What is needed?

There is personal growth in quietly providing what is needed. The world is made better by those who notice and attend to needs.

SandraDodd.com/service
photo by Gail Higgins

The more the easier

SandraDodd:

My "make the better choice" tool has helped me move from "acceptable" to "better" and then MORE better.  🙂

JennyC:

It's nice to catch yourself in the moment and do better. The more you do it, the easier it is to do it.

SandraDodd.com/service
photo by Sandra Dodd

Positive, inspired, happy

Ripandeep Saran wrote:

When I was 14 years old, I asked the leader of the Sikh ashram I was visiting what to do when I am feeling blue and he told me the scriptures advise meditation, service and giving gratitude. He told me that it is also the same advice for when you are happy.

This all helps me keep my cup full. That is what works best for me - keeping my cup full of positive, inspired, happy energy as much as possible. Life has its ups and downs, but I like to focus more on the ups and put myself in the best possible position to help myself out when I am down. I am more sensitive than most people, and I feel very deeply. If I had not learned early in life how to deal with my lows, life might not have been as wonderful as it has been.

—Ripandeep Saran
(a.k.a. Rippy Dusseldorp)

The quote is from SandraDodd.com/mentalhealth2

but I also saved it at SandraDodd.com/cup
photo by Marta Venturini

Big things happen

Something BIG happens when a person turns away from selfishness to service.

Something HUGE happens when a person can care about another person more than about himself.

SandraDodd.com/divorce
photo by Nicole Kenyon

Giving and connecting

[The word "Service"] stirred negative feelings for many years, until I had my first child.

Being with my children, giving them in each moment all I can, learning and growing with them, changed my understanding of "service."

I have chosen to give, help and serve my children. I feel being with them has contributed towards a new understanding of the word as well as a way of building a connection with them. I can also see how it can be extended to others.

I realize how much weight a word can carry, how changes in my own feelings have lightened that weight and thrown a new light on the word itself. Service now stirs up and brings great feelings of joy.

— Parvine Shahid
March 2015

SandraDodd.com/serviceResponse
photo by Cátia Maciel

Service and abundance

Service is an expression of love for me. It really depends on the attitude, doesn't it? Like the half full or half empty cup....although for me it is neither but plenty in it to go around.

— Nicole Kenyon

Responses to the Question about Service
photo by Cathy Koetsier

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Yesterday's link to SandraDodd.com/abundance didn't work, but it's fixed now, and is related to today's quote, too.

Five solid tools

Alex Arnott wrote:

Principles of unschooling that have helped me relate differently with my own highly active nervous system:

1. expanding awareness to include all the joy life offers rather than zooming in on the negative;
2. developing a habit of questioning the assumptions my mind make about potential dangers...learning not to take all my thoughts so seriously all the time;
3. developing mindfulness to slow down when my mind feels chaotic so I can reconnect with my values which in turn helps create the condition to make better choices;
4. learning the joy and privilege of being of service to others...I cannot overstate how vital this has been for my mental health. It’s helped me reconnect to others in meaningful ways;
5. deliberately choosing love, which is a wonderful antidote to fear/anger.

These are just a few examples of what’s helped me learn how to be solid in the face of anxious personality traits.

—Alex Arnott

Parenting Peacefully
photo by Karen James

Simple and profound

Taking food to someone who is reading or playing a game or watching a movie and just putting it where he or she can reach it without any instructions, warnings or reminders is a great gift. It is a simple gesture, and a profound service.


Monkey Platters
photo by Sandra Dodd

Honest and true

If you offer service with the hope of reward or praise or indebtedness, it will create resentment in you and in those who received the service. If you offer service without sending the bill, anything others say or do will be an honest expression of gratitude, not the last-minute submission of the bare minimum payment for services rendered.

A "thank you" that's scripted is just noise. A "thank you" you didn't expect is true communication.

Serving Others as a Gift
photo by Rippy Dusseldorp (or someone with her camera)

Impermanence AGAIN!?

It's true; the subscription provider has changed. Feedburner is closing at the end of June, and another company offered to import five blogs for me, so if you want to add any of the others to your feed, they are Unschooling Site News, SandraDodd.com Sandra Dodd (personal blog) Homeschool News and Muse mainstream articles, but I might start using that for other things Wheelbarrows (Wheelbarrows interest me, and they are also a portal into people's history, lives, and gardens.) If you clicked through to the subscription service and saw "Publisher: aelflaed" that's me. When google mail came along, someone snagged my name (probably because it was her name), so I used my SCA/medieval-studies name. "Ælflæd" was like lots of names 1000 years ago, but now it's like Alfred and Elsie (surviving cousins). ANYway.... that's me, on google-owned sites. There are TWO ways to get to the blog from e-mail now—clicking the post's title, or "read more" at the bottom. A new option is to get a push notification on your phone, so for those who didn't like the e-mail's appearance on a phone, I hope this is way better. Changes do not thrill me, and I'm getting old. But Vlad Gurdiga is still young and enthusiastic. He helped with this move as he has helped with many other things involving my collections— moving thousands of photos from photobucket (which kept on changing and losing things and charging more money) to SandraDodd.com (which he moved from yahoo to another host company). Thank you Vlad, again.

photo by Holly Dodd

Service as a gift

Schuyler Waynforth wrote:

It's amazing to see doing for others as a gift. It takes the whole angst about servitude away

There isn't any servitude in it when it's a gift.

—Schuyler Waynforth

SandraDodd.com/service
photo by Amber Ivey
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A wonderful, surprising abundance

Megan Valnes, when her daughter was younger, wrote:

Today, while making my older daughter's bed, I was reflecting on the very act itself. The girls have a bunk bed and Lila's is on the top, so I have to climb up there and she has about 20 stuffed animals--it's what I would have used to think of as a pain. Instead of feeling overworked and underpaid as I made her bed, I found myself taking extra care to make her bed very nicely because I know how good it feels to sleep in a freshly made bed. I tucked the sheets and blankets in tight and cleaned off any food crumbs. Thinking of my sweet girl, I made the bed as perfectly as I thought she would like. Her stuffed animals are placed in their special places and her bed looks very cozy and inviting. Even if she never mentions it (which I doubt she will), I feel good knowing she will appreciate the gesture.

Is this the abundance everyone talks about? This fullness of heart that I no longer think of making beds as a chore, but as an act of service and gratitude? The feeling was such a wonderful surprise!

—Megan Valnes

SandraDodd.com/service
photo by Cass Kotrba

What is needed?

There is personal growth in quietly providing what is needed. The world is made better by those who notice and attend to needs.

SandraDodd.com/service
photo by Gail Higgins

Comfort, patience

When it's easy to be calm and patient, anyone can do it. The special service to a child, and the evidence of growth in a parent, is learning to be more calm, for the child's sake. The real patience is finding a way to quiet one's hurry, to slow down to a child's pace, for a while.

SandraDodd.com/patience
photo by Elaine Santana

Sharing a moment, together

When we "give someone our time," what is it we give? Sometimes attention, or service. Maybe assistance, or advice.

Instead of thinking that I "give" my child my time, it helps to think of us sharing a moment, together.


"Being there for and with the family" seems so simple and yet many parents miss out on it without even leaving the house. Maybe it's because of English. Maybe we think we're "being there with our family" just because we can hear them in the other room. There is a special kind of "being" and a thoughtful kind of "with" that are necessary for unschooling and mindful parenting to work.

SandraDodd.com/being
photo by Lydia Koltai

Gradually easier

When it starts to become a habit for a parent to consider peace, safety, acceptance, choices, service and gratitude in everyday decision making, parenting gradually becomes easier.



SandraDodd.com/betterpartner
photo by Colleen Prieto

Ice cleans up after itself

Some of my kids' best bathtub toys have been ice. We have a copper fish mold (you know those molds for jello and aspic and pate and suchlike, all out of fashion now) and an ice-fish was fun, but ice in a bundt pan (like they do for big bowls of punch) has been a fun bathtub toy too. Some bathtub toys make a mess or get moldy or have to be stored, but voila! I mean "where'd it go!?" Ice cleans up after itself.

When we hadn't planned ahead and had ice, I would just set a big plastic bowl full of ice cubes within reach of the tub and Holly would float them, sink them, hold them while they melted it, race them around by swirling the water and I don't know what all.

SandraDodd.com/strew/tadaa.html
photo by Sandra Dodd, of ice for Devyn in 2014
P.S. Public service reminder. Ice cleans up after itself in a bathtub, in a wading pool, on the patio, but not on a nice wooden table, and not on the keyboard.

Ages and stages

Yesterday I bent over and picked an inch-tall tumbleweed sprout from a crack in a sidewalk. It was a tiny bit of community service.

The wind is blowing here, and all the big tumbleweeds will pass through chain link fences, or barbed wire, and scatter themselves into thousands of seeds. It happens every year.

A tiny baby hardly resembles adult forms, or the changes that take place in old folks. Where you are now is young compared to where you'll be later. Those changed old folks are always saying you will miss having those young children, and I found it to be true. It also irritated me for someone who was sleeping in a quiet, clean home to tell the baby-sticky, frazzled younger me that these were good days I would miss.

"Truth" is irritating, when we're sprouts, sprigs, teens, new parents, but just as the winds blow, people express the wisdom they gained as they aged and discovered that they missed having children in the house, as those other older older-folks had told them that they would.

"Results" (a half-random link)
tumbleweed photo by Holly Dodd
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Slowly amazing

Schuyler Waynforth wrote:

It is amazing that the epiphanies seem to come so frequently in this life. The other day I was baking a cake and David got back from the grocery store and had to deal with the leaking coolant on the car and needed help putting the groceries away. I was up to my elbows in batter and asked Simon and Linnaea if they could help.

They both came in and put all the groceries away and went back to what they were doing. It was so sweet, so not coercive, so not eye-rolling. Just this generous gift of service. It came with an epiphany, an underscoring of these unschooling side effects that I see and read about from other people.

As you say, the proof is in the living! The rightness, the evidence, the closeness, the joy, those are all found in this life. You can read about them, but to experience them you have to get down on your hands and knees and play and hang out and tell stories and cuddle and talk and share and be willing to listen and to apologize and to work to make it better. And if you can do that without any other intention than enjoying being with them, without any ulterior motives, it plays out in ways that nothing else that I've ever seen does.

—Schuyler Waynforth

SandraDodd.com/confidence
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Little bitty bits

The whole world is made of little bits of information. Yesterday, at my house, Holly asked who first did "Dream Lover." I was thinking someone like Dion, or Bobby Vee, and while I was thinking she said "Bobby Darin," and I said no, not first.

Spoiler: I was wrong.

She pulled the computer out of her pocket, looked the song up, and played the beginnings of a couple, on Spotify. "That one!" I said, to the one by Dion. It listed Ben E. King, among others, so we figured (falsely) that it was his first, THEN Dion, then Bobby Darin.

Does it matter? To us, it does. To music history, and royalties, it matters. As to political correctness and the basis of assumptions, it ties in to all sorts of socio-political, economic, maybe geographical aspects. Trivia is what knowledge is made of. Enough little bits form a rich whole.

We could each explain why we thought what about whom, in all that. Those explanations would lead to other trivia, stories of other songs, writers, and musicians.

Any interest can lead to all interests. Let curiosity flow.

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These will (while they're there) link to recordings at YouTube, but if you have Spotify or another music service, you can find recordings by these and many other people. There are other songs with similar names, too. I will embed Bobby Darin's version, because he wrote it, but it's not the one I knew as a kid.



"Dream Lover," Bobby Darin (composer), April 1959
"Dream Lover," Dion, November 1961
"Dream Lover," Ben E. King, February, 1962

Notes on Wikipedia and SongFacts:
"Dream Lover" is a song written by Bobby Darin and recorded by him on April 6, 1959.
Dream Lover by Bobby Darin

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Trivial posts about trivia
(or profound reflections on very real learning)