Do you move at your own
pace…
feel like you control your own destiny?
Or does it feel like
you are in a laboratory being studied like a mouse in a cage – or like that
mouse that has to navigate some maze in order to get a bit of cheese?
You don’t need the
nation’s worst natural disaster (New Orleans’ Hurricane Katrina experience) to
change your life, to be a “tinker, thinker, a doer.”
The rest of the nation
is taking this anniversary as a push to be top of the headlines. Looking through a magnifying glass and a
satellite to see human nature evolving and changing (or not). It’s almost like this is another world and
people get to watch reality tv, though people here in Louisiana and elsewhere
know it’s real. And tough. Many in New Orleans and around the Gulf Coast
just want to see it as another day, not talk about the experience again and
again.
What the media could be
discussing are the important things, such as the way community values became
center focus in the months after the storm. It wasn’t about blaming and who
should live where or why rebuild – it was deeply personal, “where did you go”, “how
are you doing”, “where are you at now”… It wasn’t a fascination with morbid
curiosity, but a connection to people like yourself. It was a real time with real people doing
what they needed to do inch by inch to pull the family back together, to
support friends coming home.
Don’t wait for a
disaster to remind you what you have. Take
time to determine what is important to you.
Remember the real things that are important in life. It’s not what you accumulate, unless it’s
true friends and holding family tightly.
Good article, though
not from within but from DC (so some outsider parts, but whatever). As Kenneth says, “The –ism part ain’t ever going to be
over. The –ism is the theory of disaster and struggle.” Here, and everywhere. Live your life to the fullest, and don’t
succumb to living in a “lab.”
