La Petit Chou learned yesterday that an old friend had passed away. I’d never met Ron, and in the course of telling me a little about him, she said, ‘He had a calming effect on people.’
That’s stayed with me. I’ve been thinking this morning: How many of us have that kind of positive impact? Not nearly enough, I guess, or it wouldn’t seem remarkable. How do I impact those around me? How should I? No new questions, and the answers aren’t easy.
I told a friend recently that I want my work to be intriguing, encouraging, inspiring, to bless viewers- buyers or no- in at least some way. Today I’m remembering that I should have added calming to that list of qualities.
Calm doesn’t sound like much, does it. It’s not exciting, it doesn’t get you up on your feet, pumping your fist, throwing horns, screaming your throat raw. But even the most adrenalized dream-driven wired of us need calm sometimes. The tighter we’re wound, the more we need somebody like Ron in our lives. So even though I didn't knew him, I know he’ll be sorely missed, and the world’s a little poorer now he’s gone.
From Amanda Palmer’s blog:
life will break you.
nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearnings.
you have to love.
you have to feel.
it is the reason you are here on earth.
you are here to risk your heart.
you are here to be swallowed up.
and when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt,
or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree
and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.
tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
- Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
1 comment:
I am sitting here in tears...reading words that speak softly and with tenderness about someone unknown to you...and at the same time are motivational and filled with hope...Ron I think would have liked that...(c;
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