Are you ready?

December 11, 2023December 10, 2023Michael 12 Comments

Are you ready? Only 2 weeks till Christmas. Are you ready? Only 3 weeks to New Years Day. Are you ready? Only 14 weeks until the start of Daylight Saving Time. Are you ready? Only one day until tomorrow.

It seems we are always getting ready for something. True some things need a good dose of planning. If you’re thinking of having 12 people for Christmas Eve dinner, you should be getting ready now! If you’re already thinking that you can’t wait until we change the clocks back and are standing at the grandfather clock poised to adjust those hands, you are over prepared. And even though it is only one day away, if you haven’t planned for tomorrow, you may be shortchanging yourself.

It is true, no tomorrow is guaranteed any of us, so why plan that far ahead. On the other hand, we can’t treat any day, especially one as important as tomorrow so cavalierly as to pay more attention to an event half a month in the future than to what tomorrow may mean.

Believe it or not, today is the only day you get today. And tomorrow’s today will be the only today then. if you’re lucky enough to be here then. According to data compiled by the United Nations, 150,000 people die each day. That’s a lot of people. It may seem a drop in a bucket compared to the 8 billion people the UN estimates are inhabiting this earth. Unless you’re one of those 150,000. Or related to one of them. Or a good friend of one. The point is, there is no guarantee to a tomorrow. But should we still plan for it like we do for events weeks, months, and even years into the future? I say yes. Why?

How about hope?

C. S. Lewis said of hope, “Hope is the only thing that will keep you from despair.” I believe he is telling us that if we don’t have hope, we live in fear of being one of tomorrow’s 150,000. With hope we look forward to the new experiences tomorrow’s today will bring us just in case we aren’t. It’s why we try to be ready for tomorrow by being our best today.

So go ahead and plan for Christmas, New Year’s Day, even the start of Daylight Saving Time. Did you know there are only 10 weeks and two days until Valentine’s Day. And there’s only one day until tomorrow.

Are you ready?

How do you tell friends you love them? In writing of course! We explain in the most recent Uplift we we say say Every letter is a love letter.

8E9889C9-C52E-4193-8173-81E10EFA22B1

Everyone Happens for a Reason

March 25, 2021Michael 2 Comments

Buried under all the recent CoViD-19 news, a variety of natural disasters, and a couple of mass shootings, the really big news was pretty much missed. Last week the 2021 Oscar nominations were finally announced!

I’ve checked out all the entertainment news outlets and I haven’t seen one yet this year but soon, because there is at least one every year, soon there will be an article about some actor who had turned down one of the nominated roles. “I coulda been a contender!”

The saying is “everything happens for a reason.” Maybe it should be. or at least be augmented with, “everyone happens for a reason.” Everyone does you know. We all have our purpose and that purpose is ours alone. We’ll not do anything just like anybody else and whyever the genes mixed however they mixed when they were mixing to make one of us, there was going to be only one of us. (Thoughts on identical twins still pending.)

The good actors, that is to say the actors who happen to be good people (they are a few) will joke about missing out on a possible award winning role and say, “Oh yeah that could have been me. As the line goes, ‘I coulda been a contender,‘ but I’d not have been half as good.” The rest of them are not so magnanimous. Surely they would have given not just nominated performances but certain award winning performances just because they are they. They are them? It is unthinkable that the hard work and superior skill of anybody else might have actually contributed to one’s nomination.

Bad actors aren’t the only bad actors in the world. We may all have had some moment in life where we made a decision to do or not to do and had we instead not done or done, life may have been significantly different. We fell victim to the shoulda, coulda, woulda syndrome. If I had gone to school, if I had taken that job, if I had played that game, if I had married that person I would be the one with the book deal, the corner office, the vacation home, or the beautiful children. Of course it wasn’t the school or the job or the partner that made any of those things happen. It was the effort of the one in those positions. In truth, when we made those decisions to do or not to do we already set into motion something significant. If our effort would have been great enough to be of value going down one path it also would have been going down another.

Direction Years ago I saw a poster I shoulda bought. I’m sure it woulda made all the difference. I coulda had it on the wall always to remind me to take the right path, which woulda been remarkable because in truth it said I shoulda not take any path. Of course you coulda figured it out by now. It was Emerson’s quote, “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Even without the poster (which woulda likely gotten lost by now anyway) I think I figured out that it’s not the role that makes me me. It’s how I fill it.

I’m not a contender. I’m already a winner.

Spring into Action, Spring into Love

March 18, 2021Michael 9 Comments

Spring is close to being around the corner you can smell it in the air. I cannot remember a Spring I have waited for more than this year, and that’s a lot of Springs. Talk about a winter of discontent. It should have been one of great hope. A vaccine was out and in use! Even though the first doses were administered in December, technically that was still Fall. And then it went downhill.

Right out of the gate, reports of cheating among West Point cadets hit the papers. Of course the Commander in Chief was busy trying to beg, steal, or cajole a few million nonexistent votes (oddly he never tried to buy) so why shouldn’t the youngest of the military try to game their way through the system especially when just the following day the first of over 40 pardons or sentence commutations were issued by Trump in his last month in office. December wrapped up with three people shot in a bowling alley in Illinois. January saw landslides in Norway, blizzards in Spain, and nutcases raining down on Washington DC. In February, if CoViD-19 wasn’t an infectious enough problem to deal with, avian flu broke out in Russia and an Ebola outbreak in Guinea had all of West Africa on alert. The month wrapped up with 5 dead from a shooting in Indianapolis. That lead to February opening with 4 dead in an Oklahoma shooting, and in a weird homage to December, three people were shot in a bowling alley in Central Pennsylvania. Uprisings and protests dominated the news in February and March with unrest in Myanmar, Ethiopia, Catalonia, and Somalia.

With just 3 days remaining in this winter, the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center released a report documenting 3,795 incidents of harassment, physical assault, and civil rights violations against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders since March 19, 2020 that include 503 in January of February of this year. (The Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council (A3PCON), Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University launched the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center on March 19, 2020.) These are only the reported incidents. It is impossible to say what the actual incident frequency is although the Pew Research Center estimates 3 in 10 Asian Americans have been verbally abused since the start of the pandemic last year.

In front of a house on a road I use often there is a sign proclaiming, “Impeach China Joe.” I doubt the people responsible for posting that sign understand what the words mean. Like most bullies, they simply repeat what the head bully says. One of their favored means of attack is denigration. In the school yard fifty years that would be “Four Eyes,” or “Stinky Pants.” Now it’s China Joe, Crazy Nancy, Braindead Bernie. Now it’s every time that somebody wants to look tough without a pack of Marlboro’s rolled in the white t-shirt sleeve, they repeat a select epithet. Even if it was just name calling to make themselves feel superior it would be so wrong, but the modern societal bullies do not stop there. Actual violence, hospitalizing and killing people make up over 10% of the reports received by Stop AAPI Hate. That was before six Asian women were killed and one other wounded in the Atlanta shootings this week.

IMG_20200726_232745 We have a new season starting Saturday. Spring is supposed to be a season of rebirth, hope, and beauty. This would be a good time to start acting like reborn, hopeful, beautiful people and stop the unrelenting slide into the ugliness this country and this world have become. It will take action of your part. Positive action, not just a heart and praying hands icon on your Tweets and emails. I have said this here before, you cannot stop the hate if you are doing the hating. You must love. Make no mistake, the opposite of love is not hate. It is however the cure for hate. The opposite of love is apathy. If you are not actively loving then you are not truly loving, and if you are not loving you cannot oppose hate.

RogersClemmons I don’t suppose that it is coincidence that Saturday is not only the first day of Spring but also Fred Rogers birthday. If I had to pick only one hero to model my life on it would be Mr. Rogers. For over thirty years Mr. Rogers was a friend to millions of young Americans, and with a diverse group of performers shared time, stories, music, and make believe. Unfortunately at the same time, thousands of young American bullies were already gearing up to throw water and hatred on the devotees of Fred Rogers gentle manner and universal friendship.