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Dalton
Roberts |
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Recently someone described one of her favorite friends as “a person who helps me to see my own sparkles.” That is one of the most valuable things we can do for people around us. It is also important that we do it for our own self. It is hard to believe but some people don’t even know they have sparkles. There’s a control kink in people that causes them to keep piling stuff on sparkles, burying them under all kinds of abuse. Physical or sexual abuse can make you so obsessed with fear that no thought other than survival can penetrate your mind. Sometimes the abuse takes the form of layering us with expectations until we cannot see our special sparkles. To borrow a colorful biblical expression, we see our selves through a glass darkly. I once knew a boy who was brilliant but his mother kept telling him, “You’ll end up laying around down on the river running trotlines all your life just like my sorry brother.” A recruiting officer told me he made an incredible score on the Army entrance test. He ended up spending his life on the river fishing. He let his mother smother his real sparkles and deprive him of living out his magnificent possibilities. Someone has said, “There are two kinds of people in this world: those who separate people into two kinds and those who don’t.” Now that’s cute but when it comes to sparkles, there really are two kinds of people in this world: those who see your sparkle and fan it and those who don’t. Sparkle definition is important. In Sparkle 101 you will discover that you have one basic inner sparkle, your inner being, and it manifests in several sparkles unique to you. You have the sparkles of your personality and the sparkles of your talents. Each separate sparkle is your very own. No one else in the universe has any sparkle like yours. The old saying, “There are no two snowflakes alike” is true but more importantly there are no two personality or talent sparkles alike. You are one-of-a-kind! If you are frustrated that you seem to have no flashy save-the-world mission in this life, perk up. There is nothing anyone can do that is more important than helping people find their inner sparkle and its distinctive expressions in their personalities and talents. That may sound overly dramatic but it is fundamentally true. In the Bible verse, “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul,” Aramaic language expert Rocco Errico says the word “soul” means “true self.” Your true self is that basic inner sparkle that makes you unique among all earthly beings. Once when I spoke on a topic similar to this a woman said, “Children are little savages when they are born and the main thing parents need to do is to civilize them so society can tolerate them.” While I do not deny there is a need for establishing limits for children and educating them about the requirements of living in a structured society, I say the higher goal is to awaken the child to its own unique talents and gifts. If they make any real contributions to society, it will be through unfurling their own inner being or, as Tennyson said, releasing their own inner splendor. It is not the teacher who crams the most information in heads who creates happy and productive children but the teacher who helps them find their own greatest talents. In one case you are building robots and in the other you are creating self-directed managers of creative change. The perfect illustration is Helen Keller. She was born blind and deaf. Living in this dark, soundless world, a teacher reached her and opened her inner vision to all her sparkles. No one has ever started with so little and lit up the world so magnificently.
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