This week I have written about industriousness, initiative, reinvention and responsibility. I have written about the way that human beings come alive when they feel free to take meaningful, appropriate, even obvious actions in support of necessary change.
In reflection I understand that these various expressions are all shoots of the same vine; each an attempt to manifest my personal understanding and expression of the truth that meaningful action is a balm to anxiety.
We can commiserate, complain, kvetch and confer all we want but until we act we will feel frustrated and useless, no different than a damp matchbook is to our hope for a comforting fire. Or, as David Whyte expresses it in his poem Out On the Ocean:
“…always this energy smolders inside
when it remains unlit
the body fills with dense smoke.”
We’d do well, all of us who are hungry to take meaningful action for change, to revisit and reconsider the words of Howard Thurman:
“Don’t ask what the world needs.
Ask what makes you come alive and go do it,
because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
This is the time and place in which you live.
This is the time and place to act.
This is the time and place to express what you are here for.
Go and do.
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