You’re reading 5 Clear Cut Signs That It’s Time For New Friends, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
“If you’re the smartest person in your group, then you need a new group” ~ Les Brown
Have you ever spent a weekend with friends only to leave with that deep empty feeling inside?
Where you were once best of buddies, now it seems like you’re strangers.
Are you at the butt end of every joke, prank, and sarcastic comment?
It’s not personal (even it if feels like it), you’ve simply changed and grown apart.
One of the problems is that as humans we don’t like change.
Change challenges what we know and causes us to become nervous and defensive.
So when you appear different to your group, it suddenly feels like you’re on your own walking the plank.
Mutiny!
Instead of clinging on reasoning that you’ve known each other since you were kids, or that you all went to college together, it’s time to bite the bullet and find a new ship.
We all have a deep longing for embrace and acceptance. We want to be liked. But when the pack turns on you, you need to turn your back on the pack.
Sticking with old friends who don’t care for you like they once did, is a sure fire way to fall into depression, desperate for a connection that is long lost.
Instead of trying to save a sinking ship, it’s time to step out of your comfort zone and explore new avenues and relationships.
Look for these 5 telltale signs to see if it’s time you found a new group of friends.
Do you organize everything? Are you regularly inventing original and diverse ways to spend time?
When someone needs to take the lead, are you always the one to step up?
Are you continuously planning everything, organizing every trip or night out? If you are then it’s time for balance.
I cannot recall how many times I have arranged kick ass trips, events, and parties only for my friends to turn up, enjoy the pie, and then go home leaving me to clean up the mess.
Organization is a team effort. If you always do the heavy lifting, you’ll be left with a heavy heart that feels bitter and under appreciated.
If your friends are not taking the initiative to participate then it’s time to look for people who will.
A lion does not bother himself with sheep!
When there are people in your circle who aren’t pulling their weight, cut them loose and move on.
It sounds harsh but your head and your heart will thank you for it.
Have you ever built up a sweat in a bid to arrive on time only to watch a friend casually waltz down the road without a care in the world?
Frustrating isn’t it?
You’ve broken the 4-minute mile while your buddy thinks being late like Axel Rose is cool. This isn’t a Paris Hilton party!
In Colombia, I made friends with a girl who kept turning up late to a workshop.
The girl didn’t think twice about being late every day until I asked her if she could arrive at the time scheduled instead of 20 minutes later.
Noticing that she was disturbing the group she promised that she would be on time and cleverly said:
“Don’t worry, I’ll be here tomorrow on English time.”
To which I replied:
“It’s not English time, it’s the TIME!”
Do you have any friends like this? People who think time stops for them?
Friends who ignore emails, or “forget” to return phone calls are making a strong statement.
Simply put, they don’t care enough about you to be reliable.
You hear excuse after excuse as you wait around like a lemon as if you don’t have better things to do.
Everyone is late occasionally.
We all forget to reply once in awhile.
But if you are the kind of person who goes the extra mile for your friends while that effort goes under the radar, then it’s time to look for people who actually value and respect you.
No time to hit reply, time to say goodbye!
At University I naturally became friends with the guys I shared dorms with. One of their big interests was soccer. I wasn’t the biggest soccer fan but wanted to fit in.
Several years, and hundreds of hours later, I realized that I was spending time doing something that wasn’t really me.
Sound familiar?
The final straw came when we went on a month long road trip around Europe following the England soccer team as they played in the European Finals.
Although the trip was fun, I came back empty.
Realizing that we shared completely different interests was a pivotal moment.
There was nothing wrong with their interests, each to their own, but they weren’t mine.
If we all liked the same things life would be pretty mundane.
Sometimes you need to recognize and accept that your interests are wildly different from your friends.
When you notice that your friends love to stay in playing video games, and you love going out dancing, instead of forcing yourself to do the things you don’t enjoy, throw in the towel.
It’s not personal, there’s nothing wrong with videos games, but if their idea of fun is closing the curtains and playing Battlefield, whereas you get your rocks off by soaking up the sun, then it’s time to wave the white flag.
That being said, having different hobbies is fine. We aren’t clones, so look for balance.
Make your relationships a two-way thing.
Recently I came back from a 2-year traveling odyssey around Intercontinental America. As you can imagine, it was the trip of a lifetime.
You might think that when I returned home, my friends would be desperate to know about the adventure.
Some were super interested, others, well, they just wanted to talk about their day at work.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m interested in what they’ve been up to, but what about their interest in what I’ve been up to?
How much interest your friends have in your life is a telling sign about how much they actually care about you.
Have you ever been bursting with excitement over a new job, car, or partner, desperate to celebrate the joy only for it to get brushed under the carpet?
Don’t take it to heart, it’s simply that your friends aren’t so invested in you. They are invested in themselves!
In ‘How To Win Friends And Influence People’ author Dale Carnegie explains that if you want to make someone feel good, ask questions about ‘their’ life.
Let’s say you are at a BBQ and you are talking to a stranger. Eventually, you notice that unless you ask a question, they stare into oblivion. They have nothing to say unless you do the probing.
It wouldn’t be long before you moved on, right?
We need to adopt this approach with our friends and consider finding ones who offer a bit of give as well as take.
You’ll feel a happier and stronger connection if you spend time with people who show an interest in your life.
A few years ago I moved to London and hooked up with a new girl. I thought she was awesome and was keen for my friends to meet her.
Instead of welcoming her into the group, they showed little support or desire to make a connection. It’s possible that they felt threatened, but if they really cared they would have welcomed her with open arms.
Plenty of other pals have formed a great friendship with my girlfriend, but for others, they weren’t open to the new relationship.
Have any of your friends rejected something or someone new you’ve brought to the table?
Maybe you bought a summer dress and instead of compliments, you received sniggers.
Or maybe you suggested trying a new restaurant only for it to fall on deaf ears.
Good friends are willing to try new things and will support you with new ventures.
If you come out and tell your friends that you’re gay, they might be surprised, but they’ll stick by you.
Or they’ll show their true colors!
Be careful though, don’t make the mistake of wanting your friends to be “Yes” people.
True friends won’t be afraid to disagree with you, but they’ll do it in a thoughtful way with only your best interests at heart.
When you have a new idea, make a big change, or do something out of the ordinary, look for friends who have your back, not ones who laugh behind it.
Letting go of your friends can be a painful yet often necessary process.
If you want to grow, expand, and develop meaningful relationships, sometimes you need to make space and jump out of your comfort zone.
Make a decision to connect with like-minded people who support your goals and participate in your interests.
You won’t find too many like-minded individuals at a rave if crowded places and loud noises make you anxious.
The trick is to get out there and do the things you love by surrounding yourself with people who are already doing it.
Join a meetup or local course filled with people doing the things that interest you.
Remember, it’s not about cutting everyone out of your life. It’s not about getting angry and falling out with your old friends.
Accept that you have different desires and dreams. If it seems like you are aliens, take another path.
You aren’t better or worse, you’re just different.
Finally, acknowledge the precious few friends who support, contribute, and stick by you.
Work on developing the friendship and be open and honest with each other.
Friends come and go through life, but the ones worth keeping are like looking for glass needles in a haystack – you’ll need to put in some real effort to find them.
You’ve read 5 Clear Cut Signs That It’s Time For New Friends, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
On May 9, in a twist that would have seemed far-fetched even on House of Cards, President Trump fired James Comey as director of the FBI on the recommendation of Jeff Sessions, his attorney general. The notion that Trump and Sessions took action against Comey because of his unfairness to Clinton may be the most brazen effort at “fake news” or “alternative facts” yet from a president who has shown no reluctance to lie, even and especially when the truth is plain for everyone to see.
The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by the novelist and memoirist Jesmyn Ward, originated in her search for community and consolation after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012.
Even if you think yourself a reluctant shopper, consider all of the resources used to create our material world: the steel to build our homes, the natural gas to fire our furnaces, the aluminum in our smartphones and tablets. In the world’s richest countries, consumption has ballooned by over a third in the past few decades to the point that in 2010, each person in the thirty-four richest nations consumed over 220 pounds of stuff every day. How did we come to be such voracious, irrepressible consumers? And how has all of this consuming changed the world? Those are the questions at the heart of Frank Trentmann’s Empire of Things, each of its nearly seven hundred pages of text jam-packed with telling facts and counterintuitive provocations.
Flowers blanket the hills of Osage country in April. Little bluets, Johnny-jump-ups, spring beauties everywhere, as though the “gods had left confetti” wrote John Joseph Mathews, himself an Osage. May brings black-eyed Susans, which corner the market on sunlight, starving their smaller cousins. The Osage call Maytime’s queen of the night the “flower-killing moon.” Then came May of 1921 and the Osage-killing moon.
David Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of the deft, dashing, and doomed story of Percy Fawcett in The Lost City of Z, brings a keen reporter’s instinct to this sordid episode—the (known) murder of twenty-four Osage people, this time not directly out of Manifest Destiny or racism, but greed—another blot on the historical landscape of the United States. Like a veteran of the crime beat, Grann has sweated the details: dug into the archives, interviewed surviving principals and peripherals, thought long and hard about what he has heard and read, and—despite his relative youth—displays an old-school, learned hand in Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.
He is also a canny raconteur, providing both the play-by-play and the color commentary, following one thread, then picking up another, and so the tapestry of the story takes shape. The book opens with the displacement of the Osage, American Indian people who once found a home stretching from what is now Missouri to what are now the Rockies. But wars, settlers, and U.S. government policies ate away at that expanse. The Osage ceded—that is the polite term—100 million acres and found themselves confined to a small patch of southeast Kansas. White settlers wanted that land, too. Finally the Osage bought 1.5 million acres of rocky, sterile land from their Cherokee neighbors to the south, unincorporated land at the end of the Trail of Tears, convinced that even the land-devouring settlers wouldn’t want this ugly terrain. The Osage signed on the dotted line, purchasing the ground above and the ground below: mineral rights. That’s called foresight.
That worthless reservation in what would become Oklahoma sat atop black gold, and a great deal of it. The Osage collected royalties that grew and grew, but only those Osages who were inscribed on the Osage Roll—registered members of the tribe—could benefit from the mineral trust, and the shares, known as headrights, could not be sold. This rankled the white sense of superiority. Every manner of racist trash was heaped upon the Osage. “Lo and behold!” trumpeted New York’s Outlook. “The Indian, instead of starving to death…enjoys a steady income that turns bankers green with envy.” For goodness sake, the Osage had white servants. Osage girls “attended the best boarding schools and wore sumptuous French clothing, as if ‘une très jolie demoiselle of the Paris boulevards had inadvertently strayed into this little reservation town.’” Being on the receiving end of irony can be a bitch.
There was, of course, no surcease of meddling by the U.S. government. In 1921, since it was obvious to the powers that be that the Osage could not be trusted to handle their newfound wealth wisely—and Osage adult was, in the eyes of the Department of the Interior, “like a child of six or eight years old, and when he sees a new toy he wants to buy it”—the U.S. federal government assigned the Osage white guardians. There are guardians of probity and good will, and there are predacious guardians. The Osage, almost to man and woman, found themselves with the latter, prominent whites who referred to the fleecing of their charges as “Indian business.”
The above state of affairs is the backdrop to a tragedy that disappearance of Anna Brown jump-starts this sad mystery tale. One of four sisters, Anna was the scapegrace. She had been known to spend a night in parts unknown, to frequent “the dark side of the street,” but as the days wore on a search was initiated. She was found in a creek bed outside the boomtown of Whizbang, shot in the back of the head. To say that forensic science was in its infancy was true, but such newfangled tools as fingerprinting (a bottle was found at the scene) and ballistics (the bullet was never found, although there was no exit wound) were available. None were deployed. As Grann notes, for a century after the American Revolution, the citizenry were wary of a formal police force, and its formation began only “after dread of the so-called dangerous classes surpassed dread of the state.” Until then, sheriffs—decentralized, underfunded, incompetent—were just as likely to be on the wrong end of an investigation than the other, and popular justice took care of many matters.
Anna’s sister Mollie knew there were two routes to take: hire a private investigator—Allan Pinkerton had left his mark, but this was the heyday of the William J. Burns International Detective Agency, whom Mollie hired—and offer a reward, in this case $2000.00. That’s serious-talking money in 1921. But there was plain too much collusion and corruption for any of these forces to make headway. It would turn out that many of the white population were guilty of lockjaw, brought on by a bad case of the swindles or simple racial envy.
Meanwhile, members of the Osage community began to discern a pattern, the threads that Grann sets to braiding. Before Anna’s death, her sister Minnie had died of a baffling wasting disease. Then their mother Lizzie died in the same fashion. On the same day Anna was found, the body of Osage Charles Whitehorse was discovered a mile north of the reservation capital in Pawhuska, shot between the eyes. Bill Smith, who had been married to Minnie, and married her sister Rita after Minnie’s death, voiced his suspicions that Minnie and Lizzie had been poisoned. Even though the coroner in Osage County was not trained in the evidence of poison, the culprits must have thought it best to be safe. An explosion leveled Rita and Bill’s house, and them with it.
The deaths continued: between February and July of 1922 two Osage men and one women were killed with strychnine poison, while in February 1923, the Osage Henry Roan was found murdered in his car. An attorney returning from taking the deathbed testimony of an Osage man wired the sheriff of Osage County that he had sewn up the case: he was thrown off the train on the way home, and died. A well-known Osage rancher was killed falling down a flight of stairs, and another was murdered on the street in Oklahoma City while on his way to brief state officials about the case. Small wonder the Osage call this time the “Reign of Terror.”
The Bureau of Investigation swung into action in 1925, then an obscure branch of the Justice Department, which a decade later would be christened the Federal Bureau of Investigation — much on the merits of this case, conducted by Tom White, though J. Edgar Hoover, already at the helm, as megalomaniacal and paranoid as he ever was, quickly took credit, as he would in breaking the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and the Kansas City Massacre. (As well as a history of this crime, Grann offers a well-tempered history of local, state, and federal policing in the United States.) The case turns on a bit of serendipity—and there will be no spoilers here. Let it be said that Killers of the Flower Moon follows the painstaking disentangling of all those threads. It is deeply gratifying when the last thorny knot comes loose, the villains such a surprise. Still, the story is deeply saddening, and though Grann plays it like a violin, it is mournful tune.
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Located on the slopes of the Franklin Mountains in Texas, USA, this wonderful residence was designed by the Tucson-based studio Hazel Baker. Rising 2,500 feet above the Rio Grande River Valley, it has adapted to the site’s undulating and steep topography, with the three-storey home maintaining a direct connection to the outside at each level. The white-cream used on its exterior, perfectly combined with walls lined with beautiful stones, definitely..
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The rocky terrain of Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma is an oasis of natural grassland among developed farms. Almost 60,000 acres are now home to reintroduced species including bison, elk, prairie dogs, river otters and burrowing owls. Visitors can enjoy wildlife watching, fishing, climbing, hunting and walking among wildflower blooms. Photo by Daniel Suh (http://ift.tt/18oFfjl).
Sig Nordal 