“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.” -
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
There's a chill in the air today. As I gaze out my bedroom window, I'm looking at the mixture of colors in the trees here on "King's Mountain." Gold, orange, yellow, red, all of the colors of fall, all of the colors that remind me that soon we will experience the frost and the cold, waiting to feel warm again. Life will become quiet. The cold will make us huddle closer to those we love, grateful for their warmth and their company. This is our annual, regularly scheduled experience with loss.
Since the beginning of September, I have been questioning, as others have, our purpose, my purpose. Life has become routine, predictable and with each passing day, I have become more complacent. I am strangely, picking and choosing my battles because well, there are just too many to choose from the day to day. The thought of fall means Thanksgiving and then Christmas. The two seasons where we are supposed to be counting our blessings. The loss of color is superseded by love and the spirit of giving. We are also conscious of loss. We are forced to wait for winter to end and soon the colors return.
My heart is grateful and fearful at the same time. I do not like what I see in the news. I do not like what I see at the supermarket, at the mall, at the gas station or on the roads. I see anger in my students. I see their complacency and acceptance the idea that it is acceptable to hurt each other physically and emotionally. These things always existed but not in such a continual and consistent way. Meanness is indeed fashionable and part of our day to day communication. My heart grieves. It also knows that in my grief, there has to be a change of seasons...so to speak. Nothing everything stays the same. It all changes whether we want it to or not. My grief stems from the fear of where all of the aggressiveness and meanness is heading. We are of course in a "fall/winter" in our history and spring and summer can NOT come soon enough.
When did violence and hatred become so fashionable and marketable? When did this officially happen? Historically, in our grief we needed answers. The violence in front of us has left us helpless. Numb. We respond for the sake of our sanity and safety. Over the last decade we saw that we could evolve and that the lines had finally been blurred with respect to honoring the diversity of our society. But underlying all of that change, we didn't see how vulnerable we still were. With every violent act and incident, we are reminded that perception is everything. We can't live in denial forever though. For the heart, civility and civil rights are more important now than they ever were and we have been too complacent. We got spoiled by the progress. We forgot that human beings are capable of hate as much as they are capable of love. The two go hand in hand. We love. We hate. Somewhere in the middle lies sanity and common sense and societal peace.
The heart knows what it knows. The heart leads us to the correct answers. How I wish we would follow what our heart tells us rather than following the herd of indifference. The older I get, the less indifferent I am becoming. I care more now than I ever have about the freedom, to vote, to live. I care about our youth and their misconceptions and their feelings of entitlements. I care that our young become more educated and empathetic. I care about nature. I care more about staying healthy and my loved ones being ABLE to stay healthy. I care about the dignity of our elderly. I care about our safety and our well-being. Let's make love more fashionable than hate. Let's extend our hearts to what is fair and just. Let's not accept indifference, violence and chaos. We are better than that. Our hearts, my heart believes this to be true. My heart has to believe it is true. Everything else spells danger. Everything else clouds our truth. My heart knows what it knows. My mind knows too.
Since the beginning of September, I have been questioning, as others have, our purpose, my purpose. Life has become routine, predictable and with each passing day, I have become more complacent. I am strangely, picking and choosing my battles because well, there are just too many to choose from the day to day. The thought of fall means Thanksgiving and then Christmas. The two seasons where we are supposed to be counting our blessings. The loss of color is superseded by love and the spirit of giving. We are also conscious of loss. We are forced to wait for winter to end and soon the colors return.
My heart is grateful and fearful at the same time. I do not like what I see in the news. I do not like what I see at the supermarket, at the mall, at the gas station or on the roads. I see anger in my students. I see their complacency and acceptance the idea that it is acceptable to hurt each other physically and emotionally. These things always existed but not in such a continual and consistent way. Meanness is indeed fashionable and part of our day to day communication. My heart grieves. It also knows that in my grief, there has to be a change of seasons...so to speak. Nothing everything stays the same. It all changes whether we want it to or not. My grief stems from the fear of where all of the aggressiveness and meanness is heading. We are of course in a "fall/winter" in our history and spring and summer can NOT come soon enough.
When did violence and hatred become so fashionable and marketable? When did this officially happen? Historically, in our grief we needed answers. The violence in front of us has left us helpless. Numb. We respond for the sake of our sanity and safety. Over the last decade we saw that we could evolve and that the lines had finally been blurred with respect to honoring the diversity of our society. But underlying all of that change, we didn't see how vulnerable we still were. With every violent act and incident, we are reminded that perception is everything. We can't live in denial forever though. For the heart, civility and civil rights are more important now than they ever were and we have been too complacent. We got spoiled by the progress. We forgot that human beings are capable of hate as much as they are capable of love. The two go hand in hand. We love. We hate. Somewhere in the middle lies sanity and common sense and societal peace.
The heart knows what it knows. The heart leads us to the correct answers. How I wish we would follow what our heart tells us rather than following the herd of indifference. The older I get, the less indifferent I am becoming. I care more now than I ever have about the freedom, to vote, to live. I care about our youth and their misconceptions and their feelings of entitlements. I care that our young become more educated and empathetic. I care about nature. I care more about staying healthy and my loved ones being ABLE to stay healthy. I care about the dignity of our elderly. I care about our safety and our well-being. Let's make love more fashionable than hate. Let's extend our hearts to what is fair and just. Let's not accept indifference, violence and chaos. We are better than that. Our hearts, my heart believes this to be true. My heart has to believe it is true. Everything else spells danger. Everything else clouds our truth. My heart knows what it knows. My mind knows too.
