What Do We Emphasize?

Look for hope, gentleness and kindness.

Today, my precious beloved one, lays on a hospital bed for the 16th day in a row. It has been rough. I have been there most of the time. We have straddled life and death, hope and despair, joy and grief, peace and fear. Yet, love, family, care and humane-ness sits amid the fragility of life. Sacred. Holy. Tender.

Never have I been more aware of how much our values matter, how well we must treat each other and how much hope, a good imagination of the future, matters. Even gentleness has taken on new meaning to me.

I write this week just to encourage us to emphasize hope, gentleness and respect for the fragility of life. It can be so short.

I wanted to share this quote with you from Howard Zinn, in You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History.

A group of colorful hand painted stones with a lapis blue one in the middle with HOPE in black letters. The picture was taken by Nick Fewings.

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

Be Well.