world: I wanted to do that. I remember them saying there were certain places we could not call, they were off limits.

But we all were duped.

We only knew what was on the media: Russians were evil and they tortured cats (OK they did not say they tortured cats), they were despicable humans and they wanted to kill Americans. Mexicans and the Japanese were trying to take over our jobs. The Chinese were amassing huge numbers to invade the rest of the world, etc. There was communism and capitalism, and neither the two shall meet.

I remember when the wall came down, and the first American Photographer was allowed in the former Soviet Republic, he took pictures of people; they weren't ugly, spiteful, cat killing war mongers, they were people just like we were.

The media was wrong, movies were wrong and we had all been fed lies from the very start. It was funny to hear, but their media portrayed us similarly.

This opened our world, but where are we now?

With the Internet, our vision becoming wider – the whole world is open to us, but we have other problems we must face. I speak to some of my friends in the UK, Australia, Europe and Asia , but I don’t speak to my neighbors anymore. This global closeness has in fact created a distance between us and those in our own physical community.

I propose – we need to get that back, we need to be close with those around the world, and those next door.

But how do we do that? The people on the internet – they don’t scare me.  The people next door, they are far too real. If I don’t want to talk to someone from Portugal, than I don’t have to respond, I don’t have that freedom with my neighbor: If they come over, you can’t just turn off the computer and they go away.

That is what the problem is; we are too much in control of how we deal with each other.

This is where the rubber meets the road: we need to be open, which means we will be vulnerable – nobody likes that.  However there is strength in vulnerability.

It takes courage to be vulnerable, because when you are vulnerable you have nowhere left to hide, you have to stand out on life’s stage and face whatever is coming at you.

It is hard, we don’t want to be vulnerable, I don’t want to be vulnerable – I will be totally honest with you, but when we become vulnerable, we will let people into our lives. Yes, they might cause pain, they might cause heart break, but it also will create love, and we need more love in this world