Lesson of life is enjoy the journey, focus on the good
/The Boston Herald
It was Gilda Radner's father's favorite expression: It's always something. Radner used these words all the time in her comedy and as a title for her book about her valiant struggle with ovarian cancer.
It was a perfect title, because it is always something.
That's what life's about. Climbing hills. Meeting challenges. Facing problems. If it's not one thing, it's another. This is fact.
But in between the hills there are plateaus and in the midst of troubles there are joys. ``To be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings _ it's all a miracle. I have adopted the technique of living life from miracle to miracle,'' Arthur Rubinstein, the world-famous pianist who lived to be 95, once said. From miracle to miracle. That's how he viewed life's journey. Not from crisis to crisis. It's interesting how perspective affects what we see. For years the threat of nuclear annihilation hung over our heads like an unfulfilled prophecy. For decades we believed we were doomed. This inevitability so permeated our national psyche that we allowed billions of dollars to be spent on defense year after year so that we could stay strong and intercept an attack or _ worst-case scenario _ strike back. What's your biggest fear, Americans were asked, and we used to answer: nuclear war. Now that's all changed. Now, because of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, we're not worried about world destruction anymore. ``The 40-year-long East-West nuclear arms race has ended,'' the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced in an editorial last week. And in a move that would have seemed miraculous even a few years ago, scientists set their symbolic Doomsday Clock back to the furthest point it's ever been from ``nuclear midnight,'' the hour of doom, to 11:43 p.m. In 1955, right after the United States tested the hydrogen bomb, the clock was set at two minutes to midnight. That's how close we came. The fact is we've made miraculous progress. And yet the miracle hasn't been noticed. There are no shouts; there are hardly any whispers. Why? Because it's always something.
Because now we are preoccupied with other things. Our schools are failing, our cities are war zones, our factories are idle, unemployment is rising; health care and housing are inaccessible to millions and morale is at an all-time low. These new troubles consume us. And yet... The war in the Persian Gulf ended. This too is a miracle. Many young people may be unemployed but they're not in combat; they're not in veterans hospitals; they're not dead. Radner prefaced ``It's Always Something'' with a parable told by Buddha: ``A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above.
Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other.
``How sweet it tasted!'' In the end a tiger will get us all. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This is our destiny.
The lesson of life is to enjoy the journey, look around, focus not just on the bad that men do, but on the miracles, too. Because it is the good that sustains us, that gives us the strength to change what seems unchangeable.
