What is it about people that change the world? How do they do it? What’s the secret?
If you look at any one person that lived their lives this way, you’ll find that they lived from a perspective of something greater than themselves.
You know the story about someone planting a tree, knowing full well that they themselves will never enjoy the tree’s fruit or shade?
“But that sounds too poetic, or too saint-like. How is that even possible, to live that way?”
Its just as basic as that little voice that softly and quickly asks you to stop if you happen to be the first person to come up to an accident on the road. Its that instinctual reaction of helping someone else. Something that we’ve all experienced at one point or another. Only in cases of people that make such large changes, they’ve widened their aperture to see humanity needing help on the side of the road, and not just one particular car.
So if we want to honor someone like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, we can look at not just what she did (which was remarkable on its own), but how she lived her life. And we could try to see how we might find a bit of the same way of existing and experiencing life within ourselves.
Learning how to widen our own field of vision to encompass just someone else. You don’t have to try to take on the whole world. You can just start with trying to see one other person as an extension of yourself. The same life, just formed a little differently than you are. But underneath, the same life.
And what would you want for that same life?
You’d want them to feel safe; to feel loved and to feel free wouldn’t you? The same things that you’d want for yourself. A life well-lived.
This is all it takes.
I’ll bet that Ruth and everyone else like her would approve.
#RBG #RIP #humanity #life #wereallinthistogether
William Schmidt Counseling 