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<\/a><\/p>\nKeeping On Keeping On And On<\/strong><\/p>\n This morning I was struggling as usual with seasonal blues and political angst when my almost-four year old granddaughter arrived a few hours before her usual time. Seven hours later, my mood has shifted into the green, out of the pit and back to the world of living, growing people. Back to replenishment and renewal. Truth be told, seven hour stints with a kidlet or two more commonly leave me feeling frazzled, but today, youth worked its healing magic on the grumpy old granny. Hallmark moment? Not exactly, but there\u2019s no denying that a dip into the realm of enchantment is, well, enchanting. It probably helped that we were one-on-one for most of the day, and that she can immerse herself in imaginative play for long stretches.<\/p>\n Her gentle burble formed a cheerful background to our projects, which ranged from knitting a ridiculous scarf of incredibly soft, incredibly tacky pale pink, fluffy yarn (me) to baking bread (us) and decorating our little fake tree with (unbreakable) glittery ornaments (her). Before long, she got caught up in making nests of tinsel garlands for the bird ornaments, who then got into complicated games with the knitted gnomes and trolls. The argumentative ones got won over by the promise of treats for good behavior and they ended up having a big picnic with a fleet of unicorn and dragons. Now they\u2019re all nesting in the little tree, waiting hopefully for the return of a playful child.<\/p>\n There\u2019s Hope & There\u2019s Hope<\/strong><\/p>\n A friend recently spoke about two kinds of hope; one is the anticipatory hope of looking forward to an awaited, presumably joyful event. That tickle of coming pleasure is as tasty as sugar, sweetening our days and soothing our nights. The other kind of hope is more like salt mixed with pepper, bringing us out of the daily trance with a jolt. This hope is not a soporific but a wake up call. Red alert! It\u2019s an imperative cry for action, a klieg light shining in the dimness of dailiness, revealing what\u2019s been disguised, overlooked, or ignored. This kind of hope inspires a willingness to live a changed life, leaving unquestioning comfort behind. We may not immediately recognize the impulse as hopeful but it is. When despair drags us down into the dark, hope pushes us up to the light, where we can see what\u2019s happening and decide what we\u2019re going to do about it.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the part that has me wondering lately; what am I going to do about the it of the day? I\u2019m very happy with my scaled down life, exchanging a very large house on acreage for a very modest renovated mobile home. I\u2019m thrilled with our relatively small power bills, delighted to be driving an average of 12 miles a week instead of closer to 100. We can and do walk to most of our usual haunts. We don\u2019t have bucket lists and we don\u2019t travel anymore (something we\u2019ve both been very glad to let go of, so no big merit points here). We\u2019re largely ovo-lacto vegetarians with some fish and fowl (ok, and maybe a pound of bacon and a few pepperoni pizzas a year). All these reductions and changes have been voluntary and are practically and philosophically pleasing to us both.<\/p>\n That\u2019s Nice, But<\/strong><\/p>\n So where\u2019s the effort, the hardship, the extra mile? I definitely don\u2019t want to be one of the tediously moral high ground claiming people who make everyone else feel like crap, but should doing my bit really be this easy? Why am I so awkwardly aware that virtue signaling is a reflexive white privilege response to the universal challenge to \u201cget active\u201d? Who, me? How can I possibly do more than I do when I\u2019m already being so GOOD? Personally, I\u2019m finding clearer direction, inspiration and hope from teens all over the world.<\/p>\n The most obvious are stellar girls like Greta Thunberg, and Autumn Peltier, a 13 year old water protector from the Wikwemikong First Nation in northern Ontario who called out world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in March. Her big question was the same as mine: what are you going to do about it? Pretty sure she was talking to me as well as to the international delegates. Closer to home, Kai Joseph, a Kitsap seventh-grader, collected bins of shoes for kids in foster care because the foster care kids her family cares for arrived with funky hand-me-downs that didn\u2019t fit. I do walk local beaches, picking up trash every few weeks; could do that more often. I\u2019m happy to donate shoes to foster kids and knit warm scarves and hats and fingerless gloves for homeless kids. Could do that more as well. I guess my real question is, how much is enough? Do we give until it hurts?<\/p>\n Hurting Doesn\u2019t Help<\/strong><\/p>\n Is giving supposed to hurt? Is it more virtuous if it hurts? I\u2019m thinking no. I\u2019ve been noticing how horrible I feel after reading or listening to the news, how helpless and depressed I am when those narratives run my life. There\u2019s just so much gut wrenching news blasting at us every single day. I\u2019m certainly not the only one who get overwhelmed and flees to the garden, or starts knitting hats and scarves, or makes too much bread and soup. It\u2019s interesting that when I do retreat from the barrage for long enough to regain my balance, that\u2019s when an activating hope bubbles up. That\u2019s when I get renewed, energized, hopeful.<\/p>\n So of course we keep on voting, and exercising our rights as citizens by requiring our elected officials to act in our names and according to our will: Abolish ICE! Set the captive immigrant families free! Reunite those families and make reparation! Get the unfairly imprisoned out of jail-for-profit institutions and help them find their feet. Stop the increasing ecological abuses of all kinds NOW! We can call again and again and we must, for only by letting our representatives hear from us daily, over and over and over, can we expect them to act in our interests, not corporate interests.<\/p>\n Now For The Hard Part<\/strong><\/p>\n And above all, we can all be kind, generous, quick to offer a hand when a need is made known. Stress can make us crabby, that\u2019s for damn sure, but let\u2019s make a pact to stay kind. And happy. I used to think that the pursuit of happiness was selfish, shallow, and frivolous. The older I get, the greater the value I see in happiness for everyone. For one thing, happy people don\u2019t covet other people\u2019s land. Happy people don\u2019t need to fill an inner black hole with stuff. Happy people don\u2019t create competitive hierarchies or play win-lose games with people, places, or things. Happy people don\u2019t make war, don\u2019t steal (legally or otherwise), don\u2019t develop addictions. As the Buddha famously pointed out, happy people don\u2019t need anything and they like to help. So now, I\u2019m trying my best to be a happy person. It\u2019s definitely NOT the easiest work I\u2019ve ever done. Wait, what? So maybe this IS the hard part? Hmmm\u2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" And above all, we can all be kind, generous, quick to offer a hand when a need is made known. Stress can make us crabby, that\u2019s for damn sure, but let\u2019s make a pact to stay kind. And happy. I used to think that the pursuit of happiness was selfish, shallow, and frivolous. The older I get, the greater the value I see in happiness for everyone. For one thing, happy people don\u2019t covet other people\u2019s land. Happy people don\u2019t need to fill an inner black hole with stuff. Happy people don\u2019t create competitive hierarchies or play win-lose games with people, places, or things. Happy people don\u2019t make war, don\u2019t steal (legally or otherwise), don\u2019t develop addictions. As the Buddha famously pointed out, happy people don\u2019t need anything and they like to help. So now, I\u2019m trying my best to be a happy person. It\u2019s definitely NOT the easiest work I\u2019ve ever done. Wait, what? So maybe this IS the hard part? Hmmm\u2026. Continue reading