Monday April 29, 2024; 1:24 PM EDT
- Some coincidences:#
- Two friends were born in the same week, in the spring of the year I was born, many years ago. If memory serves me, each year during his birthday week one of the friends sends out a note reminding anyone who cares to ponder it, saying something like this: If there's something you were put on this earth to accomplish, better get to it.#
- Since my birthday is only a handful of weeks earlier, that annual spring message speaks to me a little louder , a little more symbolically, than it might without these personal connections and coincidences in place. #
- And that other friend, born that same spring week those many years ago? He was in my circle of close friends from school more than fifty years ago. No other non-family member saw so many decades of my life. And a few weeks ago he passed away, short of his spring birthday.#
- He held his cards close to his chest through much of his life. I suspect he thought he had not accomplished as much as he could have. I had trouble persuading him that he would never know the ripples of influence that moved outward from him, from his careful reflection, from his moral character, from his inventive decisions. I suspect that he thought that what you accomplish in life is something you see and know clearly, can have confidence in and can name.#
- I'm not sure that we all can have that sense of clarity. I suspect that he doubted himself and his accomplishments in the weeks of his final illness. Introvert though he was, those ripples were always emanating from him over the years, influencing others at near and far distances. There were people in need he served, for one thing -- who can measure that accomplishment? #
- So expecting the surviving friend's annual note to come this year during their spring birthday week, I find myself thinking of tangible and intangible ways a person can satisfy its tolling of the calendar bell. Both kinds of accomplishment are very real, but the intangible, the ideas spun out into the community, say, the motions of spirit and example, the naming of standards for our actions, the creativity, the calling for creativity, all these and other un-measurables, well, yes, we'd better get to those with some urgency too.#