Planting
Seeds
“Every
adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of
an equal or greater benefit.”
Napoleon
Hill
I have learned over the
course of a lifetime to look at things from a distance. In the
moment, it's difficult to experience what is going on around you and
make sense of it at the same time. At least, it is for me. The work
of Caroline Myss has taught me give as much attention to the change
that comes after an historical moment as I give to what happened during that moment. In my personal life, too, I have found that many absolute
disasters turned out to have beneficial consequences. Doesn't mean
the experiences weren't terrible at the time, or that the pain of
those moments wasn't real, but in retrospect, I realize that the pain
and turmoil were necessary for change to happen.
We humans do not change
easily. We require a motivational kick in the butt to get up and do
something different. For example, in my youth people took to the
streets and created sustained chaos to change deeply discriminatory
laws. Every night on TV we saw fire hoses and police dogs, the
battered bodies of teenagers, men and women beaten on the Pettus
bridge, and we had three beloved leaders shot dead. Finally, we woke
up and changed the laws. Schools opened and children learned how to
live with differences. We're still cleaning up the mess, but the tide
has turned, and our future will be different from our past. That pain
was necessary in order to bring about a better life for all.
Looking back through
history, and today, we see periods of terrible carnage: world
wars, bloody genocides, economic depressions that cause insurrections
and revolutions. In their aftermath, people long for freedom and
hope, and their deep dreams of a different world bring about change—a
righting of wrongs. Singer, writer, Debby Boone, expressed it this
way: “Dreams are the seeds of change. Nothing grows without a
seed, and nothing ever changes without a dream.” We must keep
our dreams alive, and work in whatever way we can to make them a
reality.
I believe our current
crisis will bring about change. I believe that it will stoke the same
kind of yearning in people today as did the adversities of the past.
People will step up and do what needs to be done to right these
wrongs. Something good can come of this if we hold on to our dreams
and put our shoulders to the plow. Just as our forbears did, we can
plant seeds that will bear good fruit for generations to come.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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