Friday, Weeks End
Every end is a beginning. Who does not look forward to the end of the work week? The last day of the usual, necessary tedium; and the beginning of a weekend–opportunity for relaxation and reflection. Sunday coming up will be Mother’s day, and I am lucky to remember my mother, and to select a apt greeting card for my wife. Between these two strong women, I recollect in memory my entire life. My mother was a safe harbor of strength and kindness to me in my years of innocence and vulnerability. My wife has been my best friend, a valiant warrior, and mother to our three children for my entire adult life. How much I owe to gifts received from others.
Earlier in the morning I checked the collection of little fiber pots containing soil, holding the pepper, cucumber, and squash seeds that I planted a few days ago. I gave them a bit more water. Water is life. I do not know if they will sprout because they were left-over-seeds from last year. But who knows? Life is tenacious. If a spark remains, with light, warmth, and moisture they will rise.
My instinct tells me that I must feed my mind with kind thoughts. The stories of darkness, machinations of power, of misshapen egos that fill the media are a poisonous diet. I note this morning the President has changed up the story, the rationale behind the dismissal of FBI Director Comey. “He was a show-boater and a grand-stander……”
With all that has been done and said over the past several days a further consideration remains.
Kindness remembers how there might still be virtue amidst a lot of evil. Kindness is aware that when someone shouts an insult, they are not usually revealing the secret truth about their feelings; they are trying to wound the other because they feel they have been hurt – usually by someone else, whom they don’t have the authority to injure back. Kindness is interested in mitigating circumstances; in bits of the truth that can cast a less catastrophic light on folly.
If strengths are invariably connected to failings, there won’t be anyone who is remotely flawless.
…..a disturbing, less well-publicised thought: that – in fact – the world is very unfair. Kind people always keep the notion of injustice in mind.
–Selected quotations from The School Of Life website
