I had a wonderful thought regarding that. I guess that as we grow older our imagination grows as well. So when I thought about this question, my imagination took me back to when I was twelve. An awkward age at best, twelve; not yet teen, not still child either.
In my case, twelve caught me recovering from typhoid fever, suffering the horror of brushing out hands full of my hair each morning, skin stretched over a 78 pound skeleton, at the bottom of the popularity chart. It was worse than awful at the time, but when I look back, I know without question that this was the beginning of my character development.
Nothing short of my own suffering, confusion, rejection could possibly have led me to such deep sympathy, empathy, understanding of what it’s like to be the underdog. I am eternally grateful for that no-holds-barred battle to survive into my teens.
And today as we adjust our mindless doing “what we’ve always done” and find it necessary to take a moment to consider other possibilities, I think we can look forward to some constructive re-discovery of human values and a re-evaluation of our human connectedness.
What if? What if this unexpected turn of events, the recession, were to lead to millions of opportunities to develop better and stronger character among our people? What if being without any of our taken-for-granted conveniences caused us to stop and weigh things in on a new scale?
In the big picture, it’s character that seems to be missing these days, isn’t it? We still admire it in movies and fiction but we don’t see much of it in real life. With character comes respect, dignity, and the strength to be leaders, not followers in the world. Is it not character that seems to be missing at all levels?
Perhaps it hasn’t really gone anywhere but simple has lacked an arena in which to perform for some time now.
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