Falling Leaves by Adeline Yen Mah

"The easy camaraderie prevailing in the operating room evaporated at the completion of surgical procedure."

- Adeline Yen in Chapter 21

“Feel good” factor can be obtained by growing self-worth. Simply start sowing by climbing up the hierarchy of your circle of influence in career, school, click or family to gain a foothold of the Alpha status. Nothing sounds wrong about building one’s self esteem in this manner. Yet, when terrible tools and machines – lies, deceit, treachery, falseness and hypocrisy – are brought into this sowing and growing, that’s another story.

Looking deeper, a façade of this sort carried by any individual reveals an intense need, for pretense and perpetual dishonesty is hard to keep. Nobody wants to be described as a bad egg. So what’s this need? It seems to me that this need is the acceptance by the community they are active in.

Moreover, the presence of such harmful competitiveness kills the opportunity for friendship budding. The association between individuals becomes “on the surface”. Once the channel of connection closes, the relation collapses. The prospects of building a friendship are dimmed. Possible scenario of acceptance murdered.

How then can we build camaraderie? How then can we show acceptance? Loving each other deliberately is the answer. Love cannot be forced because the very nature of love anchors on the willingness to the party to give care and concern, to share and to sacrifice. Here, deliberate loving means to purposefully show your love for another person because you truly want to love.

We speak of love but words are not enough. While reading the phase "... professed his love, not by words, but by his every action", I was made certain that love has no power unless accompanied by deeds. It is through making the intention to love known through actions that relationship and the atmosphere of acceptance can be build.

Using the acts of love to kill two birds, each individual’s self esteem is build. We would receive an abundant harvest of “feel good”.