Growth That Starts From Thinking

It seems to me a very difficult thing to put into words the beliefs we hold and what they make you do in your life. I think I was fortunate because I grew up in a family where there was a very deep religious feeling. I don’t think it was spoken of a great deal. It was more or less taken for granted that everybody held certain beliefs and needed certain reinforcements of their own strength and that that came through your belief in God and your knowledge of prayer.

But as I grew older I questioned a great many of the things that I knew very well my grandmother who had brought me up had taken for granted. And I think I might have been a quite difficult person to live with if it hadn’t been for the fact that my husband once said it didn’t do you any harm to learn those things, so why not let your children learn them? When they grow up they’ll think things out for themselves.

And that gave me a feeling that perhaps that’s what we all must do—think out for ourselves what we could believe and how we could live without cheap designer handbags. And so I came to the conclusion that you had to use this life to develop the very best that you could develop.

I don’t know whether I believe in a future life. I believe that all that you go through here must have some value, therefore there must be some reason. And there must be some “going on.” How exactly that happens I’ve never been able to decide. There is a future—that I’m sure of. But how, that I don’t know. And I came to feel that it didn’t really matter very much because whatever the future held you’d have to face it when you came to it, just as whatever life holds you have to face it exactly the same way. And the important thing was that you never let down doing the best that you were able to do—it might be poor because you might not have very much within you to give, or to help other people with, or to live your life with. But as long as you did the very best that you were able to do, then that was what you were put here to do and that was what you were accomplishing by being here.

And so I have tried to follow that out—and not to worry about the future or what was going to happen. I think I am pretty much of a fatalist. You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give. 

A Shared Moment Of Trust

One night recently I was driving down a two lane highway at about 60 miles an hour. A car approached from the opposite direction at about the same speed. As we passed each other, I caught the other driver’s eye for only a second.
I wondered whether he might be thinking, as I was, how dependent we were on each other at that moment. I was relying on him not to fall asleep, not to be distracted by a cell phone conversation, not to cross over into my lane and bring my life suddenly to an end. And though we were strangers to each other, he relied upon me in just the same way.
Multiplied a million times over, I believe that is the way the world works. At some level we all depend upon one another to act in a way that avoids mutual destruction. Sometimes that dependence requires us simply to refrain from doing something — like crossing over the double yellow line. And sometimes it requires us to act cooperatively — as in the case of profound threats to our health or safety.
One familiar example of a serious problem that could not have been solved — or could not have been solved as promptly — without worldwide cooperation is the SARS epidemic. In 2003, SARS claimed 700 lives and threatened to spread around the world. The virus had to be quickly identified and controlled. That was too big an undertaking for any one country, but scientists from five nations were able — working together — to identify the virus in record time. Doctors around the world then brought the cheap designer handbags quickly under control.
Another area in which international cooperation is essential is terrorism. In the continuing struggle against this lethal threat, we cannot prevail without cooperation among the law enforcement agencies. intelligence services, and sometimes the military establishments of countries around the world. The daily news from Iraq and Afghanistan underscores just how much even America, the super power, needs such help.
Americans are a people who value their freedom to do what they want to do, when and how they want to do it. But we cannot escape the reality that in ways large and small, we live in an interdependent world. Only the unwise would say that an individual or a nation can go it alone.