Category: Refuse to be Afraid

You got to have a dream

People get so angry and sad. Shouldn’t the world be a happy place?

Life is too short to waste on anger and sadness and resentment. We rage against the machine and rail against injustice — or we try to leave the machine and the injustice alone to flourish without us, so that the hate and anger and sadness don’t burn us to the point where our souls are mortally wounded.

How can we serve as a counterbalance against the anger, not to lash out, but to lift when the world is charging to the depths?

Nourish your mind and spirit with joy and love, and make the world a better place as you can, whenever you can. Be the light against the darkness. The light takes more energy — after all, dark is simply the absence of light, which must be created — but the light heals what ails us, and being a healer is a nobler profession than a destroyer.

My dear mother, faced with the darkness of the world, would sing, “Happy talk, keep talking happy talk …” and I’m here to tell you I remember that song more than I remember any of the dark things that upset her.

And in that song is a truth brighter than any darkness:

You got to have a dream. If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?

Would you rather be safe or free?

(It’s funny what 22 years can do to something you wrote. This chapter, incorporating two newspaper columns I wrote back in the day, may be the most chilling bit in my book Refuse to be Afraid.)

Would you rather be safe or free?

It’s been the central question in the United States of America for two decades now.

In April 1999 a couple of kids at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., committed an atrocity, shooting 35 students and teachers, killing 13 of them, before turning the guns on themselves. In the days immediately after, there was much talk about clamping down on the possession of guns and adding great layers of security to the classroom experience.

I wrote this in my newspaper column in the aftermath:

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Like Harvesting

We check back to see if anybody “Liked” our words and/or pictures – we peek at the sales figures – seeking signs of validation and approval, some little marker that we made a connection.

That’s OK. That’s one reason to write – to reach minds, sometimes to change other minds, and sometimes to say things minds may not like, or Like.

Harvest the Likes and enjoy the attention, but don’t be afraid or discouraged when the Likers are silent. Maybe you struck a nerve or maybe, as the songwriter said, we just disagree.

It’s OK to be that different-drummer marcher when you need to be. In fact, your health insists that when you hear that beat, you march to it.

The sun always sets

On the darkest day of my professional career, the universe conspired to make me laugh.

As the boss droned on about why he had sold the business to our most hated competitor, I looked down and saw the woman next to me was taking notes on a pad.

The pad had an illustration across the top of the page with the words, “One hundred years from now, none of this will matter.”

“Yep,” I laughed, and whispered, “Thank you, Lord.”

It’s sort of gallows humor — after all, you know why none of our current troubles will worry us a century out — but it has more than a kernel of truth.

Whatever’s weighing you down, whatever is keeping you awake at night, even that will be over someday.

Take heart and aim for better days.

Here’s how it will be when the dust settles

Oh, we go through this in cycles, every four years. Such a fuss, such a lather, and in a few months there’ll be the same old realization that “the most important election of our time” produced yet another dose of “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Oh, there’ll be some cosmetic differences, but the vast protection racket will still be in place and we’ll still be toiling away for the privilege of giving a third or more of what we’ve earned to a machine that does not rule over us as well as we can run our own lives. It sounds so bleak, put that way, but it isn’t so much.

After a while you spare yourself some angst and recognize that in actuality your life is your own, your future is in your hands, and you are the boss of you.

Recognizing that you have the power is scary — because you have the responsibility, too — but all told, it’s kind of exhilarating because it’s so, well, empowering.

Choose how you react

“Choose to have the right attitude, and you choose success,” Scott Alexander wrote the other day. It’s an oft-repeated thought: You can’t control what happens sometimes, but you always can control how you react.

Not that it’s easy — what happens can be infuriating or heartbreaking or unintentionally funny, and your first impulse may be to lash out or burst into tears or laugh out loud in, say, a funeral parlor — but you can (and often should) control that impulse.

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The Halloween fear

© Marilyn Gould – Dreamstime.com

Somebody noticed months ago that Halloween night is a full moon this year, three days before what was sure to be a raucous election and in the middle of the ruckus caused by the reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What could possibly go wrong?” the somebody asked sarcastically.

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