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  • Memories of Grieving

    Memories of Grieving

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    Looking back on my 66 years on the planet and being involved with the work that we do, has given me time to reflect on the memories of the grief that I have experienced. I often use the example of my little league story. As a youngster, I finally got a base hit only to be left stranded on base after a third out. It dashed the hopes I had of a winning season.

    I had forgotten this small example of grief. After years of stuffing my emotions and trying to be strong in the face of adversity, it took a willingness to open the door to this memory. Now, I can remember clearly the feeling that I had been let down and that life wasn’t fair.

    At the time, I was probably told to forget about it. After all it was only a game yet, I realized that I had not forgotten this loss. I had carried it with me until I began doing my emotional work caused by the death of our daughter.

    What was it that made me hold on to this pain?

    So often, kids feelings are discounted. We attempt to distract them from their present moment of suffering the pain of a loss. We are inconvenienced and made uncomfortable by their mood and behavior. We look for ways to distract and deflect their pain.

    I can remember being asked, “How was your day at school?”

    My reply was, “Terrible.”

    In response, “Oh, thats too bad, here have a cookie.”

    My feelings were discounted and deflected in one quick statement. If this is what they have been raised with then its no wonder kids give us single word responses, grunt or totally ignore us. There is a “better” list of “50 questions to ask your kid after school” floating around FaceBook these days. Kids look for engagement. Showing interest in what they have to say is a great way of getting that engagement.

    As a child, I learned from my parents example of dealing with the loss. As their parents and siblings died, I observed the ways that I would later handle death and process my loss. Watching how a parent mourns is the primary way that we find out about this concept of death. We have seen many examples of what not to do in this situation. We have also heard many things said that can’t be unsaid. How can being told that grandpa is sleeping in heaven help a child understand that grandpa isn’t going to wake up to play with them again? Being afraid of falling asleep has been attributed to this example. We don’t do a good job of explaining death to children.

    The Grief Recovery Method has a program that is specific to kid’s grief and the premise is that children need help to process their response to loss with the help of an interested and caring adult. An adult as a co-participant in the grief recovery process, provides the support and explanation of many of the questions that a child might have of death, loss or grief. As a Grief Recovery Advanced Specialist, this program and all the Grief Recovery Institutes offerings seek  to engage and explain how our uncommunicated feelings prevents us from healing from loss.

    Having resources in troubling situations is important for anyone dealing with the pain of loss. Our advice is to find the resource that works for you and to ask when you need help. 

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  • Another Side of Grief

    Another Side of Grief

    It’s been 8 months since we’ve moved to St. Paul from Raleigh, NC.

    We moved here to be closer to my son and his family. Our granddaughter Ayra was born in July of 2020, and after we met her, we knew that we wanted to be a part of her everyday life.

    One of the things that I’ve been aware of since we’ve moved here is the grief of all of the time lost when we lived apart.

    I was surprised to come upon this as grief.

    The fact that I can still be surprised by grief tells me how complicated grief can be. Even though I am aware of grief in my life, I can still be taken aback by the more subtle nuances of grief.

    My son had lived an airplane ride away form us for over 13 years.  We saw each other 2-3 times a year during that time, and we all longed for more time together.

    There was a time when I didn’t see a solution to wanting to be more of a part of my son’s life.

    Because I didn’t see a solution, I also didn’t see the possibilities.

    Because I didn’t see the possibilities, I was not open to any of the ways we could be a part of each other’s lives on a more regular basis.

    Once I began to get curious about how we could spend more time together, possibilities began presenting themselves. One of the first was to build a tiny home in his back yard, and spend summers in Minneapolis, and winters in Raleigh. Our plans to do just that were well underway when we learned of our granddaughter’s impending arrival.

    Because I had already opened the door of possibilities, when we were called very strongly to move here permanently, we walked through that door with ease.

    My grief came from not engaging the field of possibilities sooner.

    Thinking that I have wasted time that could have been better spent. I’ve found that is a common theme when we are looking at life decisions from the lens of grief, or disappointment.

    What I’ve learned through my own journey is that we are not ready until we are ready. When we are ready, we find what we are ready for, our teacher appears. Lamenting what we haven’t done, what we didn’t say yes to earlier can keep us stuck.

    Learning how to live with presences helps us to embrace what is here now, where life is calling us in each moment. It doesn’t mean that we will never feel difficult feelings again, or that grief stays up on that shelf where we put it, hoping it will stay our of site.

    Rather it means that we have the resources to meet our feelings, all of them, when they show up.

    As I met these most recent feelings of grief, I realized that up until now, I was not ready to make the move that I made. I am aware of all the reasons that this is true. I became aware of them in a moment of knowing as I sat in my daily Samyama practice. I was able to hold those feelings of grief in my heart, and allow my heart to transmute them. I also know that I don’t know ALL of the details of this move, and that is ok. I trust that as I continue to be devoted to the present moment, I will know what I need to know at exactly the right time.

    When you are ready to get curious about your own grief journey, I am here.

     

  • Children’s Grief

    Children’s Grief

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    Over the past twenty years that have elapsed since our daughter, Leah died, I have had the privilege to work with children who have experienced loss. Children’s grief can be simple or complicated like much of the grief that adults feel. Children have not accumulated the experience that adults have. Therefore, it can be overwhelmingly difficult for them to understand loss and come to terms with grief.

    Soon after Leah died, I volunteered in a program that was sponsored by the Frederick County Hospice in Maryland. The program was called Camp Jamie and it drew children from the county who had experienced the death of a parent, grandparent of sibling. At the time, I didn’t have any experience working in this kind of program but the idea appealed to me as a way of giving back and helping someone else in their suffering.

    The program paired adult volunteers with children who were then grouped according to age. The camp was held at a local youth summer camp and the facilities were ideal since it had the ballfields, games and activities that allowed the kids to burn off their excess energy after the group had a chance to do some process work.

    Each night registered counselors reviewed the days activities.  The adult debrief provided the adult volunteers with suggestions on ways to allow the child to open up about what they were feeling and discussed methods for engaging the kids There was craft projects and plenty of time to do group activities focused around the kids.

    The adults modeled talking about the losses that they  had experienced to encourage the kids to tell their story.

    Another program was Comfort Zone Camp held in North Carolina at a YMCA summer camp. Comfort Zone Camp provided pre-screening and adult training of what to expect during the camp weekend. Again, the volunteers were matched to an age related group of kids. These kids had also had lost parents, siblings and grandparents. Adult volunteers or Big Buddies worked in various group process sessions with Little Buddies. The program ran from about age 4-5 up to late teens. weekend had a full itinerary that included a variety of sports, fun group activities and being outdoors.

    What distinguished these programs were the individual camp atmosphere and the process work that each group was provided.  In both programs, as the children were dropped off by their parents or guardians; you could visibly see that they carried the heavy weight of their loss. Seeing other kids who had experienced loss helped each child understand that they were not alone. Group team building, process work in small groups and personal storytelling by the volunteers helped break the ice and make the kids feel comfortable talking about their loved ones.

    Of course there were meals together, camp songs and in the case of Comfort Zone Camp, a very formal night vigil with lighted luminaire that the kids had decorated in memory of their family member. Each activity contributed to making the weekend memorable. Each night the adults reviewed the days progress.

    Each program had a very positive impact on the attendees and the heavy weight they carried on Friday was all but removed by Sunday afternoon. To see the difference that this time away provided was to see the burden lifted, allowing the kids to be kids again. It was very rewarding. A program like this is always looking for volunteers and age is not a barrier to providing a helping hand to a kid who needs a compassionate ear. I’ll talk more about kids grief and the Grief Recovery Method in another post.

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  • Emerging From Covid

    Emerging From Covid

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    I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately about how we are feeling as we emerge from the absurdity of the last year. The way we showed up in the world changed in an instant. The way we did business shifted, maybe forever. The way we socialized was distanced. From the first time I heard the term social distancing, I thought, no, that’s not what we need. We need physical distancing with social connections.

    As I think back to the early days of last year, when we first knew that our lives would be changing, yet we didn’t know how they would be changing, I was reminded of my early days of grief. And I realized that we were going to experience grief in ways we never had before.

    In my conversations about this past year, (and beyond) I’m hearing about so much grief.

    Grief about what we lost.

    Grief about the changes we experienced.

    Grief about the unknown.

    Our losses are so much more than the obvious.

    Some of us lost loved ones,

    And our losses extend into many layers of our lives.

    The way we work, the way we connect with friends and family, the way our children attend school, and so much more.

    Maybe some of the things we lost are better off gone from our lives, maybe they made space for more important endeavors.

    I think it’s important to consider what we have gained. So many questions arise as I consider these for myself.

    How have your relationships with your immediate family changed? What is different from the way it was before? What opportunities for creating a life you want to live presented themselves during this past year?

    A new understanding of what is important.

    The urgency to take a stand for those things, or make changes that align with your values.

    A greater understanding of who we are and how we want to live our lives going forward.

    We hear a lot about the “new normal”, what does that mean for you?

    Whenever you experience a major life-changing event, there is an opening to create a new life, to change the way you show up, and respond.  Where is your life calling you?

    Take some time to consider how this past year impacted you and what changes are right for you.

    And take time to grieve for your losses, honoring your feelings and making way for what is emerging.

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  • More Insights on Men’s Grief in Marriage

    More Insights on Men’s Grief in Marriage

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    I promised more on the idea of sharing grief in your marriage. How is this type of grief a different case from learning to handle loss and pain when an individual experiences a tragedy? Vulnerability plays an important role in this situation. When it is your own pain there are many ways of dealing with it. Some are good and some are not so good.

    With any type of shared emotion, women have the advantage when it comes to grief. In general women are more empathetic. Women are also more practiced in developing a network of support to help sustain them through difficult and rough times. There is generally support of one another over their shared experiences. 

    As I mentioned in a previous post, men have been conditioned by society and their father’s to follow a rather fixed set of rules. These rules held to a certain stereotype that believed that men should grieve alone and if you get hurt, you just walk it off. If you stuff your feelings long enough and often enough then you’ll never have to feel them.

    “You never saw John Wayne cry, don’t be a baby.” Sound familiar?

    Hypertension, heart issues, overeating, alcohol/drug abuse are some of the health issues that men have face from chronic stuffing of emotion. As the Grief Recovery Method states, we are not meant to be pressure cookers. Contrary to what happens in the kitchen when you pressure cook meat, It doesn’t make us tender. it doesn’t work that way with humans. Our blood pressure soars, we lash out in aggressive behavior, in short we fail ourselves and our marriages suffer.

    I did this. I thought I knew how to handle the grief that broke my heart when my daughter died. I was too quick to return to work, attempting to shoulder my burden and try to pick up the pieces of my life. I couldn’t or wouldn’t talk to anyone and my wife was grieving her daughter.

    That’s the thing, I had come to rely on my wife, Nancy to share my pain. I didn’t have anyone else. When she was deep in her own grief, it was hard for me to try to open up. I did what I knew how to do, I compartmentalized and stuffed the grief in a box to be dealt with later. Meanwhile, I tried to deflect the pain I was feeling by over drinking and zoning out on television. Attempting to “get through” each day only to pick up again and do it all over again. It worked for a while, until it didn’t. I could see the marriage getting stuck and before it broke apart I knew I had to act.

    That is where vulnerability comes in. I had to break open the stubborn lessons I was taught and share my pain with Nancy. One of the hardest things I have done was to admit that I needed help and that I couldn’t do this on my own. I had help from several sources, a therapist and the Grief Recovery Method. But it wasn’t until, I could open up to my wife tell her the brokenness that I felt that my healing truly began. More on this in future reflections.

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  • Labels Are Confining

    Labels Are Confining

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    I’m often asked if I am an intuitive or an empath when I ask a client a sacred question, one  that hits the heart of the matter, or that cuts to the core of what they have been working on. A questions that brings clarity to what they thought of as chaos.

    As a child growing up, I was often given labels.

    The shy one, the stutterer, the oldest, (which carried expectations) the quiet one.

    Because of this, labels have always made me cringe. I also cringed when I heard labels intended for others. In my heart of hearts, even when I was a child, I knew that I could not be defined by a label, that I was much more, and much less than anyone else’s perception of me.  It took me a long time to be able understand who I was, and it was through my grief journey that I was finally able to step fully and unapologetically into my Self.

    Even though I work intuitively, I don’t label myself “An Intuitive.”

    Even though I am able to feel how my client is feeling, I don’t call myself  “An Empath. “

    To me these are labels that confine me in a box in which I don’t fit.

    I’ve had business coaches tell me that I have to define myself in specific terms. And nothing ever resonated completely.  I can tell you what I do, and I won’t confine myself to a box that limits who I am.

    Sometimes I describe myself as a Grief Journey Guide.

    That feels spacious enough to allow all of me to show up as I do in each moment.  It also allows my prospective clients to get clarity on what that means. When I’m asked, “What does that mean?” or “What do you do as a Grief Journey Guide?”  Then I get to tell them what I do, and more specifically, what our work together might look like, because by that time I’ve spent enough time with them to feel into where they are being called.

    My work with each client looks a little different.

    Since I don’t limit myself in to a specific way to work with everyone, we are free to explore where my client is being called at the specific time we begin working together, and the course our work takes is created from there.  It all starts with presence.  I teach a present moment awareness practice called Samyama, and then we see what arises.  The present moment always holds the question that will allow my client to feel deeper into the answer.

    My work can’t be described in a 30 second commercial.  I don’t resonate with traditional marketing strategies. As a matter of fact, I don’t market my business.

    I share who I am and trust that those who are drawn to my work will show up, and they always do.

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  • Working with Grief

    Working with Grief

    When I am asked, Why do you do this work?” or “How can you work with people in grief?” My initial answer is that I am honoring my daughter’s memory as I go about this important work. Leah was and remains a bright light in our lives. In doing this work, I hope to bring that light to people who need to see that light in the shadow of grief that they are under.

    We wanted to give back to others, something of the lessons that we have learned along the way.

    We chose to do this work based upon our experience of working through our own despair and grief. Our company name comes from where we found ourselves at the time; “being with grief”. These 3 simple words hold so much. The act of being that describes your awareness of your present state, and “with grief” as we found ourselves steeped in the turmoil of loss and pain.  All our unmet expectations of her life that were cut short never to be realized.

    So that our grief work comes from our hearts to others with hearts broke open.

    Sometimes it seems like we are all “Beings” with grief, because we continue, throughout our lives to have grief visited upon us. Some grief, we barely recognize; the traffic jams on the way to work or the annoyance of standing in line for something we need.  Then there is the larger grief, that slam us to the ground and grinds us down. It is deciding whether to pick ourself up and carry on that can seem like an unsurmountable challenge. It it brutally illustrates the reason why this work is important.

    It isn’t easy to open up to each other and make the effort to expose the wounded individual that struggles with the pain of loss. It can be especially difficult for a man to share the pain with anyone. Men often choose isolation because we are taught that we should grieve alone. If you ever stumbled as a child and were told to walk it off, you were conditioned to accept what happened, deny the feeling and make the best of it.

    This perpetuates the myth of self-protection from our own feelings and emotions. That showing our vulnerability somehow makes us weaker. That we are somehow protected by not showing our feelings. That it is safer to stuff your feelings than to share them with your mate or a friend that can listen without making a judgement. Not being aware of our feelings numbs us to our pain but also numbs us to any other feeling. Apathy can be the result, you can quit caring and that is not a path that a marriage or a relationship can survive.

     

    I believe that allowing our vulnerability to show makes us stronger. Why are we afraid of being in a position to be judged as human? We all have our list of strengths frailties and flaws. Particularly in marriage, our flaws are on showcase for our partner who sees all of them and loves us no less. It is a lesson that I learned and that I share even when it feels like I am shouting into the wilderness. I’ll be sharing more about husbands and wives in future posts. I would like to hear your comments or contact me on our website.

  • How Did I Get Here?

    How Did I Get Here?

    It occurred to me that if you are a recent reader of my blog, you might not know how I got to a place where I’m able to be vulnerable about my grief journey.

    Let me take a few minutes to bring you up to date.

    All my life I’ve been a seeker. Even as a child, I always sensed my inner light, even though I was sure I was wrong. A lot of things in my early life led me to believe that I had no value.  Neighborhood kids bullied me, I was sexually abused starting at age 8, and I had a severe stutter, which affected most of my early life. Still, I had glimmers of what came through to me as my true essence. I always thought that was hogwash.

    I did a lot of work to move beyond the abuse of my childhood. By the time I had my own children, I was in touch with a semblance that inner light most of the time, yet I was still a work in progress.

    In November of 2000, my 17-year old daughter Leah died from injuries she sustained in a car accident on her way to school; she was a senior. She hit a tree, the only one in the middle of a cornfield, and had severe brain injuries. After 5 days in the hospital we had to make the impossible decision to remove her from life support. I thought my life was over.

    And it was, my life as I knew it would never be the same again.

    Shortly after she died, I received two messages. They were similar to the message I received as a child about my inner light.

    Losing Leah is too high a price to pay to not live the life you were meant to live.

    Everything you have done up until this point has prepared you for what is coming next.

    I had no idea how I was going to make sense of either of those messages at the time; however, I knew that in order to honor my daughter, I would have to try to excavate the life I was meant to live. I turned to a practice that was already a part of my life at the time, a direct experience practice of present moment awareness called Samyama.

    Samyama helped me to be with the pain of my daughter’s death, without all of the stories that went with it.

    I also already had a trusted Samyama practitioner. In those days I didn’t want to talk about Leah’s death to anyone who didn’t know me well. I was self-isolating, and staying in my pain.  It’s what most of us do in early grief.

    I found Samyama to be a powerful resource to unravel the stories that held me in a place of suffering after Leah died.

    I found that my heart could hold the pain, and teach me how to be with my feelings, which eventually began to shift them.

    I discovered that my heart is an alchemical vessel that can hold anything, no matter how big or painful or uncomfortable.

    I learned how to get better at feeling my feelings.

    Every time I was able to bring my feelings to my heart without the stories, I would receive blessings and grace, every single time. I was beginning to experience the alchemy of grief.

    The alchemy of my grief journey allowed me to go deeper into those old childhood wounds, and heal them more fully. My daughter’s death provided me with the initiation necessary to fully excavate that light that was only a glimmer earlier in my life.

    I found my voice through my grief journey and I learned how to take a stand for myself. I learned that when I speak from my heart I do not stutter. I learned that I can feel joy and pain at the same time; they are not mutually exclusive.  I became an author and a speaker. I uncovered that light that has always burned in my soul.

    I am living the life I was meant to live.

    Living the life I was meant to live means that I continue to be present to where life is calling me in each moment. That is the biggest lesson of my grief journey, and how I continue to honor my daughter.

     

     

  • Husband & Wife Grief

    Husband & Wife Grief

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    A topic that has become the subject of a few of our recent podcasts deals with the grief that a husband and wife go through regarding the loss of a child. If you checked out our web page (www.beingwithgrief.com) then you are familiar with the story of our daughter and our loss. Nothing can prepare you for the loss of a child or the grief that follows an event like this.

    It is a particularly wrenching moment for a marriage.

    In addition to the overwhelming sadness that you feel; you are also shown all the chinks and flaws in your marriage at a time when you are weak, confused and grieving. Simply put, men and women grieve differently. This can contribute to the divide that can grow out of a horrible loss and destroy a marriage or relationship. My experience in dealing with the aftermath of loss taught me a few things about the differences that I would like to share.

    No surprise that women are nurturers.

    Regardless of the role you might play in society, women carry the nurturing aspect of human behavior far better than men. It is not only the physiology but the conditioning of society and family expectations that contribute to what separates male from female. In our case, my wife and daughter had a relationship that many moms and daughters have experienced. From the struggle with selecting what to wear, the many shopping excursions and the struggles over boyfriends, habits, and chores, the mom-daughter relationship goes on a series of wave crests and troughs. It contributes to general stress and the experience of watching the up-down struggle that each test takes, can make your day or break your heart. Yet, through all the teenage angst, the mom-daughter relationship somehow remains strong regardless of the teenage willfulness or a mother’s concern.

    I think that this is because women, and especially moms and daughters connect with each other face to face. They enter intentionally into their mash-up of ideas, desires, goals with the idea that eventually it will all resolve itself. They will pick up the pieces, mend and clean-up whatever mess was made and carry on, together.

    It has been said, that men connect shoulder to shoulder.

    Fathers and sons approach a task whether it is doing chores, teaching/learning a new skill (like woodworking) or playing a video game side by side and shoulder to shoulder. Facing the issue from the side can give the impression that they are a team. This may lead to a false sense of unity and create expectations that are not followed through on.

    The resolution of the lesson or chore may not result in the same type of personal connection and creates a different type of bond. Think of a football match, when all your team is aligned against another opposing force. Your team may have the same goal but the intent is the man or team that faces you is the opponent and it is a win-lose situation.

    The moral is that, once the lesson is taught and skill is learned, you are expected to execute the task on your own. Go, cut the grass, wash the car, kill the deer, win the game or paint the house. In other words, “Perform and produce while I attend to other things.” Isolated from others with an expectations that hangs over you contributing to whether you, “Play nice or rebel.”

    When it comes to grief, men have an inherent idea that “you are on your own.” How you respond depends on how you were taught and what you observed. As a society we do not teach grief in theory or in practice. We are left “to our own devices” which in many cases means we, as men, stumble, trip and fall. I’ll be looking into this more closely in another post later this month. 

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  • Do You Have a Daily Practice?

    Do You Have a Daily Practice?

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    Throughout my life I’ve always been fascinated when someone talked about a daily practice.

    I imagined that their practice allowed them to be exactly the person they wanted to be, 100% of the time, especially when the person talking about to me was someone I looked up to, someone who seemed to have it all together.

    I tried many times to cultivate a morning practice of my own.

    Do you have a morning practice?

    Maybe a better question is do you have a practice that is sustainable?

    What makes a morning practice sustainable?

    I’ve strived to find a morning practice, or any practice for that matter, that I will do consistently. I was reminded recently that a daily practice is like making an investment in your self.

    • If you put $5 a week in your bank account after a time, your money will not only accumulate, it will grow.
    • If you watch a rain barrel fill with raindrops, it may seem empty for a long time, and then it’s overflowing and able to water your plants.

    In my own quest to find a sustainable daily practice, I’ve tried many things, and many times of the day.  Things like Samyama, or prayer, or writing to name a few.  Consistency has always been elusive for me, in many areas of my life. Every time I strayed from my practice  even for one day, I considered myself a failure and spiraled into days of negative self-talk for not doing what I set out to do.

    Have you ever done that?

    Over time, (lots of time) I realized that I was trying to be too perfect. One of the great lessons from my grief journey was giving myself grace when I was striving for perfection.  I have now cultivated a daily practice that is sustainable and that won’t derail if I miss a day.

    I begin (most) days sitting in Samyama,  (presence) followed by writing, followed by movement. When I have an early morning commitment, I do at least one of these things some other time of the day.  As I continue to consistently invest in my self-care in this way, I find that I can ease up on myself when I’m tempted to berate myself for skipping a day.

    The “results “ of a daily practice may not be apparent on a day-to-day basis, and maybe not even on a week-to-week basis.  Yet I’m beginning to feel the accumulative effect of my daily practice. And that right there is enough for me to continue each day.

    You may wonder the same thing, if you’ve been doing a daily practice fairly consistently.

    Is it worth the time?

    Could you be doing something more productive?

    And then you find yourself in a situation that calls for patience, and you know exactly how to access it.

    Or the answer to a prayer you’ve been saying arrives in a miraculous way.

    Scrupulous devotion to our daily rituals creates alchemy that show up as miracles.

    What have you noticed in your own life?

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