To Balance the List

We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential. ~Ellen Goodman


Do you make New Year's resolutions? 

Personally, while I applaud those who do and actually keep them, I am more  Mark Twain-ish on the subject:
New Year's Day… now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.

In the fall of 2009, I dared to write that things were looking up in Haiti--the signs of progress were there and I was hopeful that the new year would be even better for Haitians. For those affected by the earthquake and the orgs trying to help in the aftermath, 2010 has been about creating lists of work to be done and patching cracks has been the least of the work.

It's been a challenging year in terms of remaining hopeful and resolute. How do you stay positive in the middle of so much devastation?

During personally hard times, people have asked me how I do it, or express disbelief at the prospect of dealing with it (whatever "it" happens to be at the time).

Ellen Goodman is on to something that sounds very UU-like (she certainly is quoted often by UUs), with balance and all. It's so easy to find flaws in each other and in ourselves--no balance there just a tipped scale for many of us.

It is important not to ignore cracks and flaws, of course, but believing in potential--in you, in me, in Haiti, and in the world--is what gets me out of bed every day during particularly hard times. 

Can you see the potential here?
 

 

A man exits a restaurant after he looked for his belongings. An earthquake rocked Port au Prince on January 12, 2010.

 

Photo Marco Dormino/ The United Nations United Nations Development Programme

Happiness is...

If it's been said once, it's been said a thousand times in a myriad of ways:

• Happiness is not having what you want. It is wanting what you have. --Rabbi Hyman Schachtel 
• When you can't have what you want, it's time to start wanting what you have. --Kathleen A. Sutton 
• If you ever find happiness by hunting for it, you will find it, as the old woman did her lost spectacles, safe on her own nose all the time. -- Josh Billings  
• ...it's that - if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with! Is that right? --Dorothy, Wizard of Oz

And the famous UU quote: Do what you can. Want what you have. Be who you are. -- Forrest Church

What if what you have is illness, loss, and/or suffering? And don't tell me to cherish suffering, the gifts in things like cancer, or the inevitable silver lining, because I don't. I wouldn't wish some of the devastating loss I've experienced on anyone. I think I have become more compassionate because of those losses, but I don't believe that to become compassionate, you have to suffer first.

But, what I have discovered is that I cherish potential, and never more so than during hard times. Happiness is not wanting the cancer that you have, it is believing in the potential to be happy, to be useful, to be loved and to love in spite of cancer or loss or suffering.