reflections & action
on behalf of someone who cared
We lost a family member overnight—a passionate, caring person who did everything with gusto. She fought a debilitating disease for several years but always with determination and hope. She graced the lives of countless friends across multiple continents, adding to our understandings of cooking, art, photography, health care, and literature. We were all so lucky to have her in our lives. I am so glad she is at peace.
Perhaps her greatest passion, beyond her family, was politix and an active commitment to improving the lives of others through electing officials she so firmly, with evidence, supported. I don’t know for certain but suspect some of her final diminishing energy went to watching the unfolding election because it so worried her. She recognized she could not personally change everything in the world but she never shied away from looking at things as if she could have done so.
Each of us can learn that passion leads to a place where we commit to actions which support the outcomes that really matter to us. So many conversations today seem to end with kvetching about things not being right yet far too often that is as far as people’s actions go—to kvetching. I am as guilty as anyone else, I regret
. I will always remember the commitment of this woman who ACTED as powerfully as she could to CHANGE those things that offended her sense of the world. I never heard her quote Gandhi per se but this magnificent woman embodied the quotation attributed to him: ‘be the change you wish to see in the world’.