 Good afternoon. Welcome to Finding Happiness in Hard Times. My name is Ken Burtis and I'm coming to you from Haleva out at the North Shore. And today we have a special program for a very special year that we're just entering 2000 to 24. The last year has not been an easy year for most of us 2023. In fact, the last four years have been difficult. With the coronavirus, the pandemic, the lockdown, all the things negative that are happening in the world like the war in Ukraine, climate change for sure, mass shootings, it's been a hard four years. And because of the pandemic lockdown, we've lost contact with people we care about, especially our friends. And that's what we're going to focus on today, the joy of friends. That's what's going to help us get through this year as it's helped us somewhat get through the last four years. And we're going to strengthen that bond and hopefully reunite with some of our friends that we've lost contact with. So we'll take that. Friendship is critical to happiness. If you're not, if you don't have friends, you don't have support, you're alone, things seem to impact much, much harder without friends to call up and talk to about and have them listen to you and understand what you're going through. So this is why I chose this show today. If we've got our friends by our side, we can tackle just about anything. Now we'll be talking about, of course, friends during this session, but a lot of what we'll talk about is how things change. We're picking up friends all the time and throughout our lifetime. And we're also disconnecting with friends. And I think a key to happiness is to stay as connected as possible with our friends, because our friends can be that happy moment that we go to when things get really hard, as well as, of course, we can go to them. If we've kept in touch with them, we can go to them online. We can go to them by phone. We can go to them at work in person. So these are critical things to being happy in hard times. And that's why we'll take this. Now when we do the show, because like I'm saying, things change with friends, the friends that you had when you were young are not the same as the friends that you were have when you were middle age or the same as friends that you have for middle age, where I stuck at right now. Now some of them are the same. Many of them are not. Many of them are new. And that's a whole different ball game. It's always changing. And that changing presents problems, but it also presents joys to us. So what I'm going to do is let's just go to with five different times of friendship, because the people that are available and the fact that we're changing all the time and our thoughts about who we are and what we are and what we want out of life are also changing. Therefore, things are much different during these five areas. And the five areas we're going to be taking a look at are preteen, that we're going to look at the teenage adolescent years, and then we're going to look at young adulthood, and then we're going to look at adulthood, red in the middle, and then we're going to look at retired. Now many of you people may not be retired yet. You may not even be in adulthood yet. And that's okay. It'd be sort of a cubbing attraction and something to prepare, something that most of us don't do very well when you were younger as far as staying connected with friends who are important to us, because they remain important to us throughout our whole life. So let's go and let's start with the preteens, the friends that we make when we're young. And we have a picture here of my way preteen elementary school, and just with two of my close friends who are just out in the backyard. We didn't have a lot of money, but we need need a lot of money. This friendship doesn't need money to be strong. We played together. We interacted together. It was always great when we were together. Now that does not mean that things always stay at this sort of perfect. They were living happily ever after during their teenage years, of course, or their preteen years. Of course, things were difficult because we were learning so much and everything was new. Not only were they new things happening to our body and new things happening to our mind as we expanded, but our bodies were changing and who our friends were and how available to us they were are changing as well. For instance, if we take a look at this, I'm no longer able to be in touch with either one of these two young gentlemen. There are friends that I made at this age that I'm still in touch with and I'm very grateful for that. And that's been very important. The other thing that's important is to be able to look at these pictures and remember the wonderful times that we had together and where we were at. Not only were we out with our friendship, but we were out with ourselves. And that's going to be a key thing that we're going to talk about throughout the five sort of stages that I picked out to take a look at. And that is we need to be comfortable with ourselves. And luckily I got a head start on that. My parents made me very comfortable with myself. There was not a lot of you have to do this or you must be this or we want you to act like this type of thing. They were very supportive of me being myself. And when you have that support, whether it's given to you by parents or other adults or yourself, which is probably the most important, it frees you up to be comfortable. And preteen is not the most comfortable time because of all those changes going on. So it really helps to be comfortable with yourself. And certainly I was. And those friendships, because I was comfortable, they tended to be comfortable because I was sort of open. It encouraged them to be open. And that's something that's going to go through all your lifetime. If you have a lot of self acceptance, then people are going to accept you for you, who you are. If you try to be someone else, if you try to please people along the way. And there's a lot of that that starts in preteen and really comes to a head when we get to the adolescence or the teenage years, because we desperately need friends and we want friends. And we want to be popular. And so we look around and we say, well, what would what do people like in friends? Well, maybe I can do that. Do they like somebody who's joking all the time? Do they like somebody serious all the time? Do they like somebody who's very strong or good looking or whatever? Well, what you need to do is to be yourself. And if they see yourself as you see yourself and accept yourself, then they're liable to accept you for who you are. And they're not liable to be disappointed when you finally show who you are somewhere along the line, which eventually has to happen. Okay, let's go to our the teenage years. Let's go to high school. High school. This is my prompt picture. And high school was a very, very difficult time. I mean, our bodies were really catching up to where we wanted them to be. We were beginning to be happy with those. We were beginning to learn how to use those. We were finishing up a lot of changes. We still had some to go. But we were finishing up with that. And we were expanding our friend bases. High school took away some of our preteen friends. They went to different schools, other parents moved or whatever. So we lost touch with them. But we also picked up a whole bunch of new friends in high school, especially when we wound up moving from class to class, instead of high school schedule, rather than staying in one room with the same people all the time and the same teacher. So this gave us a lot more breadth. And one of the wonderful things that happened to me during that, if you remember the preteen picture that we just showed you, my two friends were boys. Well, as you can see, we're doing a quintuple date there. Actually, there are only four girls because we've yet to pick up the fifth, but there's going to be 10 of us, which was a great way to go to the prom with your friends. And the key is I've got four of my male friends at the top there standing up behind the couch and three female friends, four female friends at the bottom. And that was a difficult passage for me. And I think it is for a number of people. It's a very important passage to expand your breadth of friends. This is the time that we have to sort of come to the idea hopefully that friends can come in all colors and creeds and religions and genders. And for males, that can be difficult. It was for me very difficult. My phrasing in high school was I'd rather face a whole den of lions than to ask a girl out to a date. That was so traumatic to me. I was so enamored with the beauty of the young girls and wanting to be able to be with them and to have them as a friend and eventually, of course, in a romantic relationship. But most importantly, to have them so I could talk to them. And I couldn't talk to them for a long time in junior high school. And it took me quite a long time to be comfortable with girls, realizing that they were the same as men were, just the same as other people's differences. Really boils down to where human beings and we're in a brotherhood and sisterhood among everybody on this earth. And to be able to add 50% by adding women to my male mix was a great stride. And to be honest with you, it was fairly easy because I had a lot of women in my classes. Despite the fact that it was the 50s, which I know seems very ancient to most people, they were very smart women and I was in sort of the advanced classes, college prep, if you will. And a lot of those people in there were women and they were very, very smart. Girls seem to be women, of course. And it was just a wonderful experience. And I think now's a good time to sort of talk about that a little bit. There's a lot of what the old saying is men and women can't be friends because sex gets in the way. That's just not true. You could have friends across all our different lines, including gender. And there doesn't have to be a lot of things that get in the way of that. If you're yourself and they're themselves and you like each other and you trust each other and you like being with each other, those are the things that's really important. And those are certainly the time to learn it. But if you don't get that in high school, maybe you're going to an all male or all female school, well, you'll get it someplace down the line. And I hope that that always is an open door for you to be able to be friends with anybody. Very, very, very critical. Friends can do, friends can make your life so much better. There's a favorite quote on mine, and that's by Cicero. I was a Latin major as one of the majors I had in school. But the quote from Cicero is basically telling us and I think we have a slide on that. As you can see, friendship improves happiness and abates misery by doubling our joys and dividing our grief. And I can't begin to tell you how important that is. Now, how much that helps, because we all run into those difficulties, we all run into terrible times to be frank. And there's certainly enough of them today, it where we're at today, difficult times, heartbreaking times. And to have a friend that you can share it with is incredible. It is so, so very important. And I'll be talking later on in the show about how to continue to stay connected to your friends, which I think is a real key to happiness, especially in like the title of my show says in these hard times. So, yes, high school was a major turning point for me that only got bigger in college. And then young adulthood, let's go to our young adulthood slide. One of the things that's great about young adulthood is that you can do some wild things. And here I am being wild with my friends. And you can see a mixture of male, female, different kinds of friends that were out running. That's the last thing I thought I'd be when I was a young adult would be out running. I envisioned myself doing a lot of other things, but to be on a running team, I mean, you got to be kidding me. But the beauty of this was I did it with friends. It wasn't an individual running event. And I did do some running individually with 5K, 10K, and even a couple of marathons. But the most fun was the relays that I did with my friends. And these are friends from the people I knew at the time, a little advertiser long, long time ago. And we were not yet burdened down with a lot of adult things, like for instance, parenting and career. We still were very mobile in those areas. And so it was a time to experiment. It's time to try things. Now, that time never goes away. I still like to be able to try new things. And I hope that you are too, no matter what your age, no matter how young or how old. But the young adulthood certainly was that, certainly was that time to just sort of let it, if you will, all hang out and like I said, try new things. Now, when we got into adulthood and we got married or partnered up or had some kids or did not, we got a career to look forward to and a whole bunch of other quote adult things that we made our, well, our day very, very full. And let's go to the slide with our adult slide. These are people that knew later on and they're out of the beach with me. We just, one of my friends just got married, as you can see in the background. And it was a very special day. It was a day that like the others in the pictures that you just remember every time I remember the people in this slide and some of them have gone since that time. But most of them are there. And whenever I want to feel good, one of the wonderful things you can do in Hawaii to feel good is to go down to the beach, just to be in the beach. And many of my friends got married on the beach. And that was terrific. I got married back in Pupukea Valley, one of the valleys in Pupukea, which was equally well. There's so many wonderful places and wonderful views. But after the wedding, we came down to the beach and spent our time after the wedding down at the beach. And it's always a place where friends can gather and be and be themselves and be comfortable, not having to put on a show for anybody or any place or any situation, but just to be themselves and share how they're feeling. And in this case, you can see everybody is happy. They're happy for the bride and groom. They're also happy for themselves. They're happy for being among friends. And that is so incredibly important. If you can do that, then your life will be full of friendship. And you'll be able to get through a lot of hard times with those friends there that you can count on, that you know are there. And if your friends have passed on, for instance, like some of you might have, you always have those memories. You're never without them because the memories are there at the times that you shared. With that, let's go to the retired. Final slide we have here. And one of the things the retirement does for you is that it allows you to do things that you didn't have time for in adulthood because you were so busy being at work. Well, reading books is one of them. I'm in five, excuse me, three book clubs, as well as three writing groups. And that's what retirement has done to me. It's allowed me to do all these things. As you can see, being around the table here, and this was taken at the Wailua Library, these people are able to take the time now and to read books and to enjoy themselves. And it's all, of course, well-earned. But the thing that I worry about is too many people who reach these ages are sort of stuck. They hesitate to try things. They hesitate to look for things that make them happy. All they know is that they've lost their job and probably their kids had moved on. And if you're younger, maybe you have some parents who feel like this, that are sort of isolated, encourage them to go and try new things, even though they may be older. And when you get to that age, do the same thing for yourself. Life is too precious. And it's too wonderful to sort of sit back and think only of the past and sort of be stuck into sitting in your easy chair indoors, watching the negative news, television on the internet, or listening to it on the radio, and bemoaning the fact that today is just not as good a time as it was when you were growing up. You don't need to do that, because you've got these wonderful memories to look back on. And if you look around the table, these people are all smiling. And they're all my friends. And they were such wonderful friends and still are to have. And I'm very blessed to be able to interact with people and talk to people and share. And as you can see in this picture, there's not a whole lot of men in this picture, which is fine with me. I've always enjoyed being with women. And so, and it doesn't make any difference. It doesn't make any difference where you come from before you got to a Y, or maybe you were born in a Y even better. It doesn't make any difference what gender you are, what race you are, or anything. The only thing that matters is that these are people that care about you, and you care about them, and they'll support you, and you'll support them. This is where we get not only our happiness, but also our strength. Okay, let's, enough of the slides. I think I word you with some of my memories enough, but we're getting a little low on time. So I want to really talk to you about importance of maintaining your friendships. And this is hard to do, very hard to do. People get lost along the way, and we lose track of them. We have so many things even in retirement, even if you're my age in retirement, but certainly before then, there's so many other things that sort of take you, and people slip away. And you need all the friends that you have, because they all are giving you something that you've found in life, not only the friendship with the knowledge that they've shared, the support that they've shared, the variety that they've shared, the things that they've opened up to you that they've shared. That is so important. Now, of course, we have the internet, and the internet has been helpful. I tracked down some people through the internet. Although I must say women are a little more difficult than men because they, many of them I knew with their maiden name, and sometimes it's hard to track maiden name, and they have their married name on there, but it's worth the effort to track down and find these people and share. And most importantly, if they're away, maybe they live in the states or maybe they live in other parts of the world. We can now do that with Zoom. I mean, this program is a great example of that. We can do that and not only stay in touch, but even see them, which is a wondrous thing, so that you can share old memories. And to me, most important, you can tell them what they meant to you. That's one of the things that's been very difficult in the past when I've lost friends. And believe me, it's not only old people who lose friends, you can lose friends anywhere along the line. I can tell you that. And one of the best things about friendship and one of the most important things is to be able to tell your friends how much they meant to you, why they're your friends, and why you like them, and how you appreciate them. Because once they've crossed over, it's very difficult to tell them that. And so one of the things I've been trying to do for a long time is be with my friends, but also tell them how important they are to me and why they're important and get specific and tell them and be with them as you remember back to wonderful times that you had together. And the fun thing is that because our memories, even when we're young, tend to slip away we tend to forget things, not only old people who forget things. But as you're sharing some of these memories, they can fill in some of the spots that you've forgotten. And you can say, oh God, I forgot about that. We had such a wonderful time doing that. And I learned so much that day. I experienced something much different than I had before. That was the first time. And maybe, for instance, that's the first time I get together with friends and I share the first time I hugged Haleakala, which was game-changing, life-changing. It was one of those things that you just never imagined. And all of a sudden, you're doing it and it's the joy that it's hard to describe. And when you share it with friends, it comes alive again. And so when you go back and reconnect with these friends, that's critical. Now, sometimes we're divided, of course, by distance. Like I said earlier, our friends can be far away and it'd be impossible for us to go visit them in person. So that's a difficulty. But sometimes friendships end with disagreement. Because our friends are not going to be the same as this. They're not going to be clones like us. They're going to have differences of opinion. We're not going to agree all the time. But if we disagree with caring, if we disagree with listening and be able to understand where they're coming from so that they can listen to you and understand where you're coming from, and then accept it. Accept the fact that we're different. And that's okay. We're still friends. And that's another thing that's very difficult to do. And I hope that if you take one thing away from this program, that's one of the things that you'll take away from. And if those disagreements occur, and you've sort of chosen not to stay connected, think about that again. And what I always tell people, friends, and my former clients, and my former students, is that always keep a door open. Always have that door open. Because you may disagree now, but that may change. And you think to yourself, oh, okay, well, you know, I can see more where they were coming from. I can understand why we had that disagreement. Or what comes down to is that, oh, it's okay. Disagreement was not that important. What was important and what is important is our relationship. And I need to reach out and reconnect. Now, that's difficult, because the other person may still be harboring some disagreements, some difficulties, especially in an era of diversity, that diversity that drives people away, diversity of thoughts rather than diversity of people themselves, but of, you know, your thoughts and all that sort of stuff. And to realize that the person, your friend, is more important than that. And to be open to that. And to do that, I always recommend to people to just drop them a line. It can be an email. It can be a Zoom. It can be a snail mail. And you don't have to do it more than once a year, but just so that you let them know that you are still here. And they're still your friend, despite your disagreements. And don't try to start a conversation. Don't put anything on that they have to do. Don't ask them for a favor. Don't give them advice. Don't say, I hope you're doing this or whatever. Just say to them, I'm thinking of you. And I care about you as a friend. I always have. And I just wanted to let you know that I'm thinking about you. Do that. And there's a great chance that you'll be able to reconnect. And there's nothing better than reconnecting with old friends, believe me. Now, we're running out of time. As I can see, I'm going into negative time. So it's time for me to say aloha and tell you how happy I am that you joined us as always. Hope you join me again in two weeks. Because two weeks, we're going to be taking this on Valentine's Day. And I've got a special Valentine's program for you. It's called The Joy of Marriage. Or if you will, The Joy of Partnership. The joy of being with a person that you love incredibly. And that's what we'll be tackling in two weeks time. So I hope you tune into that. And of course, I want to thank Think Tech of White for supporting me. I want to thank Michael and Jay and Haley and Carol and everybody there. Otherwise, this program wouldn't be possible. And especially, I want to thank you who are out there who are tuning in. It's always wonderful to be with you. Aloha.