Topic: coping
Today is election day in the U. S. Unlike many days when we sit around navel-gazing, and many think "we are the most important nation on earth," the world really IS watching us today. For it knows that so many things in their future can depend upon the decision we make, in choosing our next President. Please do not forget to go to the polls! Whoever gets elected, we must look to the future and get on with life.
Even as we focus on the future, museums and stories from the past are important. They help us understand our deepest pain or longings.
Richard "Babe" Karasawa, as a volunteer at the Japanese American National Museum (see http://www.janm.org/ ) , came to understand why he had always felt that he had to be an extra good American. It was driven into him at childhood. Not to be "extra good" came from the common syndrome of Japanese during internment. That of being a "rejected American."
Perhaps, due to trauma of abuse in your past, you have come to share the feeling of having been rejected. That feeling was so frequently mine after being cast out for speaking the truth to my closest friends and colleagues.
Perhaps it is what drives you to be the best you can be at anything you undertake today. Or maybe you've just given up and developed a mediocre set of goals. It can go either way.
Or it can go a third, the way that is healthiest: Just be all you can be, in your own little world, without busting a gut in the process.
