Category: Words To Live By

I have a few pet peeves in my life when it comes to things I see occurring in everyday life when I’m out and about. One of them deals specifically with something I’ve observed happening quite a bit lately. It’s when people don’t throw away their trash and expect someone else to do it.

It baffles me on why it’s so difficult for any individual to not discard their trash in a receptacle after they’re done with it. The most notorious place I see this happening is actually at the movie theater. When the lights come on at the end of a movie and people are scurrying out of their seats to leave the theater, I always see the many empty bags of popcorn, soda cups, and cardboard trays strewn across the seats everywhere. This constantly has made me wonder what people are really thinking when they leave their waste behind. My guess has always been that they’ve felt entitled to doing it. I have further fathomed that most probably make the assumption that they are paying for some staff person to clean up their mess because of their movie ticket purchase. While on some sense the money from a movie ticket might actually be paying for the employees of a theater to do their work, isn’t it really just a common courtesy to take our trash to the nearest garbage bin?

I’m not sure if it’s the lack of common courtesy or just plain ignorance that causes people to leave their trash behind, but I sure am grateful that I’m one of those who doesn’t practice this behavior. I have to thank my family for teaching me good values such as this one. They always taught me to put myself in the shoes of those people who end up having to clean up the trash left behind in those public places like a movie theater. That led me to thinking about how frustrated I would be if I was having to do that job and it’s become a great motivating force for me to consistently pick up my own trash no matter where I am now.

Sadly, it’s not just at the movie theaters I see this behavior happening either. It’s in the parking lots outside convenience stores where people are leaving their empty bottles, cigarette packs, and old scratch tickets on the ground. It’s in the fast food establishments where people are leaving their trays, dirty napkins, and wrappers behind on the tables. It’s in the public washrooms where people are leaving their used paper hand towels on the bathroom floors. And it’s even in the recovery meetings I attend where I see people leaving behind their empty drink bottles and coffee cups on the floors below their seats.

Why do so many people do this? I truly wish I had the answer. The only thing I know I can keep doing to deal with this problem is to continue taking the action to clean up after myself. So no matter where I am, I always make sure to take my trash to the nearest receptacle. Often, I even pick up other’s people trash left behind and discard it as well. It really isn’t that hard to take an extra second or two to discard our trash, and someone else’s for that matter, in a nearby bin. Thinking someone else is being paid to do that job is definitely lacking in common courtesy and isn’t it really just being plain ignorant in doing so?

The next time you find yourself about to leave your trash behind in any public place, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and try to picture yourself having to clean up your mess and everyone else’s too. Hopefully now you might reconsider doing this action ever again and instead start having the common courtesy to throw away your waste like those of us who do…

Peace, Love, Light, and Joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Do you ever relive any of your good childhood memories?

I do and I’ve found it to be very therapeutic, especially given that I had such a dysfunctional family growing up. Coming from a dysfunctional family always made it very easy to talk negatively about the experiences I had growing up. And for awhile that’s all I did. But I found that was holding me back from healing and growing spiritually. When I started realizing that, I began doing work to reshape my thoughts of my childhood to a more positive level. It wasn’t an easy process given the fact that I had so much suppressed anger inside about what I went through back then. But the more I worked through and released those things, the more I began to remember moments from my childhood that I truly cherished. I wrote specifically about one of those yesterday when I spoke about my family’s annual day trip to New York City during the Christmas holiday season. Remembering good memories like this was only part of the healing process I went through to reshape the thoughts of my childhood. The other part was in taking an action to relive them in the present. And since 2007, I’ve been doing just that by going to New York City during the Christmas holiday season on or around the second Saturday of each December.

I’m quite sure I wasn’t fully conscious of the healing that was taking place inside of me that first year I went back down to New York City in December. But I was definitely conscious of a constant urging coming from somewhere within me to get me to actually do it again. It started with me asking my closest friend if he was interested in going and it turned into us asking a few other friends to join us as well. When the second Saturday arrived in December of 2007, I had a car full of people heading with me to the train station in New Haven, CT at five in the morning. Over the next 14 hours or so, my friends allowed me to guide them along the same exact path I had taken with my family almost twenty years earlier. By the time we were back in my car heading home late in the evening, all of our faces hurt from laughing so hard because of the amazing experience we had with each other. But what I felt inside was even more special than that and it was the same sense of joy I had in reliving a happy childhood memory.

For seven years now, I have visited New York City around the second Saturday of each December solely to relive one of the fondest memories I have from my childhood. While some of those outings have been more fun than others, I have always been able to remember my family with positive thoughts during each. Things have changed over the years in each of those outings including the people who went with me, the activities we did there, and the destinations we had during the day. But one thing has never changed with these trips and that’s the fact that I’m still doing them, like I did last Friday.

My honest truth is that I don’t feel anger anymore about my family and I know reliving my happy childhood memories, like our Christmas trip to New York City, is a big reason for that. It’s helped me to shift my focus completely away from the negative thoughts and experiences I had back then. Now, I’m able to reflect so much easier on the good things that actually did happen with us during my childhood, as there were actually many of them.

I know how difficult this task may seem if I was to ask you to recollect your happy memories from childhood, especially if you grew up in a dysfunctional family like I did. But I want you to know that it’s not only possible to recollect them, it’s also possible to completely heal from all the bad ones too.

My healing began with God guiding me to forgive my family and let go of all that anger. And the more that I forgave my family and let go of all that anger, the more those happy memories of them started trickling in. And the more those happy memories of them starting trickling in, the more I had urgings to relive those memories in the present. And the more that I have relived those memories in the present, like my annual outing to New York City during the holiday season, the more I’ve realized how God has guided me to reshape my thoughts of my family to that of the positive.

So please know if you are finding it difficult to recollect any happy memories from your own childhood, all it may take for them to surface is a little bit of forgiveness and the letting go of some anger. In doing so, I’m sure that some of them will begin trickling in and when they do, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and start reliving them as best as you can in the present. As the more you do just that, the more I’m sure you’ll find your own thoughts being reshaped of your family to that of the positive too.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

New York City is quite magical during the Christmas holidays. While many movies do their best to portray this, my family liked seeing this first hand when I was a kid. That would happen early on a Saturday morning in the first or second week of December and it was then my family would board a Metro North train in Poughkeepsie to head to New York City for the day. I don’t remember how many times we did this outing, but what I do remember is how special each of them were to me.

They always began in Grand Central Station a few hours later where we would begin our day by heading into one of the several bakeries there. Chocolate croissants, buttered hard rolls, hot chocolates, and warm coffees in hands, we would all then venture out of the train station onto the busy streets of New York City. There was a particular smell that I grew quite fond over the years that hit me once I began walking with my family towards Macy’s, which was always our first stop. That smell was a combination of the roasting chestnuts, hot pretzels, and sizzling hot dogs on the grills from the many food stands we’d pass by along the way. My father made it a ritual to consume each of them during the course of the day and I specifically liked the slathering of a lot of mustard on a salty pretzel the most.

By the time we arrived at Macy’s on 34th Street and Herald Square, we consistently were freezing cold. I really can’t ever remember a warm Christmas outing in the city back then, but I was always quick to forget about the cold once I saw this store’s unique window displays looming in front of me. I never knew who was responsible for decorating them, but they definitely wowed me every single time I saw them. So as my family sifted through the line with the many others to see them, I was mesmerized by their moving parts going in various directions. At the end of this window show, my family would next walk into the main entrance of Macy’s with a smile. That’s also partially because we liked seeing the two Salvation Army people stationed at that door ringing their bells, dancing to Christmas music, and thanking people for donations in their red kettle.

Walking into Macy’s was always an absolutely breathtaking experience for me during the Christmas Holiday season. The store was filled everywhere with holiday tress, lights, and decorations. Even many of the store’s employees wore festive outfits while they worked. The pinnacle of my visit to Macy’s back then though was the ascent upwards through smaller and smaller fitting escalators that went from modernized to old wooden ones. At the top of that ascent was Santa’s Village where my family waited patiently in a long line for what generally seemed like hours just so my sister and I could walk through the village and sit on Santa’s lap. The wait was always worth it though.

When we left Macy’s, it was on to Times Square, which in my opinion, always looked like Christmas year round with all its brightly lit signs that existed high up on buildings there. There we would get lunch somewhere in that vicinity where my father always found some unique eatery for us to dine at. I specifically remember enjoying those oozing slices of oily New York Pizza and mile high sub sandwiches I’d get year after year.

After our bellies were full, it was onto Central Park to see the horse drawn carriages with their Christmas lights on their carts and the skaters that skid across the ice on the rink in the front of it. A hop, skip, and jump away from there was our next destination, which was FAO Schwartz. This toy store was once considered the largest in the country and it invariably held the most distinct toys and things such as huge stuffed animals, a tall moving tower with a smiling clock, a large piano you could walk across that was made famous in the movie Big, huge lego monstrosities, and so much more. To get into this store and see all these things though, we had to wait in another long line that wrapped around a building in the blustery cold. It too always ended up being worth the wait for me.

Upon leaving FAO Schwartz, my family would head down 5th Avenue stopping in many of the brightly lit retail stores. My favorite was the Warner Brothers store which sadly, no longer exists there. My parents were preferential to Trump Towers because of its gold colored glamor and glitz that existed within it’s walls. Next was our quiet walk into St. Patricks Cathedral and a silent rest in the pews while we regained our stamina.

By the time we emerged from there, it usually was dark so we headed over to Rockefeller Center to see the mammoth Christmas tree lit up and the skaters on the rink swishing around on the ice below it. If I was to place one moment to be the most magical filled on our annual Christmas outing, it would have been that one, maybe because it’s how that trip always ended for us each year.

Well actually, the real end to this trip was our rush from Rockefeller Center to the train station to catch the next one going to Poughkeepsie. On our way there was usually a grab and go of something to eat. But once those doors were safely closed on the train and us all in our seats, my eyes would get heavy and close with my final thoughts for the day always being the same. That I was able to truly enjoy my own very special New York Christmas Story.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson