(Conclusion)
I also learned that while you’re setting goals, you shouldn’t be afraid of failure. Fear of failure is a far worse condition than failure itself, because it revokes possibilities. The worst thing that can happen if you risk failure is that you will fail. But the fact is most of the world’s truly successful people fail many times over the course of a lifetime. We all know the story of the cartoonist who ran a small film studio in Kansas City, USA. He was such an enthusiastic novice that he went broke. Penniless, he went to the West Coast and created a successful cartoon character. It was stolen from him. After two such failures, he tried again and created Mickey Mouse. Known throughout the world, he was Walt Disney.
And when success has been attained, it is good to remember that money won’t save your soul, or build a decent family, or help you sleep at night. Many of the richest nations on earth have the highest drug addiction, incarceration, and child abuse rates in the world. There is no way we can confuse wealth or fame with character, no way we must tolerate or condone moral corruption, whether in high or low places, and regardless of color or class, power or the absence of it.
I learned to believe so strongly that we get to think globally by engaging in that special exercise called human empathy. Not sympathy but empathy. It is human empathy that will allow you to know what it is like to be a street child looking for a thicker carton or softer earth to sleep on, while the hunger he feels gnaws unceasingly at his innards. It is human empathy that will allow you to know the injustice of removing one decent civil servant from his job and putting someone else in his place simply because political expediency dictated it. And it is human empathy that will make you cry out in anguish at the vile inequity of witnessing the innocent being jailed and the guilty freed, only because the filth of lucre held a judicial official captive.
Be as smart as you can be, but remember it is always better to be wise than to be smart. And don’t be upset and concerned that it takes a long, long time to find wisdom. Like a rare virus, wisdom tends to break out at unexpected times, and it’s mostly people with compassion and understanding who are susceptible to it.
I realized that anxiety in this highly technological computer age has resulted in a confusion about values. What does endure? What do we carry with us into the future from our now outmoded past? Are there any taboos left? Is there a morality still? Has the promised “new politics” become even dirtier? The spiritual vacuum many of us feel is an expression of this confusion, as is the rise of new religions. Movies and plays deal with the non-feeling creatures we might become in the high-tech futuristic age. One of the greatest lines in modern film-making has been “ET — phone home,” because it is a reaffirmation that the old values will endure, that there is a specific need to be rooted in those things we know and love best. They are all different facets of us, like aliens in a new environment longing to be home again.
I have realized with the greatest clarity that the computer may store my bank accounts, my files, my writing, and even my reading someday, but it cannot store the vitality and wonderful moments of long ago nor the nostalgia that wrenches and tugs at my heart for those years when three sons and a daughter, as children, entrusted to their mother, totally, their happiness from day to day, nor the deepest sadness revealed by a husband in the messages to his children as he bade them good-bye. The computer will never be able to capture nor store the pain in the distraught eyes of a daughter nor the great joy one experiences from the exceptional and extraordinary kindness of a son.
I have found out with the greatest conviction in my heart that we’ve got to do this world one small favor. Give back. Remember the people struggling alongside you and below you … the people who haven’t had the same opportunity, the same blessings, the same education. Whatever our ideology, we have to reach down and see if there isn’t someone we can pull up a rung or two — someone sick, someone weak, someone lonely, someone defenseless. Give them a hand. Give them a chance. Give them their dignity. This is an endeavor I have learned we should have the optimum passion for. For the philosophers were right … St. Francis, Buddha, Muhammad, Maimonides all spoke the truth when they said that the way to serve yourself is to serve others. And before them, Aristotle was right when he said the only way to ensure happiness for yourself is to have the passion to learn to give happiness.
I have also learned in my journey that the beautiful five-letter word “peace,” which we all treasure and crave, has been up for grabs for as long as I can remember. Is peace simply the absence of war, or is it really the absence of conditions that bring on war? The conditions of hunger, illiteracy, ethnicity, despair. When 50 percent of the children in some village of this earth die before they are five, and in our very own country, their malnutrition rate has become so deplorable; when a child dies of measles or dysentery for lack of medical attention; when a woman in Africa, for lack of a well, has to walk five miles to a stream and then search for several hours for wood to cook with; when millions of refugees languish homeless; when millions in this world are on the edge of, or are dying from, starvation; when the kill power of sophisticated weaponry brings a country to ruin; when people from my country, scavenging for sustenance, die as the enormous mountain of garbage collapses; and when rain forests are stripped and no planting is done, then let’s face it, the world can never achieve peace.
As I journeyed along, even with the most painful experiences, I never thought that life was not worth living, or that I couldn’t make a difference. I didn’t care how hard it got, and it got very hard sometimes. But an old proverb kept me going: “When you get to your wit’s end, remember that’s where God lives.” I was told by a nun who had been a classmate in convent school that when you get into a tight place and everything goes against you till it seems you can’t hang on another minute, don’t give up then. For that is just the time and the place when the tide will turn. Hang in with life and still keep that passion burning within.
Indeed, I now know that every person’s life could be a story of hope and a story of passion, with its moments of joy and happiness, of pain and sorrow. And each person’s story is different, one from the other. The external circumstances, the material circumstances of that story, are often beyond our control, but they often matter less than we think. We all know many people who complain even when their glass is full to overflowing. And the caregivers who work with the severely underprivileged and the very ill can tell you of many families who bring joy to themselves and others through their ability to see half full a glass that many might find almost empty.
The most important parts of my story are personal. The story of anyone’s personal passion transformed includes family and friends, not just career and work. And it will continue to include my own justifications for choices made, decisions undertaken and conflicts resolved. What we do and how we explain it tells us who we are. We cannot escape the negative meaning that a failure of integrity, a failure to live up to our standards of right and wrong, will give to the stories we ourselves shape. Our society finds truth too strong a medicine to digest undiluted. In its purest form, truth is not just a polite tap on the shoulder; it is a howling reproach. What Moses brought down from Mount Sinai were not the “Ten Suggestions.” They were and are the “Ten Commandments” for all time. I agree with the philosopher who said that money can vanish overnight, power disappear, reputation evaporate, but character — personal integrity — is a rock that stays secure. And we can never ever give anyone the proxy of our conscience.
Close to 60 years ago, the American Army liberated Buchenwald. They found 1,800 bodies stacked alongside an incinerator; they watched thousands of those who were freed die because starvation, disease, and abuse had gone on too long. Crying themselves, the soldiers embraced hollow-eyed children who had forgotten how to cry. It was Eleanor Roosevelt who said, “Within all of us there are two sides: one reaches for the stars, the other descends to the level of beasts.” That is not only a statement of fact. It is a presentation of choice — a choice that many of us are called on to make.
As I go through several decades of my journey, my quest, I cannot help but realize that to have this kind of passion has led me to that door which the great poet William Butler Yeats described so vividly and immortalized: “Your goal in life must not be the perfection of work alone but the perfection of a life.” There are still challenges that await me, for I was on the cusp of a new beginning and passion transformed led me to that door.
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