When I check-in with the news, I strain for perspective! The news is grim, one catastrophe after another. Like the serial movie film of the past. We would sit on the edges of our seat, wondering what trouble will our hero stumble into next - and resolve?
When I go for lunch or other places beyond the Internet world, I find an entirely different world in which people who are courteous and decent. People laughing together over a meal. Holding doors for each other. Smiling at folks they don't even know.
It is there that I find hope. In the basic decency of most of the people who make up our world. I remember before going to France for the first time. There were warnings of French snobbery, especially towards those of us with a small French vocabulary. Instead, I found the opposite to be true. Helpful, friendly people, who did not laugh at my attempts to use my meager French - or turn away from me with their noses in the air. The only rude Frenchman I encountered was a very short man who wanted to ride with me in a very small hotel elevator, which would have meant his face would have been plastered to my American breasts. Needless to say, I insisted we NOT ride in the same elevator.
Or hope was film clips of the Obamas visiting with armed services families and the infant who insisted on putting its fingers in Obama's mouth. The news clips of soldiers returning home to families after a too long war.Or our kittens with their lively imaginations rummaging around in my office wastepaper basket, delighting in their own little games.
People here have grumbled about the lack of snow this winter and what it might mean - and then they enjoy blue skies and record high temperatures. Suggesting hope is what we make of our world - from whatever we are given.
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