Gap Fillers

Righteous indignation travels only so far. Same with pique. Our being irked feels good (maybe) only for a moment. Then an emptiness creeps in. I think that’s the void that needs to be filled once the meaningless material evaporates!

What will fill the void? More of the same? Or something much more worthwhile?

That depends on the well of thought ready for your rummaging around in! If the ‘thought pot’ is filled with junk, then junk will continue to fill the voids that occur routinely.

Take a look at most news websites these days: World News; Money News; Entertainment News. To a lesser degree Sports News and Life Style News.

Still, what’s hard news in any of those categories? World News will have nuggets of fact, so will Money News to some degree, but only to a degree. The rest may have some facts associated with them but to what overall value? Interesting material I suppose, some of it based on facts, but will it change the way you and I view the world and live our lives intelligently?

Oh, sorry! The intelligent twist was added without me thinking. I apologize. I shouldn’t have done it!  Will you ever forgive me? I’ll make it up to you somehow.

I have friends who follow sports hourly; not daily; hourly. I have associates who are in love with entertainment happenings: who is sleeping with who; who’s new recording made it to the top of the charts in record time; which movies will likely burst on the scene this weekend; which star thinks what thoughts about which candidate. All is followed breathlessly. And of course there are the fashions they wear, and the late night hour activities they pursue. Everything is so entrancing, alluring…it makes me sick!

Money and the economy. That’s a serious department worthy of our focus and intelligent inquiry. Yet it is inhabited by many who have opinions to feed and positions to lobby for. The latter make money for the principals, don’t you know; and of course, political points for those ascribing to a particular ideology. Yes; money and economics is a good field to attend to, but it is treated as entertainment today and is mostly unworthy of our attention.

And then reality pops into view. We take a breath, a deep one. We realize there are more important things to consider. Substance beckons for our attention and when we heed the call, good things come into view.

Voids. Nonsense filler. Substantive ideas. Values. Things that matter in our lives.

Recent readers may know where I’m headed here. We’ve had lots of funerals in town of late. And in the family too to some degree. Each deceased is/was important to the family, close friends, loved ones. But some people have a larger presence in our life than others. When they pass away we sense a shift in our reality; sometimes very subtle. Sometimes the shift registers on the Richter Scale.

Cliff Johnson’s passing registered this way with me and many others in our community. Fred and Florence Hafner will be memorialized today; she died a short while ago, weeks, but Fred followed last weekend. He joins the memorial service he planned for Florence! Two for one. But a couple of value to those who knew them.

Fred was 90; Florence was 89. Fred was a tail gunner over the Pacific in World War II. He was a member of the Greatest Generation. He was quiet about that, as were most of his contemporaries. He was the kind of guy my Dad would have loved to know! Dad the military engineer; Fred the user of the weaponry; Dad the systems thinker; Fred the doer. They shared the historical era and filled different roles but for the same outcome. Yes; they would have liked each other.

Florence was the mom, housewife and worker bee at the Social Security Administration. She partnered with Fred throughout their 55 years together and built a family of substance and value. They lived unheralded lives but, like most of us, solid, good and foundational.

This is the substance that fills voids and builds strong families and communities. This is void filler that is pure gold. Like Cliff Johnson, they were the salt of the earth and worth knowing. They lived their lives with honesty. They didn’t make a big deal out of it. They just lived lives of purpose.

May the same be said for each of us when our times come. May we prove worthy of the efforts we make, and the work of others they make for us. May our community be the strong body of the future for others as it was for us.

Now there’s a challenge worthy of our attention.

October 6, 2012