Does the heart and soul of a country trickle down from its leaders, or does it find its way up through its citizens?
Do you think it works like the water cycle, where everything circles and continues to repeat? If it does, it's going to take a lot to break out of this pattern.
We're going to have to defy gravity more than ever before.
Living things do it every day. Just think about the plants and trees that somehow manage to suck up the water from the ground. If they weren't able to do that, none of them would survive. None of us would even be here.
Plants need roots, but so do people. And people do have roots. We call them arteries and veins. They stem from the one thing which can help us all defy gravity in what seems to have become such an unethical world: the human heart.
On pages 46 through 48 of The Read Aloud Handbook, Jim Trelease refers to something called "HQ," which stands for "heart quotient." He makes a great point that in a society which focuses so much on "IQ," it's really the "HQ" that we all should be nurturing.
You see, many of us have been teaching, learning, leading, and just plain old living, mainly through our brains. But just like the plants can't exist without their roots, human beings can't really live without their hearts.
You can have the highest IQ in the world, but will it mean anything if you don't have any heart?
©iStockphoto/Candice Popik
It's time to bring back the "HQ," and we can start with our children. They're born with empathy, and it's in them and for them that we must find ways to nurture it. It's because of them that we will be able to defy the gravity that often weighs us down.
But, how do we do so?
Simple things, like the way we interact with our children, the way we treat others, the way we look at life, the examples we set, and the books we read, all have a tremendous impact on our "HQ."
Here's a wonderful related article I found via @micheleborba and @marjieknudsen on Twitter yesterday:
You also might be interested in reading some related prior posts:
And so, I'd like to end with this quote:
"Concern for man and his fate must always
form the chief interest of all technical endeavors. Never forget this in the
midst of your diagrams and equations." ~Albert Einstein
