John Swinburn

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
~ Robert F. Kennedy

My time alone with my thoughts is precious.  My time with my wife is precious.  My time with my family, my brothers and sister and my sisters-in-law and nieces and nephews is precious.  Every moment is precious. Today, I am grateful to have moments.  All moments.

Today is Friday, the end of a work-week for many.  This week is a bit unusual, inasmuch as it is the end of the first work week in February, which happens only once a year.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing to look at every week as an unusual, celebratory week?  There’s nothing stopping us from taking that perspective. Though I am not engaged in the work-week in the same way I once was, I have work to do. And this is the end of the traditional work-week.

If I choose to take the perspective that this week’s celebrations are precursors to celebrations every week, I can make every week just as festive and full of energy and delight.

I choose to take that perspective!

Today, I’m thinking of the aphorism attributed to Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

While I agree, on principle, there are days I think I would greatly appreciate being absolutely corrupt.

It’s hard to stay hopeful and optimistic, but if the easy alternative is to be a despondent pessimist, I’d better put my shoulder to the wheel.

Forty years ago today, Patty Hearst was kidnapped in Berkeley, California by the Symbionese Liberation Army and then, not long thereafter, she joined the organization. The world has changed a lot since then. I still wonder whether her conversion was a classic example of Stockholm Syndrome or something entirely different.  I remember the way many people judged her without having any knowledge of what she might have endured. In that sense, the world hasn’t changed much.

I used to think a “curmudgeonly” demeanor was sort of cool, even in myself.  Now, I wonder why I saw things that way.  And I wonder if, sometimes, I still do. Today, at least, when I encounter a person who has that demeanor, I feel sad; I get the sense the person is reacting badly to his or her own sense of shame or inadequacy. It makes me wish I could do something or say something to make it better.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”  One’s judgment of what constitutes beauty says a great deal about the person who makes the judgment.

I read recently of advice a father gave his son, who was facing prison if he did not change his life.  The advice was, essentially, to calm down and to focus on the moment. And the way to do that: count every breath, every inhalation and exhalation, for a while until the fury disappears.  According to the article, it worked.

The solitude of an early morning appeals to me.  Perhaps solitude, alone, appeals to me. But the mix of solitude and an early morning is food for my soul.  I love the time before the sun shoves the darkness into the corners of drawers and gives me just a hint of what’s to be.  Early, pre-light morning and I have an intimate relationship that goes deep. 

Early morning and me.  We are alike in so many ways.  We are more private than we admit.  We have no secrets, but we don’t tell all without a reason. We find comfort in one another’s company.  Our love is beyond words.

About three years ago, a friend shared with me that, each year on the anniversary of her father’s death, she burns a yahrzeit candle. She said, “It’s a Jewish tradition to mark the day with a candle that burns for 24 hours. I watched my father burn a candle every year for his mother, the candle light flickering on the walls at night. Now it flickers for him.” There is something to be said for such a powerful tradition.

It is important, I think, to give people the benefit of the doubt; look for the good lurking beneath the sinister cover, as it were.  Too often, the State is complicit in wrecking lives when those lives might have been put back on course with the right intervention.  By the same token, we must not allow ourselves to be used by bad people aiming to take advantage of our soft hearts. We must discern the downtrodden from the dangerously deviant and act accordingly.

Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.
~Anthelme Brillat-Savarin~
Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante, 1826

This translates, roughly, into “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.”

Today, we say “You are what you eat.”  And you are.  And I am.  And I should always remember that.

When I look in the mirror, if I see no reflection,
just a smudge where my heart used to be,
it’s time to consider just which way I’m heading
and it’s time to look closer, to try harder to see.

There’s still time to recover, still time to return,
to become the man who was there from the start.
Hard work and attention, compassion and hope,
are all that I need to recover my heart.