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Beginning again... I'm adding favorite columns, articles, essays and stories. My book of essays was published in 2016. I will attempt to bring the series up to date. Current date is January 2023 and there is much to add. MY WRITING LIFE. SIMPLY SCROLL DOWN...

Thursday, January 26, 2023

ENOUGH TO GO AROUND


 

 January 2018 Community Reporter

 

ENOUGH TO GO AROUND…


This time of the year I love the glow of the holiday lights, the moon shining on fresh fallen snow, the lights of the Cathedral and the State Capital just in the distance above the treetops. In this season of gift giving and welcoming loved ones home I find myself reflecting on the state of our world. While there is much scarcity in this world, there remains plenty of deprivation and misery. There is a dramatic increase, for example, in the cost of education, an increase in the availability of low-wage, part-time, no benefit jobs, an increase in the rate of suicide and in the number of individuals, children and families who are homeless. This week an article describing the increased prosperity and stability of the population of China buoyed my spirit. Believing, as I do, that we are one world and one people, I rejoice when I learn of better living conditions and greater hope for any segment of this world's population. As we move into this New Year I am reminded to live in the hope for enough to go around. You've more than likely heard me say this before, but I think it bears repeating. In 1990 I read Barbara Kingsolver's ANIMAL DREAMS and found there a hope and words to live by that return to me when I am confronted by the woes of the world, the fears that plague, the grief that strikes and saps joy. "It's not some perfect ideal we're working toward that keeps us going...What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, "What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?" Kingsolver says, " The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope…" What she hopes for "is so simple she almost can't say it. " She hopes for …"Elementary kindness. Enough to eat. Enough to go around." She hopes for "…The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed." I embraced this same hope many years ago and have done my best to live inside it and offer it to those in need of a defining path forward. I believe when we live inside our defining hopes we act in the interest of seeing those hopes realized. There is an action toward generosity, compassion and elementary kindness that comes of living in this hope and it brings us to the place of being the change we wish to see in the world. In this season of giving and as a grandmother of young people newly facing independence and adult life I want to be the bearer of a message both hopeful and true. In this season of scarcity and plenty, danger and safety, warm sanctuary and loving arms for some and only the vague hope of these comforts for many, my hope and wish for you is enough to go around.

 

Deborah McWatters Padgett is a writer and visual artist.  For more information see http://www.padgettstudios.com

 

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