Hope and Gratitude

                                                

We spend our whole lives in contradiction.

We teach our children to look for one person

In the whole wide world...one's soulmate.

And to love and live with that one soulmate forever.

By contradiction, we look over and over again

For that one person to be our soulmate,

While passing through so many souls, as though

They had no value...as though rejection of them didn't matter...

We love them for a while, live with, and learn from them,

Then keep going; doing it over and over again...searching for

Perfection...

No wonder our children don't do what we teach them...

   ~Lydia Nolan                                              

 
I have been thinking about many things while I am writing, and living, and doing...One thing struck me today. Why am I blogging at all? I know it has been in my nature since I can remember, to want to tell others what I think, what I know, how I know things, who I trust and don't, and why I love and feel so much...Initially, it seemed natural for me to want to post a blog. But then, I begun to feel that what I wrote about was mere fodder, and valueless stuff, when compared to other blogs I've read. Perhaps I needed to find a more important subject than being a writer...
 
There are blogs that keep updates of various pertinent issues in life, like scandals, celebrities, murderers and their judgments; funnies, sad or meaningful stories....and then I look upon my own: what have I offered to anyone of value?
 
I have spent my whole life asking this same question in everything I do. I feel many things, and want to do many things. But I do or change nothing. I live wondering had I done it, would it have made a difference to anyone? Or, would I have been able to see any fruits of labor, or could I possibly be led into more and more important places of value to give of myself more as well?
 
Each person I come to know I feel deeply for. Not necessarily a lustful love relationship, though that has happened in its time past, but more so a friend in the world; a common bond of sympathy, as Einstein had put it...
 
 
Albert Einstein: born March 14, 1879                           Died: April 18, 1955 at Princeton, New Jersey.



   http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/einstein-bio.html 

It was only a few years ago that I read this lovely excerpt of Einstein's, and it touched me so, for I knew that was exactly how I had felt most of my life. But I didn't do anything like Einstein. In fact, I see that all I have done has never amounted to much. The only thing I could really be proud of in any form, or feel my true value came into--though it could be argued by those ones--is the love I have felt for my children.
 
Einstein's words said: "Man [woman] is here for the sake of other [human beings]...Above all, for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends..." And I think about how young I was when I had my daughter...I was 17: hardly an age for a mother, particularly for a person who is cognizant of the smile and well-being of their tiny and precious baby...I wish I had been as I am now...
 
Einstein also said: "And also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy..." And here I find my most heart. I see back to the children I bore, their raising, the ways in which I understood my destiny and plight as a mother, and theirs as my children. How I do wish I could start over again. For I understand so much more than as a young girl, and even when I had the last of my children--I was older, but I was still latent in my understanding...
 
Finally Einstein says: "Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow [humans], both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself to give in return as much as I have received." And this brings me to a vast sea of faces in memory, those to whom I owe so much, who lived and labored--some tirelessly, and without remuneration or renown, or even acknowledgement--and I feel a great sympathy indeed, for us all. For we strive to live, to love, to find what we believe we must find. And through all this, we make so many errors, while trying to teach our children what is forthright and lasting, and becoming of a noble soul. Yet, we cannot blame them for not believing us wholly, since we too struggle to find ourselves--they too, are struggling to find themselves.
 
I am satisfied to be a one in the many, who owns a tiny plot of influence where I can give or bestow on those who may need or want it. I am satisfied now to be one with the many, and to be able to live in that connectedness "by a bond of sympathy..."  for our struggles, our sincerities, our fatalities, and our hopes & dreams, to find what is forthright and lasting, and becoming of a noble soul...