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| Church service on Christmas Eve - Episcopal Church |
Sinus congestion aggravating a European acquired yucky bronchitis
filled my head and lungs with virulent sludge, coloring my mood on this
Christmas eve, 2014. Here in San
Francisco with daughter and family, with some university work related burden
looming in the background, I am relatively free to rest and enjoy the day with
my three granddaughters who are now at the age that is truly fun. Things are happy overall and I have nothing
that I long for, at least for the moment, that is not mine for the asking.
Yet, I am stricken with shards of melancholy, not for
myself, but in spite of myself. Perhaps it’s
my 68 years of life or my relative isolation from the real world of the living
and oppressed, overindulged by luxury, living in a big house, eating out any
time and any place, going anywhere anytime, living minutes from town not having
to fend off traffic like the rest of humanity, and feeling safe and
protected. Yet things are not well in
the world, and for some reason, this makes me sad on this Christmas eve.
I feel sad for the Syrians, having displaced half of their
country’s population into refugee camps in neighboring countries, cities
leveled to rubble and thousands shot or poisoned as the toll of war. And we don’t even know who is the real enemy.
I feel frightened with the reality of ISIS, its cruelty and
disregard for human existence. I feel
sad for what has happened to Iraq and Afghanistan at the hands of their own
leaders and other foreign powers including the US.
I feel frightened by the impulsiveness of North Korea and
the possibility that a satirical movie could be the catalyst for World War 3.
I feel frightened by the unpredictability and fickleness of
the weather, cold when it should be warm, warm when it should be cold, from no
rain to deluge, snowing relentlessly in parts unlikely to experience such
excesses, and not snowing in ski resorts that should produce big dumps. Happy I live in Hawaii!
I feel defeated by those who think guns don’t kill people,
by teenagers (which I define as 13 to 33y/o) who fanaticize their life a
revenge flick, plotting months in advance to kill their fellow students (or
co-workers) at their schools (place of employment) and then doing so with guns
readily available to them.
I am tired of lying and self-serving politicians, of
irresponsible leaders of our country who continue to spend more than we make
driving us on a collision path to bankruptcy.
I am tired of those who defend people based solely on their
color rather than their deeds.
I am disgusted by how much stuff is made in China, and
disappointed that not more is made in the US.
I’m shocked at how much everything cost and whether living a
long life means taking a voyage to poverty.
I am saddened by those who have all that I have in life but
choose to waste their existence ruminating over the minutia of their lives, and
the lives of others around them.
I’m amazed that, no matter how intelligent or talented
people are, they choose to risk it by some dangerous and aberrant behavior.
And yet I’m inspired by the concept of “changing set
points”, where those humans most able to cope with a changing world as well as
changes in their world is to adapt to those changes.
Happiness and contentment are not a given. One has to work for them. One has to be lucky in life to have a safe
home. One has to be magnanimous in life
to be loved. One has to be introspective in life to ignore and avoid that which cannot be changed rather than to ingest it whole. One has to have the self-awareness of life’s fleeting moment to
focus on beauty and dignity, to shun darkness and the devil, and to treat every
moment as a gift.
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At 93, treating every moment as a gift! |
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