Curiosity & Compassion - a priceless pair

In addition to gaining their insights & gleaning their inspiration, I get a special something from the life expansionist authors I love & to whom I am forever grateful ~ ~ I get language to hang around the concepts I've harbored yet never had the words to express.

Today, I had the happy coming together of uplifting authors and richly wise material.  Early in the day, I wrote a post that I thought had been inspired by Mark Wolynn's eye opening It Didn't Start With You, a book that thoroughly shook my magnolias on my first reading in 2016, soon after it came out.  

But wait!  Writing a totally different post, on another blog, realized that it had been reading reading Rabbi Dayle Friedman's wondrous Jewish Wisdom for Growing Older, which came out the year earlier, that had opened me up in the first place, pierced me through & through with fresh perspective & unexpected ahas, ready to be thoroughly marinated in Mark Wolynn's w-i-d-e reaching, many generation points of view & impact.

Between the two, an unexpected & - for me - ideal pairing, placed in my hands the two words I've struggled to come up with for lo these many years:  the natural qualities that kept my feet on the ground (even when I felt thorough messed up, insecure & screaming with confusion) were CURIOSITY & COMPASSION.  And I can't think of two qualities that would have driven my sister & older brother more around the bend.  But they worked for me!  Still do.  

Both Mark & Dayle urge people to approach life with curiosity & compassion.  Although I didn't have the language until now to dress those concepts in, they were both very real to me. 

I've always been curious about what made my funk-a-licious family tick - infinitely aggravating to people like Peter, who is the non-questioning sort;  years & years ago, when Mom asked him why he & the others were so unhappy with the person she'd evolved into, it was reported he drew himself up, looked her straight in the eye & declared, "You - ask - questions!", something she honestly never did until her final years.  Up to then, Mom was defensively incurious about her children - she'd found it to be a good protection.  But she discovered that being openly curious was a lot more fun!

What a gracious quality curiosity has, when paired with compassion.  How liberating I have found that duo to be.  To be curious without judgement, to lead from compassion - spirit releasing.  Is curiosity tempered by compassion -or- is compassion deepened through curiosity? Matters not - pair them together & they become the core ingredients of my happy life.