Angelic work

 I had the privilege of meeting nurses and paramedics working in the field of palliative care. It was so motivating and inspiring to hear just a few of their vast number of experiences.

I want to use the word HOLA-TEM-PER as letterword for their apprach

HOLA stands for Holistic Approach

It was truly heart warming to hear how they truly adopted for years and years of  palliative care , a very dedicated holistic approach. For sure, the physical needs of palliative care patients are big. the pain control, the feeding needs, the care of wounds, the care for the bathing and cleanliness. taking care of these needs is huge and admirable achievement already, but their own commitment went so much further. They were helping the families with financial needs to obtain help through various source so f govenment or NGO driven charities. They were supporting the social and psychological needs of teh patients and their caregivers by patiently listening to the stories of suffering and sacrifice, Over thre years they have become creative in suggesting and even providing solutions through thr giving of moral, motivational and spritual support.

TEM stands for the extra mile 

While listening some of their work expediences, it became soon extremely clear that these Palliative care teams were doing way more than was strictly expected from them. This is already reflected in the holistic approach outlined above but there was so much more than that alone. They were giving the families, they cared for their own telephone numbers and allowed them to call whenever there was a big need. Sometimes on the way back from a house, they received a call and did not hesitate to make u-turn, even the distance was big, to provide the extra help that was requested. They displayed a superbly caring attitude even beyond office hours, beyond working days 

PER stands for persistence 

 These nurses and paramedics showed a remarkable level of persistence. Even if they felt not truly welcome during the fiirst visit of the referral, they persisted in an extremely friendly and caring way and almost uniformly they ended up being very welcome and even cherished by the whole family. many times the families prepared drinks and snacks and they were most of the time requested to stay a bit longer. That level of appreciation is hard to obtain, but they did it. if a person close to death, asks you to stay a bit longer, that is beyond full proof that your service has been of the highest quality.

 

I love to hear their working experiences. I heard about their struggles, some of their bitter expereinces but the successes of their extremely fruitful approach are so sweet and admirable, that I want to hear more and more. 

The quiet power of honesty

Have you ever noticed how good it feels to lie down at night with nothing to hide? That quiet, easy peace — it's one of life's most underrated gifts. And honesty is what protects it.

We've all heard the whispers of doubt: dishonesty is the fast lane to money and power. Look at the top — don't most of them cheat their way there? And if we're clever enough, we'll never get caught.

But here's what they leave out. Every lie comes with a hidden cost — the vigilance of keeping your story straight, the quiet guilt that lingers, the fear that always lurks underneath. That's the real trade: your peace of mind, traded for something that was never going to make you happy anyway. Once you see it clearly, the choice gets easy.

Now, honesty gets a bad rap sometimes — mistaken for bluntness. There's an old joke: a man in a job interview is asked his biggest weakness. "Honesty," he says. The interviewer smiles, tells him that's not really a weakness. He shoots back, "I don't care what you think."

Funny — but she was right. That wasn't honesty. That was rudeness wearing honesty's name tag. Real honesty never travels alone. It comes hand in hand with kindness and respect. Take those away, and what's left isn't honesty — it's just an excuse to be unkind.

So let's give honesty its proper seat at the table — right beside kindness, right beside respect. Do that, and something wonderful happens: your peace of mind deepens, your happiness stops depending on what you can get away with, and starts becoming something you simply are.

---

Love

Real Love — yeah, the one with a capital L — isn't just some feeling that shows up and disappears whenever it feels like it. That's "being in love," and trust me, that's a totally different game.

Here's the thing: Love is a value. It's something you get to choose to make important in your life — just like you choose to be honest, kind, humble, cheerful, or empathetic. And once you decide love matters to you, it quietly starts shaping everything: how you think, what you do, how you show up for people.

Which means Love is actually a verb. Not a mood. A verb. It's choosing to do sweet, thoughtful things for your partner, your family, your closest friends — on purpose, again and again. And here's the magic part: when you keep doing that, the feeling shows up on its own. Every time. Guaranteed.

So Love (the lasting, real kind) is a feeling that grows out of loving actions — actions you chose because you decided love was worth prioritizing.

And that's exactly why so many marriages fall apart. People sit around waiting for the feeling of Love to magically appear, without realizing it was never going to show up first. Love starts as a value. Then becomes an act. Then it becomes a feeling. It's a choice — one you get to make, every single day.

Value. Act. Feeling. That's Love.

Now compare that to "being in love" — that dizzy, swoony, can't-think-straight infatuation. It feels incredible... for a while. But it was never built to last a lifetime. Sometimes it barely lasts a few months.

And not knowing the difference? It's quietly wrecked careers, torn apart families, and derailed more lives than anyone talks about.

(inspired by S. Covey)

---

The Profit We Cannot Count

Imagine owning a car wash.

At the end of the day, you can count the money you have made. That is one kind of profit.

But there is another profit that cannot be counted.

It is in the smile of the person who drives away in a clean, shining car. In the small joy it brings to someone who has had a difficult day. In the feeling that, somehow, life looks a little better than it did an hour ago.

Every business leaves something behind in the lives of the people it serves.

We can measure our success by how much money we make.
But perhaps we should also measure it by how many lives we make a little better.

Because money tells us what we have gained.

The lives we touch tell us what we have given.

True happiness lies perhaps as much or even more in the second type of profit😄

Seeking

It was one o'clock in the morning.

Yet sunlight was quietly seeping into our room, finding its way through the narrow gap between the curtains. I could have opened them, but that would have awakened my wife. So instead, I slipped quietly behind the curtains.

There it was—the breathtaking beauty of the midnight sun.

We were travelling through the Lofoten Islands, high in the north of Norway, searching for beauty. And beauty, abundantly, we found.

Since then, I have often wondered whether our whole lives are, in one way or another, a journey of seeking.

We seek beauty.
We seek truth.
We seek happiness.

Yet these are not always the things we consciously pursue.

Sometimes we seek wealth, success, admiration, or the comforting feeling of being superior. Often, we do not merely appreciate approval—we begin to crave it.

And when praise does not come our way, we can easily find ourselves searching for something else: the weaknesses in others, their mistakes, their shortcomings, their foolishness.

The remarkable thing is this:

Whatever we seek, we usually find.

If we search for faults, our world soon fills with faults. For a moment, our ego enjoys the feeling of standing a little taller. But superiority is a restless place to live. Once we climb onto that pedestal, we feel compelled to defend it. Peace becomes elusive. Learning becomes difficult. Growth slows. Even beauty becomes harder to see.

But there is another way.

Today, let us choose to seek the beauty, the kindness, and the wisdom in every person we know and in every stranger we meet.

We will not find these qualities in everyone all the time. But if they are what we are looking for, we will discover them far more often than we expect.

And in doing so, we may discover something even more precious.

A heart that seeks beauty becomes more peaceful.
A mind that seeks wisdom continues to grow.
A soul that seeks kindness quietly discovers happiness.

After all, what we seek is often what we find—and what we repeatedly find slowly shapes the person we become.

What we see...

 What we see is only a very small part of the reality in front of our eyes.

It all depemds on what we look for, which in turn, depends on our mood, on our thoughts.

For today, let us put all other things aside and focus our thoughts and mood on beauty. We will discover so many beautiful beings and things, that our mind is dazzled. 

We will discover the beauty of a blade of grass and notice the mini tiny flowers that often grow unnoticed between them. 

We will discover the beauty of a regular cloud with its amazing texture and lining

We will discover branches of trees, that never drew our attention before, but that carry such an exquisite beauty.

We will discover that the birds are singing and the sweet tones of their song will move and stir our hearts towards bigger truths.

Oh, yes, my dearest friends, let us focus today on beauty

Mother's day

 It is mother's day today!

You may think: "Wow, Dr Hans is really confused now".

I am not! I am perfectly aware that mother's day in most countries is almost 70 days from now (10 May, 26). But we can imagine easily for awhile that it is mother's day today.

Let us do so! And give her a call. Not with a superficial "I love u mom". But let us reflect before we call about 3 wonderful moments we had with mom, recently or long time ago, and pick the very best one. Then share this best one over the phone  or during a short visit and live the moment together again.

You will feel good and a person very close to your heart will feel good too.

It is mother's day today. Let us make it mother's day for each of the coming 100 days. It will the most beautiful mother's day anyone can.imagine!

Even if mom is no longer with us, we can still think about those 3 most amazing moments and become truly grateful for them

😃😊😍

it just fell into my chest

 A small white cloud, floating high above

contained a trillion flames of love

Not infatuation, true love, the very best.

It fell from the sky and entered my chest 

 

Soon, the cloud decided to depart.

It had left all that love in my heart 

All this love is now flowing away

to whomever I meet, any day

 

And soon, from high above in the sky 

another small cloud will float by.

The tonnes of love it carries within

'll fall into my chest, filling my heart again 

 

To be, do, have

Let us consider for a short while the order of the things in our life.

1.We do things in order 

2. to have more and if we have more we expect to 

3. be happy

This leads to the belief, the more we do, the faster we will have enough to be happy.

 

The other day, I encountered a man proposing a different approach:

1. First choose to be happy

2. Then in this happy mood do the things that need to be done

3 The things we want to have, will flow to us if we do things in a wonderful way.

BE first!

 

This may seem a bit wishy-washy, but if we give it some deep thought, it may be worth to consider. 

Choosing to be happy is the thing that makes us  a bit uncomfortable. If we can easily choose to be happy, why so few us make that choice and how to make the choice and manage to be effectively happy?

 

The two key elements of a choice to be happy lie in choosing gratitude and forgiveness.

If we manage to look for the peaceful, beautiful, kind and creative things in our life, it will be easy to experience a grateful heart. If on top of that we throw away the long term grudges against people who were imperfect human beings just like all of us, we will be able to choose effectively a happy mood. 

 

Then do the things in a state of flow with great imagination and a happy mood and the rewards in terms of more happiness and even material wealth will freely flow...  

 

 

 

 

Big purpose, several obstacles

 If we "fight" for a big wonderful purpose, like quality early education for all children including the less gifted ones, it requires a lot of energy and commitment.

Along the way, there will be always mistakes, challenges, small lost battles, that may appear as  big obstacles.

These mistakes may smell like cow dung. The best way to deal with them is to avoid keeping stirring them. 

Leave them to settle and they, just like cow dung, may become fertilizers for something more beautiful, to make our original  purpose stronger. The main thing is to be able to learn the valuable lessons they often contain and then  leave them behind as soon as possible and resume the focus on our big wonderful aim!

Let's come back to our senses

 Recently, it looks like our society is becoming slowly victim of the blind greed of influencers playing mercilessly with the feelings of all layers of society to highlight incidents happening in service institutions and vilifying institutions providing high levels of service.

Many institutions provide heartfelt and wonderful services to thousands, or tens of thousands of people needing those services. All services are provided by human beings and even the most dedicated and most well meaning human beings are not perfect. It would be nice to have all services like child care, playschools, medical care and even transportation services to have zero incidents, but that is clearly impossible.

We rely on committed humans to provide services of child care in numerous well-run organizations. Lately one of the well-managed child care centers has been the target of an unscrupulous social media influencer. These influencers portray the role of helping the "poor victims" of dedicated service providers. 

 If we, as a society allow these unscrupulous seekers of influence and attention to sweep up feelings of our society against established solid institutions of care service, leading to excessive litigation, we may well end up in the dire situation of so-called advanced societies where basic service become unaffordable or simply not available. For anyone following what is happening to health care in the UK, it  is heart breaking to see how one of the formerly best systems of service has suffered extremely under the threat of continuous excessive litigation and has become a bad of example of how health care should not be 

I have worked personally in a major hospital in Malaysia. Whenever humans, no matter how dedicated and experienced, are working for the good of their patients/clients, errors do happen. We are humans and not a single human is perfect. People serving thousands of needy others in excellent ways, should not suffer excessive litigation for the one human error they unwillingly make. To err is human and if our service providers are systematically vilified based on that intrinsic human trait of imperfection we may end up in situations like the US or the UK where services are slowly but certainly becoming increasingly unavailable or unaffordable. 

Airlines operate at the highest possible standards, but does any well-run airline have zero incidents? NO! Do they deserve vilification and boycotting of their services based on the rare incidents that do happen?NO! If we become as intolerant as materialistically driven societies in some Western nations, we may end up as them with unaffordable and worse,  unavailable service. 

Let us not give too much attention to unscrupulous influencers who are out there, hungry for fame, recognition and certainly some of them just want wealth, through exploitation of human suffering and vilification of service providers who are often dedicated but who are human and inherently to human nature, are not perfect 

 Let us come to our senses. Let us reject the model dominating many formerly advanced nations (now rapidly receding); let is reject the model of hatred, intolerance, grudges, greed, all leading to crumbling and the downfall of useful and necessary services

Let's all walk on the path of our Creator, paved with peace, beauty, love, grace, gratefulness and forgiveness.

 

Not Easy

 It is not easy 

to remain kind to people at all times

even if they have done nasty things to us

but it is the way of our Creator, the way of the Universe

 

It is not easy sometimes to forgive ourselves

it is not easy to forgive the jealous people trying to harm us

but it is the way of our Creator, the way of the universe

 

It is not easy to be grateful for the small nice things in our lives

when we are the in the midst of a a chaotic challenge

but it is the way the of our Creator, the way of the Universe

 

If we manage to choose the way of our Creator

or if you do not believe in a Creator, the way of the universe,

we will be on that path paved with peace, beauty and love

and the chaos will settle faster than ever imagined possible 

Lotus flowers

 Inspired by Thich Nath Hanh

In everyone’s life there are mistakes, painful mistakes; in everyone’s life there is suffering and pain and it muddies the waters of life. And what happens so often? We keep stressed about what went wrong in the past, we keep grudges against others, against ourselves and we keep stirring up the dirt, disturbing our life.

If we manage on the other hand to make it quiet in our mind, heart and soul through forgiveness (for others and, equally important or even more important, for ourselves) and gratitude for the all the wonderful things that remain in our life, the dust and mud tends to settle on the bottom of the waters of our life and the water becomes clear.

The mud and dirt, the suffering and pain we experienced or created for ourselves does not disappear but if we allow it to be settled solidly at the bottom of the lake of our life,it can become a great fertilizer for wonderful lotus flowers that are rooted deep in the mud but make our life so beautiful, not only to ourselves but to everyone to who sees them. The flowers are the lessons learned, the wisdom and love we gained through sincere forgiveness, the sweet peace lying in heartfelt gratitude,...

On and off, a storm may come and stir up the mud from the bottom but the more we practice peace of mind, the more skilled we become in quieting down everything and allow the dust and mud to settle very fast again. Becoming again the very much needed fertilizer for the wonderful flowers in our life.  

Awakening

There are periods in time, when I forget to be grateful for all "small" miraculous things, events, feelings that happen that we experience on a daily basis. These are the weeks that pass unnoticed and tend to be less filled with satisfaction and with personal growth. Choosing to be grateful for the daily presents we get from the universe, we automatically become more aware of the peace, the beauty, the love and all other amazing things that surround us. Below a small poem about the end of a few weeks that had gone by without making time for reflection about this:

 

After what seemed an eternity of spiritual hibernation

I felt a surge of appreciation for all wonders of creation

Like a tree in winter that had looked as if ti was dead too long

I had been void of gratitude, but now it all came back, so strong

 

Just like a melody of two birds sitting on a branch in spring

I have started again to listen to my heart and my soul sing

Their song, while always there had fallen on deaf ears.

Now that this is over, my mind loves again the music it hears.

 

Aufie Zophy 

 

 

 

  

Choosing peace

    As I walked in my garden an egret suddenly flew up. 

I had not seen it and it may have been scared by my presence

It was flapping its white wings and in my mind 

it made me think of the white dove that brings peace.

 

 

At these times, let us choose peace

Let us not buy into any of the fear and war mongering messages of our greedy politicians who willfully distort truth, preaching the necessity of a war, that will fill only their pockets, while the rest of us face immense destruction of property and enormous suffering. 

 

Please do not buy into war.

War is only one thing: terrible! 

Please condemn all war mongers

and strive for peace

Peace is ours naturally

Do not let any stupid politician change this. 

 

The Kiss

I am not a great fan of angel stories myself,

but in these times with so much talk about another world war

this one touched moved my soul.

Let it be a source of love and inspiration to all: 

 

I saw white angel

I saw a black angel

 

They met each other

They kissed each other 

 

The kiss formed a halo

And a bright light shone 

 

 It envelopped the angels

and everyone around them 

 

 The halo increased in size

The light became more intense

 

And soon the whole world

was bathing in the light of love 

 

 

 

The river of love

In everyone's heart there is a special place

a spring, a source from where as long as we live

spouts tenderness, cordiality, caring grace

limitless, filling our heart with love to give.

 

It's so easy so wonderful, so natural

to let that river of love and kindness flow

every day, let it run as a cascading waterfall

amazing flowers will on this river's banks grow 

 

Down the stream, tame animals 'll come and drink

the love and affability that the river will bring

It 'll fill their soul and from within will spring

their own source of love, care and understanding

 

Further on, also wild animals will lessen their thirst

they might not have been aware of it at first

but love, kindness and charity is really what they need.

they will soon give up their dirty politics and greed.

 

Finally our river will meet the ocean, meet the sea

The water will take on the colors of that kindness stream

and everyone will enjoy; enjoy the amazing love

as the colors of our cordiality will reflect in the sky above 

 

Aufie Zophy 

 

 

 ‐---------------

I am sure you will enjoy some of my other online treasures as well:

 - Inspirational and motivational poems (I have written them under the pen name of Aufie Zophy)

  https://aufiezophypoems.blogspot.com/

 

- Two fables and a short story (my own favorite is 'Sammy and Alice')

https://shortstoriesfables.blogspot.com/ 

- Inspirational quotes:

https://quotesfromhans.blogspot.com/

 

- Very short essays about simple good things:

https://abcofvirtues.blogspot.com/

 

 Small prayers for this big world:

https://smallprayersforabigworld.blogspot.com/

- Beautiful skies seen by Hans:

https://hansvro.wixsite.com/mysite-1/skies-seen-by-hans  

 

- Beautiful flowers:

 https://hansvro.wixsite.com/flowersbyhans

The magic swan

The magic swan

I passed a lake during a slow and lazy walk

And a swan of angelic beauty came to talk

All the secrets you had, she shared with me

It was there all in front of my eyes to see.

 

I could see all feelings you ever had in your heart

Some secrets were cute , some of them really dark

The swan showed me your thoughts good and bad

And what you have done and what you have said

 

After knowing your secrets, I started to love you more

They were a bit similar to those hidden in my own core

And it is with the real you, not with what we pretend,

That I want to be a good  companion, the best friend.

 

Aufie Zophy. 

 

 

 

==============================================

We are all human and have our small and bigger imperfections. 

If every of our innermost secrets would be revealed 

to the ones who trust us, would we still be trusted?

Something worthy of our reflection. 

Here or there, we may have some work to do...