This is the essential factor in the process of cleaning up your mess that rejects all blame and rationalization and commits you to a long-term program of increasing your self-awareness, deepening your consciousness, and changing those thought patterns that led you to choose poorly in the past. This, in fact, is where “the rubber meets the road” in terms of turning your attention away from reactive efforts to make up for the past and toward proactive effort to create a different future for yourself and those who depend on you (within our outside of your conscious awareness of them). Here’s your opportunity to get down and dirty with yourself, to unearth those dark corners of your soul where you feel most unloved and vulnerable, and commit to taking positive action to addressing those areas with spiritual courage.

When you create wreckage, it’s because you’ve applied the wrong formula to the wrong problem. Merely accepting the right answer isn’t enough. You need to correct the formula you’re using so that the next time the problem comes up, your answer is the right one the first time. This is how we learn and grow: try, fail, correct, try anew, succeed!

Facing the wreckage of our lives with insight and the courage to “change the things I can” defines this stage of apology as an essentially spiritual step. Whenever we need or want to create transformational change, we need to recognize the profoundly spiritual nature of our work. It’s a totally “inside job” that has three essential phases to it: honesty, openness, and willingness. Each phase contributes its part toward empowering us to make substantial change toward authentic growth and the realization of our human potential. This is the essential process that drives us toward the fulfillment of our God-given destiny — as individuals and as humanity.

The first phase is a commitment to honesty. That demands that you lay aside all blame and rationalization and that you embrace the person that your behavior has revealed you to be with humility. Are you fearful? Are you angry? Are you arrogant? Are you self-centered? Are you judgmental? Seeing your character defects this way in the light of your bad behavior can bring up defensiveness: “You’d be that way, too, if you’d gone through what I did!” And yet, we’re not responsible for what others have done to us; however, we are responsible for our reactions to that. We all have built-in defense mechanisms that we created to keep ourselves safe when we felt overwhelmed. However, now, those defenses are no longer serving us. They’re keeping us from connecting effectively with others and with our Higher Power. When bad behavior reveals our own dysfunction, it’s time that we accepted our condition honestly. It’s time that we admitted the weaknesses that we’ve so long tried so hard to cover up to ourselves, to our God, and to another human being. Humbly admitting the truth will, indeed, set us free from it.

Openness implies the readiness to look at the situation differently: to change our minds and get rid of old beliefs that no longer serve us. As an adolescent, I was deeply angry at my father for not being close to me. All that changed when I went through a spiritual crisis that caused me to take another look at the situation. I discovered to my surprise that, from my earliest recollection, I continually judged my father’s attempts at connecting with me as insufficient. There was nothing he could do to satisfy my childish demands. In effect, I pushed him away, then blamed him for not being emotionally present. Once I saw my truth, I was open to looking at the situation from a new perspective: forgiveness became possible, and I was then free to reinterpret our relationship. Once you’ve taken an honest inventory of yourself, you have the opportunity to see the same old hurts and injuries and woundedness you have always experienced festering there, and to give those experiences new meaning. You don’t get to choose your experiences, but you do get to decide what they mean for you. When you discover a meaning that no longer serves you, you can be open to experiencing it differently. That’s your choice.

Finally, willingness is just another name for courage. Many people read spiritual and inspirational books. Self-help is a popular genre. You can read inspired authors like Maryanne Williamson and what they say can resonate in your heart and in your head. Then, like many people, you can file what you’ve learned away like you’ve done with the plots of novels you’ve read over the years, and go on about your business creating the same kinds of messes that have entrapped you numberless times before. Willingness means giving practical answers to these questions: 1) how am I going to think and feel differently about these experiences when they come up again? 2) what practical steps will I take to avoid falling into the same reactive traps I’ve set for myself in the past? and 3) what decisions will I make now about how I will change my behavior when these things come up again?

This stage of cleaning up your mess is all about change, and everybody hates change. It’s painful, it requires both humility and courage, and it takes a lot of energy to change. Yet, change is synonymous with growth. As grew from childhood to adolescence, we experienced physical ‘growing pains;’ as adolescents growing to adulthood, we experienced mental and emotional ‘growing pains;’ now, as adults growing into spiritual maturity, our ‘growing pains’ are at a far deeper level than ever before: at the spiritual level. That’s why one of the most important shifts of consciousness we can experience at this stage of life is to see our messes not as failures, but as spiritual growth experiences. Take to heart the old saying, “No pain; no gain!” and embrace your mess (with all the pain that goes with it) as a gift and your golden opportunity to make a difference in your world — for that is precisely what it is!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

Do we really need to ask why a preoccupation with the big issues eventually leads to failure and unhappiness in careers, in relationships, and in regard to your personal health and well-being? When it comes to your health, what happens when you wait until things get really bad (a crisis) before looking for treatment? Don’t you then find yourself racing to beat the pathology to the finish line? The closer you allow issues to come to the tipping point (that point at which failure is unavoidable), the more important and urgent the need to engage in corrective action becomes, and the lesser your chances of meeting that challenge successfully. At the same time, the more your resources are dedicated to handling any crisis, the greater the chances will be for other issues to approach their tipping points.

Conserving your energies to handle the big issues does little to address or solve them; in fact, the approach that focuses only (or mainly) on the important things risks creating an error cascade. Let me explain. An error cascade begins with just one overlooked detail. When that detail goes wrong, it becomes an attention grabber (Quadrant One again). While your attention is focused on taking care of that one errant detail, you ignore several other details that are needing your attention. As your attention is drawn away in a rapidly-increasing complex of (relatively) minor failures, your capacity for reacting to the situation erodes until you are unable to stop a catastrophic collapse of the system. The disasters at Three Mile Island and, to an even greater degree, at Chernobyl are graphic cases in point.

As early as the 14th Century, we find the following poem:

For Want of a Nail

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Technorati Tags:
career, communication, crisis, details, health, humility, integrity, love, midlife, Midlife Mastery, Spirituality
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |

Must couples in trouble necessarily fail? No, not necessarily: no healthy couple is doomed to failure. In fact, the only ‘doomed’ relationships are those where one or both partners are unapologetically physically or emotionally abusive . Without a doubt, the only realistic option for someone who finds her- or himself in a fundamentally abusive or exploitative relationship is to exit immediately. Apart from that, I believe that many (if not all) relationships “on the rocks” could be healed under the right circumstances. From my perspective, the fact that this healing so often fails to take place could be an indication that one or both of the partners have stopped listening. Additionally, ceasing to listen indicates a spiritual problem. Let me explain.

It would seem that the  person who hears another’s voice, but is no longer committed to listening to what the other has to say has given up on her or his partner, as well as their relationship together. If you look more closely, however, it soon becomes clear that the person has actually given up on him- or herself. Empathetic listening and appreciative inquiry represent a three-fold choice: 1) to accept the other, 2) to trust the other, and 3) to engage with the other. Closing off the lines of communication also represents a choice: to cease accepting, trusting and engaging with one’s partner. Before I relate this to fundamental spiritual principles, let’s look briefly at each choice.

The choice to accept another human being is foundational. True acceptance represents a fundamental option to see in the other person another self, with exactly the same sorts of strengths and weaknesses that we ourselves possess. This choice to acknowledge the other person as another self  has two destructive opposites. The first perversion of acceptance we call ‘exploitation‘. Philosopher Martin Buber contrasts these approaches with the terms I-Thou (for true acceptance of the other), and I-It (for exploitation). To see your partner merely in terms of his or her usefulness (like a tool or a piece of furniture) or her or his capacity to satisfy you represents a fundamental denial of humanity on your part. The second perversion of the choice to accept your partner shows itself as conditional acceptance. In brief, “I’ll accept you if you do such-and-such or so-and-so.” Conditional acceptance of another puts you in the position of being their judge, jury and executioner. In fact, it represents nothing less than your attempt to usurp the position in your partner’s life properly held by God alone.

Next, let’s look at the choice not to trust your partner. Why don’t you trust her or him? Because you’ve been hurt before? The refusal to trust your partner goes way beyond self-preservation. Once again, it is passing a judgment of condemnation on another person — another self — who exhibits the same sorts of faults and failings that you yourself exhibit. In fact, if the truth were known, the faults and failings that you find most easy to condemn and most difficult to forgive in others are the very ones that you exhibit most strongly yourself. In fact, the two keys that are absolutely essential to unlocking both acceptance and trust are these: first, to acknowledge an identical humanity in both yourself and the other, and, second, to commit yourself to the path of unconditional forgiveness. Who cannot look at the plight of even the most desperate of people around us and not be able truthfully to say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I?” The greatest message of Christianity — and also, I’m afraid,  its most forgotten and neglected — is simply this: unconditional, unlimited forgiveness. If you cannot forgive unconditionally, you cannot trust for very long.

The final choice is the choice to engage with your partner. If you refuse to engage with her or him, you thereby give credence to the (Jungian) ego’s false belief that you are vulnerable and need protection. It’s the same force that drives people’s frantic searching for that illusive (and illusory) ‘security’ that they believe will fix everything and protect them from danger. Once again, it would be foolish to put ourselves in harm’s way by engaging with an abusive partner. We owe it to ourselves and to them to take the necessary precautions so as not to allow ourselves to become victims of deliberate abuse. However, if you imagine that refusing to engage with your well-intentioned partner will grant you some sort of immunity from harm and from hurt, you are mistaken. Do you believe that spiritually you are invulnerable and that nothing outside of yourself — not even death — can destroy the essence of you? “Greater love has no one,” we have heard, “than to lay down his life for another.” Oddly, dieing for someone can actually be a whole lot easier than living for them.

Finally, what does the choice not to listen say about that person’s spiritual condition? The testimony it gives is nothing short of damning. Personally, I would liken it to what Christians refer to as the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ or the ‘unforgivable sin.’ Here’s what I mean. Whenever I write, I use the terms ‘acceptance,’  ‘trust’ and ‘engagement’ as  synonyms for what are called the ‘theological virtues’, namely: faith, hope , and love. The ‘sin’ against faith is the decision not to accept the will of God exactly as we encounter it in our world. The ‘sin’ against hope is the choice not to trust that our only Source of genuine security is divine providence. The ‘sin’ against love is the refusal to become meaningfully engaged with those we were sent to serve: our fellow creatures who, along with us, share the “image and likeness of God.” If the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ is a refusal to believe that the love of God is powerful enough to forgive us (and so we refuse to ask for forgiveness, and therefore refuse to accept it), then turning a deaf ear to someone we once claimed to love is a ‘sin against love’, for, as we know, the opposite of love is not hate, but deliberate indifference.

What can you do if you find yourself failing to listen? Remember the futility of protecting yourself. What can you protect yourself from? Even more importantly, what are you protecting yourself for? After all, your mission here in this world is not to try (futilely) to keep yourself safe. It’s to share with your fellows (and especially those in relationship with you) the same kind of acceptance, trust, and engagement that your God has shown to you. God hears his people’s cry . . . can you do any less?

And what about you who find yourself ‘learning to love one another’ and your words keep falling on deaf ears? You, too, have the opportunity to pass on the love of God. Your acceptance of the other can be renewed continually. Your trust of the other need never fail or fade. You may stand ever at the ready to engage. However, engagement (love) requires reciprocity. God does not condemn, so how could you? God does not constrain, either (because love can never be forced), but rather waits for all eternity for the other to emerge from his or her isolation and re-engage. You can have the willingness to re-engage, whether or not the other ever seeks it. You may never re-engage as you once did: time and the world goes on while the other chooses to isolate, stagnate, or (what’s worse) repeat the same self-defeating choices and behaviors with other partners. You, on the other hand, have the opportunity to accept and trust and engage with people at every stage and every condition of your life: people who, like you, have chosen to listen not only with their ears, but with their hearts.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

Technorati Tags:
acceptance, anger, avoidance, blame, challenge, challenges, change, choice, communication, courage, crisis, death, denial, direction, emotions, engagement, faith, fear, future, grief, hope, humility, integrity, intention, isolation, love, mastery, maturity, meaning, midlife, midlife mastery, purpose, relationship, responsibility, spirituality, transition, trust, values, victim
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |

Today, I’d like to share with you the (always-tentative) response that I seem to be getting from my six decades of  reflexively auto-dialing a universal ’411′. It seems — to the best of my ability to understand the answer — that the universe and all it contains is nothing but a mega-University that’s only function is to educate Consciousness (in all its known and unknown iterations) in just two interrelated subjects: what I’m calling the Two Great Lessons of Life. I won’t keep you hanging there in anticipation. The First Great Lesson of Life comes down to this: learning how to love. The Second Great Lesson of Life is its complement: learning how to let go. That’s it. That’s all there is. Once you’ve mastered both subjects, you’re ready to graduate. If it were only that easy.

We were all born selfish. You may know that in biology there’s what they call the ‘recapitulation theory’ that suggests that every life form goes through all the stages of evolution on its journey from fertilized egg to viable organism. I have no idea whether or not that’s exactly accurate, although there does seem to be a general pattern observable across all forms of life. It seems clear to me that at least human consciousness in its earliest stages develops along the lines of how consciousness emerged on this planet. At birth, our consciousness makes a giant leap forward that takes the developing distinction between “me’ and ‘mine’ to a whole new level. Birth can be seen simply asa quantum leap in the ever-increasing viability and independence of the organism. Early life outside the womb closely parallels life inside: the infant remains totally dependent on its care-givers for all the conditions necessary for its survival. From that point on, the nascent person must assume ever-greater responsibility for his or her own independent existence. Life begins with the understanding that I must get what what I need in order to survive. I learn to value who I am and what I have been given. ‘Love’ and ‘need’ start out life as synonyms.

As I lead you through this ‘recapitulation theory’ of mine, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to reflect back on your own life’s experiences to see where the crises you’ve encountered indicated ‘sticking points’ in your own evolution. If you try, you can see how they imitate the earth’s plate tectonics: the plates in the earth’s crust push against each other and their energy imperceptibly builds until, at one random moment, they suddenly become unstuck and shift — sometimes with catastrophic seismic results. Each of the crises in your own life represents a seismic shift across every aspect of your life: physical, mental, emotional, relational, economic and spiritual.

If childhood can be defined as that epoch of life during which we learn to take care of ourselves and to become increasingly self-reliant and responsible (we gradually take on the responsibility of  providing for our own survival) then that life transition stage that we identify as ‘adolescence’ must be that period where we are forced by nature and culture to confront our own self-centered self-interest and begin very tentatively to open ourselves to others as well as to the Other. It’s the time when we learn to both value and care for others above and beyond our own selfish needs, even our own need to survive. Love and need split apart in adolescence’s tumultuous soul-quakes. The adolescent transition from childhood to adulthood takes on the features of a transformation.

Learning to love . . . learning to accept unconditionally, to trust unconditionally, to become fully engaged with another . . . committed to another. These lessons of love take a long, hard time to learn because the real lesson (that love is a choice, a decision) only begins when the ‘other’ love — the emotional surrogate of love — starts to fade away. Love is what’s left after all the needing and wanting has dissipated, been satisfied or disappointed.

My first prayer as a young man entering the chapel on my first day in the major seminary was: “Lord, teach me to love.” That was the prayer of a foolish youth who didn’t understand that the prayer to learn to love, like the prayer for patience, is one that’s always answered and always in startlingly unexpected ways. “Greater love has no one, than to lay down life itself for another.” What they don’t tell you is that it’s much more difficult to live for others than it is to die for them.

Just as some people never quite learn the ‘independence’ lesson from childhood, others never quite get what it means to love selflessly. There’s a type of grieving involved in every act of true love, because it means letting go of all of our expectations. We want to be loved back, to be unconditionally accepted and trusted, to have someone somewhere somehow commit unconditionally to us. We feel as though we need that affirmation of self: if we don’t receive it, we’ll just die.
But, we don’t fully receive it — we don’t fully give it either — and we don’t die. Instead, we learn life’s Great Lesson number one.

Then comes midlife. Just when we think we’ve gotten our Master’s degree in loving, life turns the tables on us. We positively freak out when we first turn to that page in the book of life’s instructions that our parents and our whole culture and upbringing gave us for guidance and we read, “Everything in this book may be wrong.” Here begins life’s Great Lesson number two: letting go.

Letting go begins with relaxing our death-grip on our opinions, starting, of course, with everything we were once so certain and sure of. Today, on the other side of the midlife divide, I am certain of very few things. As certain as I am that there exists a universal Truth, I am equally certain that I will never fully know or understand it. And, as far as God is concerned, the God of my understanding has been replaced with the God of my lack-of-understanding. In fact, all that I really need to know about my God is that I am not he. Everything else is open to interpretation. In life, as both Martin Buber and Karl Jung so clearly saw, there is an I (a Self) in constant dialogue with a Thou (an Other) and, as with all true dialogues, meaning is always given by the receiver, not the giver. Contrary to popular belief, what God said is relevant only in regard to what we actually heard and understood.

The crises of midlife arise from the difficulty that each individual has letting go of the certitude that we hold with regard to our beliefs and opinions. At midlife, we are brought face-to-face with the great transcendental ideals that Plato and Aristotle proposed: absolute Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Unity, and we begin to recognize that we in this world enjoy only their analogates: relative goodness, truth, beauty, and unity. We will never know (nor can we as humans really adequately even understand) such things as Life, Love, Security, Health, Peace and Freedom. The famous midlife crisis is the struggle that we wage against having to give up our pretensions to these Divine attributes. When the crisis is over, we find that we have let go a little bit more of our pretensions to the divine. The answer to the great question, “Why me?” (as though we had some divine right to Life,  Love, Security, Health, Peace and Freedom) is always the humiliating, “Why not you?”

Our topic today of the Two Great Lessons of Life has brought us to the understanding that all of life is, in fact, one great process in two distinct stages: learning to let go of self (what we call love), then learning to let go of everything else (what we call death). It makes me think of the Jewish proverb that says: Shrouds have no pockets. All of this lifetime of learning to let go is just preparation for the Great Letting Go that silently awaits each of us. Like all lettings-go, life’s Great Lessons involve grief in (at least) five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. How you think about death and how you feel about the lessons that life is handing you right now, today can be very good indicators of where you are in the learning process. The more you learn to let go, the more grieving there is. The more grieving you do, the farther along you progress toward acceptance. So, where are you?

And, just a final word to the wise, if the Roman poet Horace was right when he wrote, “Non omnis moriar” (“I shall not wholly die”) — and I believe he was — then whatever letting go and whatever grieving you don’t get done in this life, you will carry with you into the next. That’s just something to about it.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

Technorati Tags:
acceptance, adult, adulthood, anger, change, choice, communication, crisis, culture, denial, fear, grief, growth, health, humility, love, midlife mastery, maturity, meaning, midlife, purpose, relationship, Spirituality, transformation, transition
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |

Some people think that heroics are best left to the young. After all, haven't we heard — haven't we said — "I'm too old for that"? Yet, in fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. Youth may be the time for idealism, but maturity is the time when standing up for your values really means something. I remember when we were kids, we used to play "Bang, bang! You're dead!" And, after a short while, we'd come running over to our 'victim,' pat the 'hurt' place and say "Fix, fix! You're all better!" At midlife, we get to see all too clearly what "You're dead!" really means, and how seldom "You're all better!" really works. The deeper we pass through the midlife transition, the more conscious we become of the cost of standing up for what we believe in.

Am I saying that younger people are unaware of the cost of heroism? No. It's just that, on one hand, we have learned to become skeptical of the ROI for our commitment — we've lost faith in the 'quick fix' — and on the other hand, we come to realize that there are many false values that aren't at all worth fighting for. It takes a certain length of experience and a lot of missteps before we can discern what's worth standing up for from what's not with any clarity at all.

My reflections today are inspired by my guest this week on my internet radio program, Midlife Matters. He's Eric Proffitt, a singer and song-writer who's married and the father of five daughters. He's also just completed a 500-mile run in heavy chains from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC to the tomb of anti-slavery activist William Wilberforce in London, England to draw attention to and raise money to counteract worldwide child sex slavery. Eric has truly put it all on the line, not only for his own values, but for the sake of others who have no voice or power. And, I believe, therein lies the hallmark of mature values worth living and dieing for.

There's no merit in merely standing up for a cause, in sacrificing and even putting your life on the line for something, when the values that underlie that cause are ultimately self-serving. In fact, the history of the world overflows with instances of people putting everything on the line for ignoble causes. Face it: standing up for something is no virtue. 'Standing up' for something simply means that your cause faces resistance. That doesn't mean that your cause is worthwhile or that the resistance you face is unjust. 'Standing up' for something simply means two things: 1) you've committed yourself to create change (and change always provokes resistance) and 2) there are people who disagree with you. There's no honor, no virtue, no benefit in simply 'putting it all on the line' unless your cause brings benefit — true value — to humankind. That, my friends, takes experience, hardship, patience, and humility to achieve.

These days, our world seems to be positively overrun with activists. From individuals like Eric to mass marches, from strident voices shouting on television and in local gatherings to suicide bombers. The hallmark of worhty causes seems very often the volume of violence that they generate. Yet, when we look more closely at them, what we're very often seeing is self-interest run riot. It seems to be an 'us' against 'them' clamor that's all about proving how right we are and how wrong they are and how we're going to win by terrorizing and, wherever possible, overwhelming them. Make no mistake: standing up for your values always implies conflict. It always implies a clash of values where someone's (supposed) 'rights' have to take second place to others'. In Eric's case, the right of children to freedom and self-determination does, indeed, conflict with the 'right' that some adults have of using them as their sexual toys. In every such conflict, somebody's 'rights' are going to get curtailed.

How, then, can a mature person stand up for his or her rights? Let's look at some historical precedents in recent history. What do people like Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Theresa of Calcutta, and Nelson Mandela all have in common? They are all recognized as people who 'put it on the line', who stood up, and suffered for a cause. What sets them apart and makes us look up to them as heroes from others who have given their all for their causes (and whom we look upon as villains or worse)? There are two characteristics that are the mark of maturity. The first is, as Gandhi described it, "non-violent non-cooperation." They all recognized that violence and force only beget more violence and force. Violence and force fully engage systems theory, which states that a system will reisist with equal force whatever force of change is applied to it, in order that the net change remains zero. Effective change only comes through the humility to change oneself. It's the lesson of the Japanese martial art, Akido, which teaches that overpowering one's opponent requires that you absorb and deflect the energy used against you. The message is very old (and very seldom learned): it's the message of Jesus on the cross.

The second characteristic that sets all these people (and countless others like them) apart from the raging mob is that they fought for the rights of powerless. They weren't fighting (and fight they did!) for their own civil, economic, or even human rights. In fact, almost all of our most revered heroes already enjoyed most of the rights that they were fighting for. They recognized that there were others who did not enjoy the same rights and privileges and who had neither power or voice. It was they — the most powerless and the poorest of the poor — for whom they fought, simply because those others had no one else to speak for them, no one else to advocate for them, no one else to stand up for them. They weren't fighting to preserve anything that they already had, nor to better their own situation. They were men and women who were ready to give up everything that they had so that others who had nothing (in terms of rights and dignity) could have something.

There is a clear distinction that we can draw in both motives and methods between youthful or adult activism and the kind of activism that we can recognize as the hallmark of maturity. Those heros of humanity like those I've mentioned stand out particularly because their maturity came to them early. In many cases, it was a life-long commitment that began very early and seldom wavered. We can use the example of these men and women and the Eric Proffitts of the world to help us judge the activism that we see around us, as well as to gauge the virtue of our own courageous stands. Are our goals truly humanitarian? Are our means effective (i.e.: non-violent)? These are two simple touchstones that mark the mature woman and man of courage and conviction. When you or I are prepared to stand up and be counted and to put it all on the line for a cuase, how do we measure up?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

Technorati Tags:
midlife, mastery, courage, heart, conviction, humility, humanity, nonviolence
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |