On the Temptation

I alone cannot change the world but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples.

Mother Theresa

These days “uncertainty” is the word of the day. Uncertainty at work, at home, at what the future brings. The present seems to be the most real, but who wants to live in the present where what passed for normal just a short time ago is now abnormal? Do we really want this to be our reality? It seems for many a hard pill to swallow, and with that comes the natural inclination for shifting back. To put on rose colored glasses and pretend, if just for a moment, that it was all a dream. Or a nightmare.

We’ve been through the word “unprecedented;” which in retrospect, we had plenty of clues telling us that the unprecedented was not only a probability, but a certainty. It is nature’s way, is it not, to evolve and change. As good boy and girl scouts, be prepared should be a motto in our toolbox. The box we each have in life to fill and use to get us to the places and do the things that we find meaningful. Material goods, skills we acquire, inherent talents, opportunities, friends, family, loved ones, and sometimes that thing called “luck” or “being in the right place at the right time”–all carefully gathered, explored, cherished, and saved over our lifetimes. We each have a different collection, but looking closely, we all seem to have similar items, just more or less of them based on how we have lived and what we have valued in our time here since birth.

I sit here and gaze out my window to see a blue sky on a sunny, gorgeous day. In the silence, I project numerous possibilities for the future, some bleak, some promising. And as always, I wish that the truths I know that paint a gray picture will be the one that bears little resemblance to what will be. That I am missing parts of the puzzle that someone will add from their toolbox, to craft a reality closer to the one I would rather see with my rose-colored glasses.