I think of myself as extraordinarily empathetic and can imagine lots of emotions beyond my own, but, for the life of me I can't imagine why anyone would want to be famous.
I think it's so okay that we all come and go as best as we can manage, that our participation here ebbs and flows, just like everything else in life. I'm also sure that this community was founded on the notion of mutual acceptance and respect and a willingness to embrace our differences as much as our similarities, but that doesn't mean we won't sometimes disagree. In fact, it means we absolutely will disagree sometimes. I welcome all your advice, most especially if I come here to vent. So often, one away from a situation can see it in a different light than those of us who're too close. Learning from each other's histories is one of the most valuable benefits of community and our differences teach us so much more than our similarities, the "echo chamber". I think it's so okay that we all come and go as best as we can manage, that our participation here ebbs and flows, just like everything else in life. I'm also sure that this community was founded on the notion of mutual acceptance and respect and a willingness to embrace our differences as much as our similarities, but that doesn't mean we won't sometimes disagree. In fact, it means we absolutely will disagree sometimes. I welcome all your advice, most especially if I come here to vent. So often, one away from a situation can see it in a different light than those of us who're too close. Learning from each other's histories is one of the most valuable benefits of community and our differences teach us so much more than our similarities, the "echo chamber".
I had for many years a dear friend and very close adviser, a Catholic Priest of the Marist Order, Edward Murray, SM. He was the first professional to whom we turned for help with our difficult marriage. Among his many wonderful ministries was to lead a CoDA (Co-dependents Anonymous) community at our parish, facilitating the meetings, which I attended. Father Ed died in 1999, but I still so often hear his words in my head. I think about how he described "fault" in another, that for which we blame them, as a "geological" term, how seeing others' faults as their broken places allows acceptance and forgiveness to enter the interaction, allows love, that this is our human manifestation of God's unconditional love, what He sent His Son to teach us by example. Another thing Father Ed taught me that I think about all the time was his suggestion that what he called Codependency, but what could also accurately be described as the need to control, was Original Sin. He had this long explanation of the Aramaic to Greek to Latin translations of scriptures that led to this, um, misunderstanding. The short version is that Adam and Eve's apple from the "tree of knowledge" was more like the fruit of the "tree of being the one who gets to decide instead of trusting God,"... or something like that.
We're all so flawed. I'm a train wreck who has no right to tell anyone anything, ever, lest they start looking at my desk or my closets or my checkbook, which are always some stage of a wreck, but I hope that from time to time, I'm lucky enough to have friends who aren't afraid to tell me what they really think so that I might have the chance to benefit from their wisdom, and maybe avoid just a few of my future pitfalls.
Y'all're all such valuable parts of this community. We may not be as diverse as I'd like, but I think we make a very nice example of how much diversity can be found in groups that on the surface appear so homogeneous, of how we're defined so much more by our ideas than by our geography or age or color or socioeconomic status. We learn so much more from those whose ideas are different from ours than we do from those just like us. I'd so hate to see anyone leave.
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