Believing in something bigger than ourselves

This is Forbes magazine's quote for the day today:

"If you only think about your own advancement, your own success, you run out of fuel pretty quickly. But if we believe in something bigger than ourselves, that kind of motivation is self-sustaining".

Elaine Chao,
U.S. Secretary of Transportation


If we believe in something bigger than ourselves.....Our grandparents and great-grandparents and many in their generation looked at life in this way. In the present time, I am sure there are those who would proclaim loudly that they believe in something bigger than themselves--God, country and family. That's fine. It's just that for a good number of them, their belief is not generous, not expansive, not inclusive. For them, it's about excluding what they don't want in their lives and in their country. It's about xenophobia and hatred of the unknown. And they use God to back them up. Those are not the people who rebuilt Europe after WWII, and certainly not the people who built the USA into the great nation it is. But our country's image is tarnished. I'm not going into a discussion of why; I'll leave that to another blog post. Suffice it to say that it is generosity of spirit that made America a great country, not xenophobia and hatred. The latter have always existed, but great presidents like FDR made sure that a lid was kept on them. 'We have lost our way', as an elderly woman visiting FDR's home (Springwood) said to me and my friend Jean when we were visiting there. She would know; she experienced WWII and the horrors it brought.

The quote above is mostly applied to modern workplaces. But it can be applied to our daily lives as well. We need to get over ourselves; we are not an invincible nation, and we won't be at all if we continue down the path we are going. We need a leader who inspires us to greater things; one who takes the focus off himself, his family, his wealth, and his character weaknesses. We don't really need to constantly see and hear what's rotten under the surface; we know. We need a leader who rather espouses values that appeal to our minds and souls and hearts. If the talk is only about hatred and revenge, then our lives will only be about that. If the talk is about generosity of spirit, a will to communicate, and a will to consider others' life circumstances, then our lives will be about that. It is a simple equation that I learned early on (in a work setting): "Garbage in, garbage out". The natural extension is "Decency in, decency out". We need to believe in something outside ourselves, because at present, we're being filled up with garbage, and we need to find a way to empty ourselves of it before it is too late. The media too need to find a way to motivate and inspire themselves and us to be better people. We need to stop taking the hatred bait and to rather espouse, and continue to espouse, the importance of decency and respect. It's slow-going, but it will go a long way toward overcoming the current situation that has most decent people up in arms.

Talking about loss and sorrow

This past summer has been a reminder that life is fragile and that sorrow and loss are ever-present parts of life. I have written several posts about loss during the past several years; it strikes me how we can never really quite come to terms with loss and the grief that accompanies it. It can be the loss of a friend or family member due to illness; I know of several people who have ‘lost’ their spouses to Alzheimer’s disease and to the slow descent into oblivion that accompanies it. The healthy spouses live with a sorrow that they silently carry around with them. Sometimes they are able to talk about their loss; mostly they do not. Others deal with illnesses that may rob them/have robbed them of their mobility and physical freedoms. Others deal with separations and divorce, or the loss of treasured friendships. Most times it is death that takes our loved ones from us. We need only listen to the TV news to know that this happens every day due to crime, war, or tragic accidents (as just happened to my husband’s good friend who drowned last week after falling off his boat); or just the inevitable progression toward old age where again, people we love move into old age, forge the paths they are able to forge through that barren wilderness, before they move on into the world where death takes them physically from us. Learning to let go of those we love is probably the most difficult thing we will ever be asked to do in this life. Wondering if we will ever know happiness again, that question haunts us.

There are other losses that are not spoken about very openly, despite the means for communication that are continually available to us. We as a society seem to be at a loss for words when it comes to truly describing how we feel about losing our jobs, our identities, our pride or self-esteem, about how it feels to be displaced or frozen out of the ‘good company’ at work or in school, or simply ignored by our workplaces and schools. We talk about bullying in society and that it should stop, but it doesn’t. People who are bullied and harassed experience a loss of self-esteem and happiness that is difficult for them to deal with and that may affect them for the rest of their lives, and they may grieve silently for those losses. We are told to deal with constant change in our workplaces, and while most of us adapt to the new changes and patterns, it is neither as fast as management wishes nor as successful as they might hope. ‘Something’s lost but something’s gained, in living every day’, as Joni Mitchell sings. That’s true, but sometimes the gains don’t outweigh the losses. I would argue that it depends upon what is lost and what is gained. Nonetheless, we cannot stand still and we must live in the now. So we are forced to deal with loss and change.

Our sorrows are often right under our surfaces, but we are silent about bringing them to light. I was at a summer party recently, and I met a young woman who told me about her father’s quiet sorrow; he was born in another country and came here to live many years ago, probably as a political refugee. He married and had a family, but he never stopped missing his birth country. For her young age, she was deeply reflective, and her love and understanding for her father were clear. Her description of his sadness was something I could understand viscerally. For I too miss my birth country; it is a tangible feeling of sorrow that I carry around with me, and that I have done a good job of keeping under my surface until now. But I cannot do that any longer. At the same party, I met a fellow expat, who told me that he hated America and that he would never go back there to live. I could never say the same. I love my country the way I love a person—we are intertwined. I couldn’t tell you why it is this way; it just is after many years of living away from my birth country. So I could not understand my fellow expat, although I registered his words and opinions. It made me think of my grandparents who left Italy for America in the early 1900s and who never once returned there, as they could not afford to do so. What must it have been like to know that you would never see your father, mother, or siblings again, unless they followed you to America? Loss and sorrow on both sides. How their sorrows must have defined their lives, especially when their lives took a downturn during the Great Depression when my grandfather lost his pharmacy. I know that their sorrows colored their later lives because my father told me a lot about his family life and how his father suffered. Not all immigrants miss their birth countries; I know several people who have moved from Europe to the USA, who have become successful and who would never move back to their birth countries. But I also know immigrants to the USA who miss their birth countries regardless of their successes. It is an individual thing—how we deal with loss and the sorrows that accompany it. But it is good to talk about it sometimes, because you find out that you are not as alone in this life as you may think.