Listen to this!

A few years ago I had a special opportunity to visit New York City for a weekend. So totally not long enough to take in all that is the thriving, full of life, a story around every corner, metropolis. The group I was part of were given a private sightseeing tour of Manhattan and one of the places we stopped was the site formally known as the World Trade Center. It was a powerful and reflective experience. It was at the site that I first learned about StoryCorps. This fascinating project's mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening. I dig that. So when I learned of the National Day of Listening taking place on Friday, November 28, I jumped right in head first.

Now if that date sounds vaguely familiar, you might recognize it better as Black Friday…the day of the humongous day-after-Thanksgiving Day sales where people camp out waiting for stores to open where they can then proceed to elbow, push, and trample their way to the limited-quantity half-off old-fashioned kettle corn popper they never knew they needed or will ever use more than once. Needless to say, there's going to be some competition for time that day.

Well, I don't know about you, but this year I've learned to embrace the simple truth that "the only thing you take with you when you're gone is what you leave behind." —John Allston. So maybe this year is the year to start thinking more about the quality of our actions rather than acquiring more possessions. Heaven forbid the economy gets any worse because people stop buying things altogether, so please feel free to get out there and spend some money. All I'm suggesting is that maybe society would be a little happier, the world a bit nicer, if we made positive actions as much of a priority. Actions like listening, truly listening, to someone.

I've used StoryCorps' online tool to build my list of questions to ask the various important people in my life. My family will be easy to interview, but my friends and I will be separated by many many miles, making for a bit of a challenge. We'll just have to wait and see if technology can come to the rescue. (I'm not worried at all.)

So if you're at all interested, even just a little bit, in participating in the National Day of Listening, click on over to the website and get ready to make a new personal connection, or deepen an existing one, and start building a positive legacy that will out live the two dozen tube socks you scored for a dollar.