Reporting from a Hopeful Place: “Sunday musings…” 4/21/19
1) Faith. Happy Easter! Happy Passover! Happy Ridvan!
2) 82. Happy 82nd Birthday to my Mom, our last remaining parent. Many happy returns!
3) Letter. Hope vs. Hype. A single letter separates the two, and yet the gulf that exists between them is too large to begin to measure. One is a journey without end and the other is over in the blink of an eye. One could end in joy, while one might bring little but sorrow. Money often changes hands with either; sometimes it ends up in the hands of someone who has it.
Which is which?
4) Kindness. Accepting kindness is a type of kindness itself. Giving brings joy to others. Allowing them to offer you kindness brings them a type of joy.
Sometimes the most sincere act of kindness is to simply say “thank you”.
5) Inchstone. If I use the term “milestone” pretty much everyone would know what I was talking about. A milestone is a major move along some continuum, usually one that is well-established and understood by most of those who would witness it. They are usually pretty large changes. Decisively different from a most recent baseline. Crawl to walk. Solo flight. The first time you sign a medical order and no one looks over your shoulder and makes it official with a co-signature. Your first house. Milestones, all.
There are other times when progress is slow, sometimes painfully so. Still, anymovement forward is an achievement and probably needs to be acknowledged, too. What to call these smaller moves along the continuum that deserve to be noted? I’d like to propose “inchstones”. It’s a bit cutesy, I admit, but you have to agree that it kinda fits the bill. Maybe someone or something just isn’t on the same timeline that we would all agree was normal or typical. What we would consider a barely perceptible advance might have taken the effort and had the same effect as achieving a more common milestone. Cheer the inchstone! Really complex problems of massive scope often move in great leaps and bounds until they approach completion. Here, so close to success, progress slows to a crawl. Celebrating each inchstone that moves you closer to the finish line in the same way you cheered those earlier big jumps might be what it takes to propel you to the finish line.
Be ever kind when you encounter what looks to you like an inchstone being celebrated. What might look like an inchstone to one of us may very well be a milestone as monumental as scaling Everest to another. Achieving them may be what it takes to keep hope alive.
I’ll see you next week…
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