"Wisdom is a blessing only to those prepared to absorb it.” - anon

"“The person who can bring the spirit of laughter into a room is indeed blessed.” - Bennett Cerf

“If this is a blessing, it is certainly very well disguised.” - Sir Winston Churchill



... in fact, I'm feeling so truly blessed sometimes it really pisses me off.

Here I am fussing about having a team of ladies in to clean my house and getting a fellow to shovel my walk, and there was a family trying to find the warmest air vent to set their cardboard on during last week's storm.

Here I am with a not-curable, but certainly manageable illness for which the government pays about $400.00 month for medication. In the time it took me to write this sentence, the equivalent of another planeful of babies died from AIDS in Africa. They are dead. That's not just a statistic, folks. Babies bodies will rot where they lie, swarmed by flies, because they are dead.

I just got back from market buying a few groceries, and not once did the thought cross my mind that I might be blown to smithereens, or I must identify the remaining body pieces of someone I loved....and still do.

I'm unable to function very well in my job anymore, so the government will pay me a salary for life to compensate.

I can fly home for Christmas, but the only time an Inuit sees the inside of an airplane is during a Medivac situation. It's also probably the only time they get to drink purely clean water.

I can climb aboard the Blogger much-beloved and eternally-grateful-for communication express train here (whoo-hoo!) and get support whenever I need it.

A friend of mine works as a hobby to provide first generation computers to third world countries.

So, yes, I feel so blessed that you are all there. Sometimes, though, you just get the feeling that it's not quite enough, y'know what I mean?.

When I was about 8 years old, my parents gave me one of those little desk signs that everyone puts up. I have mine still..in fact, it's sitting on the desk beside me now.

It says, "Character is the only thing you make in this world and take with you into the next."

I believe so much in trying to live up to that. Of course I fall short, I often fall short. But in the end, it really comes down to just having a sense of timing and budgetting, doesn't it?

Which leads to the perenniel question, "But what can one person do?"

For starters, the little-big things (i.e. the support I've felt)
-the big-little things (i.e. looking at everyone you pass in the eye, and smile at them [this came up in another conversation I had recently, and I forgot with whom....so my apologies!])

Just plain ol' doing what's right. When and where did we lose our sense of "fairness". What if there never has been a sense of fairness from the beginning?Maybe it was just a playful myth that our parents passed on to us to keep the dream alive one generation longer? Stop fighting with each other. Be realistic. It's not going to save a baby in Africa or stop the next bomb from dropping in Iraq. It's not going to stop me from seeing the doctor this afternoon, and it won't stop the multi-million building projects that we keep being told that we need for some reason.

But perhaps it'll put a smile on someone else's face too.

.....and what's wrong with that?




I Am Truly Blessed

The word for today is Being. When we listen to people discussing the theories of art, literature, music, religion or whatever, it is easy to get the impression that many think talking about something is really the same as real accomplishment in any field. The reality of life is being and doing. Our values, ideals and and whole philosophy of life are revealed in what our real values are. If we want to tell the world what our real values are, we are required to live, act, react and become that which we would like to be.





The obvious only person you're ever going to change is yourself. The more pertinent question is "Why bother"?

For me, the obvious answer to that is "For the next generation, my friends. The next generation. I feel I owe them that...it's my debt unpaid."

So, I understand how blessed I am to have lived the life I've lived and am living. "There, but for the Grace of God....

I Am So Truly Blessed...

PEACE.

Posted by Evydense on Wednesday, December 06, 2006 at 10:00 a.m. | Permalink