The Grasshopper disguised himself as the “Care Bear“ and delivered this: “No one can make you care but there is a price to pay for not caring.”

Caring presupposes that you include others; not caring keeps others out of your life.

If there is only room in your life for you, you don’t care.

Caring is giving of yourself, not just your resources.

Bending the Hallmark slogan a bit, “When you care enough to give the very best,” you give yourself.

The longer the list of things you don’t care about, the less inclusive your life will be. When that list is made up of mainly people, the less people you will have in your life.

From my vantage point, not caring is often a protection mechanism – protection from being hurt. The underlying pattern is this: If I keep it at arm’s length, it can’t hurt me.

Are you keeping life at arm’s length?

There’s not a list of things you must do that gets you to caring. For example, don’t volunteer at the retirement home if you don’t feel it because your lack of caring will be transparent.

It’s best to notice how much you don’t care and discover that it’s the wall between you and the world. Once you discover the correlation, then you can get curious about what you can care about. You don’t have to include everything, but beginning to care about one thing is a start.

You can go a lifetime justifying what you don’t care about. That exercise will produce a long list that someone can read at your funeral that few will care to attend.

All the best,

John