Choosing What Matters

Should I focus on voting ballots – their printing, distribution, casting, counting and administration? Or should I focus on something else, like Post COVID Economic Recovery? Which is more helpful to the reader? Which helps me understand the issues better?

Which is more positive than the other?

So many options to consider when making a choice. Among anything. In writing a daily blog, however, I am torn between these pressure points:

·        Am I venting my brain for its own good? Or will this help someone else think through the issue?

·        Will this piece help motivate another person to think positively in the face of major negativity in our social setting? Or will this piece serve to deepen the negativity?

·        Will this piece expand the reader’s understanding of the issue, perhaps uncovering an important, little-considered element? Is that understanding important to our citizenship?

·        Is this more of a memoir item that enhances our human-ness and celebration of it; or is it just a puff piece?

·        Am I hitting on the issues that matter and offering something in addition to what is being said elsewhere? Or am I just adding noise to our public landscape?

You see the problems?  Of course you do! It helps me to know that you do.

So today, I choose…oh heck, I’ll choose positive. The ability of humans to spring back from the negative.

I experience an ocean of creative positivity nearly every day from my SCORE clients. They bring me ideas that matter and their willingness to deliver a product or service to others. Usually these are new things that are not available presently. Of course, there are services that people need but can’t pay for themselves, so nonprofit organizations are launched to do the work. The amount of caring and passion is inspiring to me. I’m the lucky one; I witness this positivity most days.

In counseling kids with drug addictions I learned what inspires them, too. Leading them to focus on the positive is an effort, but when they do the light bulbs come on. You see it on their faces. Tiny bits of seeing the better side of life restores possibility to these kids. They have the potential to do well, like most of us. What they lack is the confidence of the possible. Helping them see and feel that element propels them on to possible. Then the potential.

That process is positivity in action. It is a wonder to be seen. 

That’s what I mean by the ability to spring back from adversity and make something good happen. This is not smoke and mirrors. It is real. It is worth working for. You and I need to know this work is going on throughout our nation constantly.

The undercurrent of positive action is ever-present and accomplishing good things. Celebrate this reality and know that whatever bad we see each day it is offset by many good things we can’t see. One day you may join such efforts and see it for yourself.

Maybe you are already doing so?

September 30, 2020