but how do we know what our diamond is?

Lynn Ruth, you have always struck me as someone who is driven and knows what she wants to do in life. You know your diamond, yet making it shine is not always the easiest part...
At 41 I still don't quite know what my diamond is and while I think I want to write and be read, I do have other talents too that I do not explore because I write, work and have to take care of my family. Writing sometimes feels too self-indulgent and violates the social being I want to be. Making a difference in the world, doing something for someone that they will remember the rest of their lives, being completely selfless...I am not sure my generation knows what that is. When I help out in kitchens that serve meals to the homeless, I am struck by the fact that there are so few people of my age/generation there. When I was helping out with the White Cross Memorial in Lafayette one Sunday, there were some high school kids but once again, no one my age (except for my husband). What does my generation really care about? What drives us? What's our diamond? How will we contribute to the world? How can we make a difference and how much of our lives and times should we give unconditionally? Can we make the kinds of sacrifices our parents may have made and how do we teach our kids to be engaged with the world, to do something sometimes that does not serve oneself but helps others? Does altruism still exist? I know it does when I look into the eyes of my Berkeley students and that gives me hope, but at the same time, they are a minority where they could have been the norm. I would like to think we progress and become more enlightened but sometimes it seems we're moving closer to the dark ages where diamonds can't shine altogether.

BTW Do people still read this blog or are Lynn Ruth and I floating aimlessly in cyberspace?

Polishing the diamond

This past several weeks have been filled with small, hurtful annoyances and these annoyances have taken up far more energy that I care to admit. I was speaking to a Buddhist friend of mine and she said that my only goal in living my life should be to polish the diamond that is whom I am becoming. If I concentrate on that, the hurts and face-slaps, the insults and upsets will fall away.
I have thought about her advice and I believe that she is showing me the only way to survive personal tragedy. I remember when I was brutally attacked in Redwood City and when I awoke, stitched up by doctors, bruised and aching because of an unexplained attack by an unknown assailant, I told myself, "That man has taken 36 hours of my life. I am not giving him any more."
This has been the way I have tried to operate ever since, but it has not been easy. Living alone as I have with no support system to back me up, I have had outrageous things happen to me and I tend to dwell on them. I am still angry at the man who stood over me and forced me to sign a check for services he never gave me. I still am furious at the policeman who trivialized my fear when I reported him. My stomach churns when I relive Renee Villanueva lying and producing false evidence to get out of paying me the balance she owed me for my automobile, and I seethe when I remember Richard Romanski who judged in her favor despite written evidence to the contrary because she was a wasp like he was. In these past two weeks, I have had money stolen from my bureau drawer, my precious dog Dorothy ran away and I am convinced she has been stolen because she knows her home and would return if she could. I entered a comedy contest and got more laughs than any of the contestants and did not even place in the voting for reasons I cannot fathom.
I have been so busy nurturing these minor grievances that I have not noticed that I am in a play I love, in a part I have learned and enjoy. I am not noticing that I spend my Tuesdays with the most wonderful famiy I have ever discovered teaching two adorable intent little girls to love to play the piano. I am ignoring that I have more energy than ten people I know who are twenty years younger. I am forgetting that every week I make at least one, usually two visits to senior homes and entertain people who otherwise would be stuck in their stuffy rooms with nothing to do but remember the emptiness of the day that just ended.
And so I am trying to slough off those angers and polish my diamond. It becomes easier every day. After all, these people who have attacked me and think I am so weak, have gained nothing really... a ten year old car with worn out tires, a few hundred dollars that I will earn back, a puppy that is not housebroken and will soon suffer the endless medical problems of age. I still have ME. No one can take that from me and only I can make it into the beautiful experience that has become my way of life. I am no Pollyanna. I do not like the people who have stepped on me and I have to exert immense will not to wish them harm. But when I realize that the time I waste hating them is time lost building my lovely castle of life, I know that all that has hurt me is trivial in comparison to the joy of traveling the road I alone carved out and knowing that I am going at last in the direction I want to travel.