What Can I Do?????

What can I do, in my own small life, to make a difference?

I hear this question from the wounded voice of a 19-year-old college student.  We are sitting together in a small room, and the angst he feels is palpable.  His face is tense, his heart troubled.

I could tell him that if he just left his cell phone in his room while heading to class each morning, he would be changing — if not THE world, his own world.  If he wasn’t scrolling through Twitter, iMessages, Instagram, and Facebook endlessly, compulsively, as he maneuvered between classes…If he would instead look a fellow student in the eye and start a conversation, pick up a book, listen to the music the wind is making in the trees…

He wants to eradicate inequality and racism and the rampant abuses of power.  I do too.

But I know that change starts with the small, daily choices we make in the ledger of sanity.

Two suggestions for this month of deep reading….

Mark Boyle spent a year completely unplugged from technology, living on a smallholding in the west of Ireland.  He recounts his experience — moving, riveting, inspiring — in this book:

Even if you don’t decide to throw everything over as he did, it is a challenging and wonderful read.

If roughing it isn’t possible, consider the healing properties of poetry — reading it, writing it.

My monthly Contemplative Writing Group members are somewhere out there cheering this next suggestion along — James Crews’s anthology of poems specifically intended to cultivate gratitude, joy, and a glimpse of life’s beautiful possiblilities, even in the midst of lingering pandemic effects, social dislocations, economic tumult.

You won’t regret it!

Kathleen