"Take Where You Have Been Hurt...and Use It To Make the World Better"

 I went to visit someone today, someone who saved me from my own depression and anxiety struggles, someone who helped me find myself again and again when I lost...someone who has lost herself to dementia, someone I never got to thank, someone I never got to say "I love you" to. I visited her in a nursing home, hoping just to give her a few fleeting moments of joy. It was a bittersweet visit, but one where we both felt joy. We even pierced through her cloaked memory for a few moments of recognition.

Today, I listed what I had learned from my grade school teachers. However, I must add the key life lessons I learned from Janet:
Take where you have been hurt, and use it to make the world better.
I try to live that, every day.
I was saddened by her swift decline, but that sorrow led me to find her and give both of us the joy of a few minutes today.

Comments

Post a Comment

Thanks for your response!

Popular posts from this blog

Peace AND Safety

Image
  It won’t surprise any of you that I’ve been struggling with this war over Israel. In some ways, I’ve been struggling over it my whole life, just as the world has been struggling over it for generations. To me, it goes beyond the need for a homeland. It is a matter of peace versus safety. I want both. This weekend, I considered going to New York City for a visit with some friends. I don’t feel safe doing so. The protests at colleges like Columbia and NYU are threatening not just to Israelis but to Jews, and they are not threatening just to Jews but also to humanity. Recent protesters have threatened that “October 7th will happen to American Jewish students 10,000 times over,” and Jewish people have been told to return to Europe or Poland. Professors have been blocked from entering buildings, and students have been forcibly blocked from entering their dorms. This is an assault to the very essence of what America represents. My own house, once, was sprayed with sw...
Read more

Don't Keep Calm and Carry On

Image
I have always appreciated a good play on words, a playful rhyme, and a clever slogan.  When I first heard the phrase "Keep Calm and Carry On", it seemed much better than my younger sister's pleas to me to "Chill" or even "Chillax."  It doesn't surprise me that hundreds or even thousands of spoofs have been made on this British phrase from the 1940s.   Below, you will see simply the first page of Google images from today's search for "Keep calm and".  The possibilities are endless, even if the off-rhyme of "calm" and "on" gets lost in the variations.  By now, "Keep Calm and" has become a quintessential meme for the 21st century. What is less popular, however, is the history of this phrase.  Here is where I grow uncomfortable. In the days leading up to the second World War,  the British Ministry of Information created several propaganda posters to help boost morale in the case of a German invasion...
Read more

Repair the World with Lovingkindness

Image
  A conversation today reminded me of how excited I was, back in second grade, to get my Girl Scout pin. I pinned it on my green sash, just so, and kept it upside down as was the tradition: you had to do a good deed before turning it right side up. A week passed and at our next session, all my troop-mates wore pins that showed me they had clearly accomplished their good deed. I, for my part, had not. Instead, I had spent evenings wondering what my good deed would be. Would it be worthy? Would it be enough? I wouldn't have known enough to look at it this way back then, but I viewed my Girl Scout pin dilemma with a very Jewish mindset. Now, as the world is brimming over with antisemitism and brash generalizations about Jewish people are stemming from extreme violence on the other side of the globe, I want to share with you a side of Judaism that is so removed from bombings of hospitals and from hostages wrested from music concerts. I want to share with you my Jewish mindset-- differe...
Read more