I find the perspective of those who have come before me helpful in shaping how I live my life. These little nuggets inform and guide my days:

This is a wonderful day. I’ve never seen this one before. – Maya Angelou

It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. – John O’Donohue

Be kind, everyone is fighting a hard battle. – Attributed to Plato (among others)

If it’s fifty miles into the woods, it’s 50 miles out. – Recovery term

Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy. – Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

You have not lived a perfect day, even though you have earned your money, unless you have done something for someone who will never be able to repay you. – Ruth Smeltzer

I expect to pass through life but once. If, therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, as I shall not pass this way again. – William Penn

Oh gosh, I admire a number of people for so many different kinds of qualities even as I know that I wouldn’t want to actually be any one of those persons. I admire honesty, straightforwardness, determination, kindness and a sense of personal mission, or purpose, in a person. Be they be known, unknown, well off or poor, it does not matter. I don’t expect to see all these qualities in any one person, but I do see them almost daily among the different people I meet here and there every day. I do not feel a need to have, nor am I envious of, the qualities of personhood that these people have. For me, the gift is just having them in my life day in and day out.

There are so many ways, forms, and reasons for receiving. I might receive “good news” about something that would have little meaning to others, or, I could “receive” compensation or an unexpected raise. I could, receive, God forbid, very bad news about my health, yet that too, would be meaningful, though unwanted. But perhaps I will receive some act of kindness which is aways meaningful, that for some people, never seems to come often enough.

Since today’s Daily Question is so abstract in nature, a response could go on forever. But I remember how meaningful my first cup of coffee is in the morning, so I’m leaving to receive and experience that! 😊

Not once in my life have I ever needed to worry about my basic needs being met. There were years as a child when my hard working blue collar parents struggled to make ends meet, but they always had work and we always had food and a secure place to live. As an adult, my wife and I were both fortunate to have graduated from college and not once throughout our working years did we not find work and meaningful careers. I make it a point to think about this often and take nothing for granted. It has shaped my life’s work and who I am as a person, and how I give of myself to others.

As an average consumer of art, and as an on-and-off creator of photography, what comes to mind first is to say how much I have missed seeing, “feeling,” hearing, and pondering art during the worst of the pandemic. I longed to just be among people who came to enjoy and consume art, be it within theaters, museums, music halls, parks or on street corners.

As the US was still making its way out of the pandemic almost a year ago now, my wife and I took a chance and bought advance tickets to see the Van Gogh Immersive Experience in Boston late this past winter. We went, gleefully, and nervously, fully masked and with Covid vaccination cards in hand and made our way through the nearly two hour presentation of light, color and movement. As much I loved Van Gogh’s work for its own sake, what thrilled me equally as much was how happy we all were, scores of us, to be back, social distancing suspended, because we were filling our badly depleted reserves of art and our need for being among one another as people, enjoying the same thing.

Oh my goodness, Antoinnette, you are dealing with so, so very much here. No wonder you are feeling sadness and of course you are close to tears as well. I have a few friends who also struggle with intense, prolonged migraines and even from my angle of view it seems like a horrendous condition to live and cope with. So don’t think for a moment that anyone here thinks that you are complaining. Instead, you are giving us a chance to hold you in thought, prayer, and love and also in conversation when and however it is a source of comfort for you.