Musing

today’s Musing written and published from south Calgary, near Fish Creek Park

walk report: -21C/-6F, overcast and calm, the snow overnight was heavier, Gusta met a new friend, albeit through a fence, no doubt we’ll walk that alley again!

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

my adolescent life was affected by a media that showed me and by a family that let me watch; my values on race and rights were shaped by struggles of people I did not know far away from where I was – I could not then or now appreciate the difficulties faced, the pain inflicted, the hurt felt, the losses suffered – but I learned a little about having king-sized dreams

we read of and observe great transformations – from war to peace, from growth to recession, from feast to famine and back again; so often these large struggles populate history books as if their collective angst could ever be captured in a page or a paragraph or a chapter; on the eve of a holiday (in the U.S.) commemorating a man central to a period of such enormous change it seems odd to see such large achievement boiled down into a single day, but no more odd than seeing such accolades heaped on just one man when what changed as a result of the cause he lead for a time, was the result of a sea-change of attitude, albeit slowly, because of the collective work of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who suffered more and longer, who saw less change rather than more, saw less glory and fewer opportunities than others – they were grist for the mill of history

when things are large, government and media and their audiences forget easily that large change is made so slowly in the lives of most ordinary people – people no one knows much about or every will

“One’s only rival is one’s own potentialities. One’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.” – Abraham Maslow

change, taking time to think about change, is beyond most people so absorbed by the challenges on their plate – so personalized by lives of those around them that taking on the challenges of the larger world, setting aside the needs of those close by in order to lay it on the line for the world, for history, for mankind – that is exceptional beyond description; it is the quality certainly that drives the Einstein’s, the Bethune’s and the Kings’s of our history books but it is the same motive – absolutely the same motive – of those who sign up, who go around the world to lay it on the line for somebody’s country in somebody’s war; some Kings change the world, some change their domain, some reign supreme, some walk, some sit; some just change themselves, a few do it all

Mark Kolke
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... with your voice, teach in order to learn


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