Scenes From The Mall

I went clothes shopping with my 10 year old daughter yesterday. She received a nice gift of cash from her grandmother and she campaigned hard to buy some of her own school clothes without my "input". We negotiated a bit. If she paid I agreed to only veto when an article of clothing fell into the "inappropriate" category. And any of my rulings of "inappropriate" would go unchallenged.

So off we went. Frankly, as she's moving from "children's" sizes to "juniors" sizes I was anticipating encountering too tight, too short, too high, too low ... but what we encountered was much more disheartening.

Her very first selections were from a niftily-displayed shelf of t-shirts with pictures of bunnies and unicorns and rainbows displaying verbiage such as:

"I did it but I'm blaming you"

"It's all about me"

"If you buy me stuff I'll be nicer"

"Cute but Mean"

Veto.

Veto.

Veto.

Veto.

Yuck. You see, our culture is not organized to support the extraordinary. Ordinary is easy. It's comfortable. It sells t-shirts. This is what I saw. Victim. Victim. Victim. Victim. And being a victim, which is apparently not only accepted but celebrated on t-shirts marketed and sold to our pre-teens, must be one of the lowest forms of living. It requires to thought. No intent. All it requires is breathing, sitting back, letting life happen, and complaining about it.

And I'm not going to stand for it. Not in my world. My stand for my children, my community, my business, my world, is that extraordinary is possible. And I believe one of the keys to living an extraordinary life rests in the quality of our conversations. Our language.

Cute bunny t-shirt. Terrible language.

Not happening in my house.

But that stack of t-shirts created a fantastic opening for my daughter and I to have a conversation about the power of our language.

Helen Keller said in her autobiography (paraphrased) that before she learned language at the age of 10 her experience of life was that of an "unconcious clod of earth". Every memory was tactile as she had no language in which to process her experience. Without language she could not even grasp the concepts of love and friendship, laughter or happiness.

But look what she accomplished after the age of 10.

There's power in your words. Use it wisely.

"I am a possibility"

"I am extraordinary"

"Living with intent"

"How can I serve you?"