attitude to inspire

I have come to the point where I can accept that life is just the way it is. Neither a pessimistic or optimistic view, I consider it a healthy balance. The pessimist in me used to see life as innocent people suffer, the evil become rich, the rich become richer, the poor even poorer. I had even scaled down this theory to apply to me; I worked hard and I didn’t get the job, it just seemed that everyone who was doing everything I considered wrong was the only one who was getting ahead. After a few church services, I would be filled with hope eternal only to swing back to poor me when something went terribly wrong. Life happens and that is all there is to it. I realized that the quicker I accepted that fact, the better my life would be. No one is out to get me, I didn’t pick an unlucky number.

I remember someone once told me that if we could all put our troubles in a pile, we would be content in picking our own right back. It’s true, even with my own baggage, I meet people with whom I would never trade places, and then I meet people my age who have accomplished so much more, and I start to pity myself. It’s the cycle and futility of this life. At some point, you are up and then down, some people always seem to be up and others always seem to be down. But those who are up could be just as happy or unhappy as those who are down. Someone asked me yesterday how I was doing. In all honesty, I answered ‘Very well’. My life hasn’t changed too much from what has been causing me chaos in the past few months or years but my attitude has.

Last night I watched a PBS documentary about the lives of two Somali families who lived for years at a refugee camp in Kenya and recently resettled in the US. There are horror stories all around but every now and then I get one that grips me. There was one woman whose husband left her to take care of four kids. She had seen her parents brutally murdered, ran for days, lost her two oldest kids in the scatter, lived in a refugee camp, and the story began as they were getting ready to resettle in America. It is a powerful documentary but the one thing I will never forget is the face of that single mother. Despite her living situation and even her husband abandoning her at the camp, she had the brightest face ever, the most positive energy. She was happy for her kids that were there, she was happy about her first job washing floors, her paycheck meager as it was, her small apartment in Atlanta. She sang when she talked about her husband who abandoned her, saying how tired she was of waiting for him to show up.Of course there was sadness as she spoke of her parent's death, not knowing where her kids were, the pressure of being a single mom but she did not dwell on all of that.If you had just caught a piece of documentary, you would think that this woman had everything she wanted just by the way she smiled and the vibe she gave. At the end of the documentary, she is preparing for her daughter’s wedding and she was not nagging about the cake, the bridesmaids dresses, the number of guests, none of that crap that plagues most of us who have ten times as much. Her ability to overcome her surroundings and not let all the negativity weigh her down was phenomenal. There are people who inspire others just by being. If I could accomplish one thing in this life is to be one such person, that I can live my life so someone else is inspired.