Religious Leaders Offer Solutions to War, But No One Cares
I am posting the following as copied directly from an email I got asking for my support in sharing this information. I am posting the following because several people who left comments on burnigbird's blog said that they wish someone would make some positive suggestions for solutions instead of pointing fingers. Well, what if the world's religious leaders got together and vowed to take a unified stand on dealing with world violence, but nobody cared? Apparently they did, and nobody does.

THE ASSISI DECALOGUE
by David Waters, a columnist for the syndicated Memphis, Tennessee Commercial Appeal

What if leaders of the world's major religions got together one day and denounced all religious violence? What if they unanimously agreed to make this plain, clear and bold statement to the world?

"Violence and terrorism are opposed to all true religious spirit and we condemn all recourse to violence and war in the name of God or religion." It could change the world. At the very least, it would be big news, wouldn't it? Apparently not.

More than 200 leaders of the world's dozen major religions did get together Jan. 24 in Assisi, Italy. Maybe you missed the story about it the next day. Most newspapers didn't carry it. And it was hidden inside many of those that did. There was a lot of other news that day. The Enron hearings opened in Washington. John Walker Lindh made his first court appearance.

It's no wonder the largest meeting of world religious leaders in history couldn't even make the front page. Pope John Paul II and a number of cardinals were at the meeting. So was Bartholomew I, spiritual leader of all Orthodox Christians. So were a dozen Jewish rabbis, including some from Israel. So were 30 Muslim imams from Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan. So were dozens of ministers representing Baptists, Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, Disciples of Christ, Mennonites, Quakers, Moravians, The Salvation Army and the World Council of Churches.

So were dozens of monks, gurus and others representing Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Zoroastrians and native African religions. They ignored the personal and political risk of attending such a high-profile gathering.

They convened and talked and prayed. They unanimously agreed to condemn "every recourse to violence and war in the name of God or religion." They also said, "No religious goal can possibly justify the use of violence by man against man." And that "Whoever uses religion to foment violence contradicts religion's deepest and truest inspiration." They called their statement the Assisi Decalogue for Peace. It consists of 10 mutual commitments to work for peace and justice in the world, including this one:

"We commit ourselves to stand at the side of those who suffer poverty and abandonment, speaking out for those who have no voice, and to working effectively to change these situations." On March 4, the Pope sent a copy of the to all of the world's heads of state.

Maybe you missed the story. It didn't even make the newspapers the next day, hidden inside or not. There was a lot of other news that day. Seven American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. Israeli troops killed 17 people in the West Bank. Mike Tyson got a license to box.

What if leaders of the world's major religions got together one and denounced all religious violence---and no one cared?

DECALOGUE OF ASSISI FOR PEACE
1. We commit ourselves to proclaiming our firm conviction that violence and terrorism are incompatible with the authentic spirit of rreligion, and, as we condemn every recourse to violence and war in the name of God or of religion, we commit ourselves to doing everything possible to eliminate the root causes of terrorism.

2. We commit ourselves to educating people to mutual respect and esteem, in order to help bring about a peaceful and fraternal coexistence between people of different ethnic groups, cultures and religions.

3. We commit ourselves to fostering the culture of dialogue, so that there will be an increase of understanding and mutual trust between individuals and among peoples, for these are the premise of authentic peace.

4. We commit ourselves to defending the right of everyone to live a decent life in accordance with their own cultural identity, and to form freely a family of his own.

5. We commit ourselves to frank and patient dialogue, refusing to consider our differences as an insurmountable barrier, but recognizing instead that to encounter the diversity of others can become an opportunity for greater reciprocal understanding.

6. We commit ourselves to forgiving one another for past and present errors and prejudices, and to supporting one another in a common effort both to overcome selfishness and arrogance, hatred and violence, and to learn from the past that peace without justice is no true peace.

7. We commit ourselves to taking the side of the poor and the helpless, to speaking out for those who have no voice and to working effectively to change these situations, out of the conviction that no one can be happy alone.

8. We commit ourselves to taking up the cry of those who refuse to be resigned to violence and evil, and we are desire to make every effort possible to offer the men and women of our time real hope for justice and peace.

9. We commit ourselves to encouraging all efforts to promote friendship between peoples, for we are convinced that, in the absence of solidarity and understanding between peoples, technological progress exposes the world to a growing risk of destruction and death.

10. We commit ourselves to urging leaders of nations to make every effort to create and consolidate, on the national and international levels, a world of solidarity and peace based on justice.

Please share this with all those who, as far as you know, yearn for peace and freedom from terrorism of all kinds.

And, for a really far-out plan to end violence, check out this site on How to stop terrorism without resorting to military action.

Eavesdropping on the Pro-Israel Rally
The Jerusalem Post reports on the Pro-Israel rally that took place in Washington D.C. today and includes the following, which I find very disturbing:
When House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Missouri) said the US is committed to preserving and strengthening Israel's security, the crowd erupted in wild applause. But when he spoke about securing a just and lasting peace for all, the crowd fell silent. [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz, a staunch supporter of Israel, was heckled nonetheless when he said Israelis are not the only victims of violence in the Middle East and that the majority of Palestinians want peace.

When he started a sentence, "The people of Israel and Palestine..." some in the crowd started screaming "What Palestine?" Another, appearing dismayed, said, "This is Wolfowitz?" "No double standards," people chanted as Wolfowitz spoke.
The chanting was so distracting that Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Presidents Conference, asked people at the end of his remarks to stay silent until after the speakers were completed.

I'm not given to prayer, but I think it's time that even I start praying for peace. It doesn't sound like the Pro-Israel people are.

History in Song and Shadow
In Googling for the lyrics of the song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" to cite in the post below, I found it on a site called History in Song, which chronicles history-related songs from the American revolution through the Viet Nam War -- a war which I protested with all of my small voice and big mouth. In surfing that site, I found this entry related to the massacre, by our American soldiers, of the inhabitants of the village of My Lai:

According to accounts that suddenly appeared on TV and in the world press …, a cam-company of 60 or 70 U.S. infantrymen had entered My Lai early one morning and destroyed its houses, its livestock and all the inhabitants that they could find in a brutal operation that took less than 20 minutes. When it was over, the Vietnamese dead totaled at least 100 men, women and children, and perhaps many more. Only 25 or so escaped, because they lay hidden under the fallen bodies of relatives and neighbors.

The America GIs raced from house to house, setting the wooden ones ablaze and dynamiting the brick structures. Others routed the inhabitants out of their bunkers and herded them into groups....

Few were spared. Stragglers were shot down as they fled from their burning huts. One soldier fired his M-79 grenade launcher into a clump of bodies in which some Vietnamese were still alive. One chilling incident was observed by Ronald L. Haeberle, 28, the Army combat photographer who had been assigned to C Company. He saw "two small children, maybe four or five years old. A guy with an M-16 fired at the first boy, and the older boy fell over to protect the smaller one. Then they fired six more shots. It was done very businesslike."

The site shares this disturbing satirical song, sung to the tune of a popular romantic piece, "Wake the Town and Tell the People”
Strafe the town and kill the people
Let's declare a massacre.
Lay napalm in the square,
So you'll know that Jake was there,
Drop the candy in the courtyard,
Let the kiddies gather 'round.
Crank your twenty-millimeter,
Gun the little bastards down.
Come 'round early Sunday morning,
Catch the village unaware.
Drop a bunch of cluster bomblets,
Get 'em while they kneel in prayer.

As a species, we humans keep denying our shadow side, and in doing so, we allow our demons to rule our souls.

It is just this type of mother image that Kali represents. Starck and Stern say "Kali-Ma, the Dark Mother, holds the two edge sword; she has the power to slay the demons as well as the ability to be compassionate. At a certain point it becomes necessary to take Kali's sword and cut through the illusions that protect us from seeing and acting on the truth."

We, who do not learn from history.....
When an open war is impossible, oppression can continue quietly behind the scenes. Terrorism. Guerrilla warfare, violence, prisons, concentration camps..... And those who want peace in the world should remove not only war from the world but also violence. If there is no open war but there is still violence. That is not peace.....We are approaching a major turning point in world history, in the history of civilization. It has already been noted by specialists in various areas. I could compare it only with the turning from the Middle Ages to the modern era, a shift in our civilization. It is a juncture at which settled concepts suddenly become hazy, lose their precise contours, at which our familiar and commonly used words lose their meaning, become empty shells, and methods which have been reliable for many centuries no longer work. It's the sort of turning point where the hierarchy of values which we have venerated, and which we use to determine what is important to us and what causes our hearts to beat, is starting to rock and may collapse.

These are the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from a yellowed Monday February 28, 1977 newspaper article that my mother unearthed this morning in cleaning out her stack of old newspaper clippings. He was writing about communism back then, but he could be writing our world situations today. When will we ever learn; when will we ever learn.

This is from a letter to the Editor...
...in today's Times Union:
To avoid the continuation of the unacceptable status quo, Israel has only two choices: to accept the creation of a Palestinian state and a reasonable resettling of the refugees, or to drive out or kill all the Palestinians in theWest Bank and Gaza Strip, an act akin to the Nazi Holocaust.

Let us hope that the assertion "never again" applies to everyone.

We have been here before, you and I, in our lifetimes.
Read b!X's concise chronicling of reports on current atrocities in the Middle East.

I will not take sides
I resent being prodded to take sides in the Middle East conflict. I have said before in these words, that I don’t support “the weary dreams of men reduced to war,” no matter what side they’re on. I don’t pretend to understand what drives the MEN who are the leaders in these conflicts to so willingly march their people to destruction. As a woman, I don’t share their testosterone dreams.

However, despite the fact that I protest war, if I found myself, my family, my community being systematically persecuted and destroyed, if I found myself facing a future of cultural and national annihilation, I might, indeed, resort to violence. I might, indeed, strap explosives to my body. BUT, I wouldn’t go and kill innocent people in a marketplace or bus stop. What I might do is enlist myself as a Mata Hari type and do what is necessary to get close to the murdering tyrannical bastards, and then I’d blow THEM up, sacrificing myself if I had to. (I guess you could call those estrogen nightmares.) Desperate people are driven to desperate, even self-destructive actions. It’s not right, it’s not moral. But if it’s war, that’s the way it is. Waging war has consequences. Suicide bombings are one of them.

I am monumentally grateful that I have never found myself in the position to make that choice and don’t believe I ever will. And I am profoundly disappointed that those who have never personally experienced the personal horrors of what is going on in the holy land are so willing both to take sides and to condemn someone like me for not.

Killing innocent people is wrong. It's wrong for the Palestinians and it's wrong for the Israelis. But if neither side doesn't want to deal with the consequences of warring on their neighbors, then they should simply stop making war and resolve to negotiate.

Personally, I think they should do what b!X suggests and put all the guys who want to fight in a big Thunderdome and let them wipe each other out. The proceeds from the tickets to watch the Final War to End All Wars can be used to help those Middle Easterners who want to live peacefully side by side to do so.

Voices from behind the front lines
I call your attention to the web diaries of the The Electronic Intifada Presents: Live From Palestine site.

When journalists can’t get in, local residents take over.

Most of the writers posting here are not professional journalists and their ability to confirm information in a warzone is often very limited. Despite this they represent a vital link to the beseiged towns that is almost entirely absent from the commercial media.

Residents of the occupied Palestinian territories are invited to submit accounts of developments on the ground to diaries@electronicIntifada.net.

Read.

Encounter with a poet from my past.

Our paths cross every decade or so. Today it was in the lobby of the college where she was giving a reading. She was coming out of the ladies’ room; I was coming in the front door. The first thing I noticed was that we had both become blonde.

I first met Lyn Lifshin in the mid-seventies, when she had just begun having her poetry published and was giving writing workshops locally. (One of the other -- at the time -- young women in our workshop has since gone on to win writing awards from both the MacArthur and Guggenheim Foundations. I envied Alice Fulton even back then. She was beautiful, an amazing writer, younger than I, and unmarried. She’s now a Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and she continues to write and publish. I don’t know if she ever married.)

But that summer in Albany, New York we were poets, each struggling to find her own voice. And we couldn’t have had a better workshop leader than Lyn, who had – and still has – a poetic voice as sharp and distinct and irreverent as her arresting face.

Her face today is the same as I remember: jutting cheek bones, dark eyes rimmed with kohl, long hair – once dark, now blonde – parted in the middle and falling across her stare with purpose and precision. She is dressed in black – a leather micro-mini skirt, tights and boots. Over her black leather jacket she wears a purposefully fake vintage leopard-look coat. I can’t help noticing that she is even thinner than ever, her hands clutching her bag of books are gnarled and claw-like. She is the millennium’s Hecate incarnate. Crone of Crones. She is who I once thought I might be. We walk together into the classroom, two blondes of similar age and obviously dissimilar inclinations.

I take my seat among the scattered audience – many of whom could be, well, under certain circumstances, my grandchildren. Even in jeans and a sweater, I feel too coiffed, too ordinary. Not looking exotic enough to ever be taken for a real poet. Real poets look like Lyn – live like Lyn – certainly, write like Lyn.

She reads poems that I hadn’t heard – or read -- before, talks about her choice to have cats instead of kids, her choice to love men often and well, her choice to open her wounds into her words and stare daringly into the faces of those who made them, even as she tosses those loaded words out to the whims of the world. She accompanies each poem with sinuous leanings of torso and hands, carefully placed intakes of breath, pauses to hold attention. She is who I once thought I might be.

One of her poems makes me think of Meryl Yourish and her anguished blogposts about the Holocaust. I Remember Haifa Being Lovely But ends with
once you become a
mother, blue numbers
appeared mysteriously
tattooed on your arm.

Lyn’s book the Blue Tattoo focuses on images related to the Holocaust.

As I leave, I buy her new book and she signs it for me. She says that she and her male partner (she uses his name, but I have forgotten it) will be moving back up into her house that is not too far from where I live. She needs to buy a new refrigerator. Where’s the best place to go for that? Sears, I say. I’ve always found good appliances in Sears. Well, she says, someone mentioned Home Depot. Yeah, I say. You should check them out too.

When I get home I take my mother outside to sit and snooze in the sun while I sit next to her and read from Lyn’s new book, Before It’s Light. The title of the first section makes me smile: “Blonde to the Bone.”

I’ve got the kids, you’ve got the cats, I think, as I get to her poem, “Cat Women.” I think of Anita Bora and her blogger cats project.

And then I get to its end:
……………..We’re mystical
about cats because some nights
we become one, slither away from
a lover’s side, wild to explore what
we sense in darkness, starved for
the prowl, the chase, the leap
from a life so domestic some of
us need to regrow claws, survive
on prey, give up safeness

Well, I, too, have a cat. And once I had a most remarkable growl. I'm sure it's still in there, somewhere.

It's a toss-up
Check out b!X's two satiric extreme solutions to the extreme satanic situation in what was once a holy land. In case you can't get to the whole post (there's some problem with getting his new system working consistently), here's the gist of it:

Option one: Give the land back to God.
It's quite clear that neither side in this age-old conflict is behaving like anything resembling God's children. If they're all so damned certain that this is Holy Land, and that God cares about who lives there, then perhaps we should just clear them all out and let God live there by himself.
Alternatively, we could give just it to Buddhists.
Option two: Build a dome over the entire region and sell tickets.
AOL Time Warner, in conjunction with Walt Disney, presents Holy Land. Two religions enter, no man leaves. Let them fight it out as intensely as they please, while the world pays $50 a head for dome-side seats and watches the carnage from within a disposable comfort zone of hotdogs and beer.

Honestly, I no longer know if I'm kidding or not. I'm simply unsure if either side deserves anything other than scorn, contempt, and a major international shunning.

Everyone over there is full of holy shit.

Our fathers, who art in heaven…
My condolences go out to Halley Suitt, whose father passed away today. My posting of my poem about my own father’s death was unfortunately prescient. But for today, I offer this for Halley.

Let Evening Come
--by Jane Kenyon

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
Let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

In response to Mike’s request for support for Meryl, I offer this litany:
I will do everything in my power to make sure that there are
no more holocausts
no more racism
no more bigotry
no more ethnic cleansing
no more genocide
no more economic slavery
no more religious persecution
no more terrorism
no more dogmatism
no more sexism
no more national chauvinism
and most of all
no more holocausts

Voices from The Blog:
For some reason, during the past week there have been a series of eloquent and loving tributes to parents and grandparents as they age and begin to leave us behind. I linked to Jeneane’s below, and there are others that I was so glad I found, posted by Halley and Heather and Barbara and Lisanne.

And Esta posted some touching verbal family snapshots taken from a younger, brighter perspective. Here are two that I particularly liked:
-- Mastering the chain stitch, and feeling the instincts of several generations awakening in my fingers.
--The two women after whom I was named running all over my house and exclaiming with delight over it.

And I found this ingenious way of sharing books and connections as a result of linking over to Willa’s site. She got it from Tish. Love that blogrolling.!

April: the month for poets.
In an article in today's local newspaper, columnist Diane Cameron, again, shines her own unque light on a blurry issue: National Poetry Month. She quotes William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems.
Yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found here.

And she ends with :"...poems can help and they can heal, and sometimes they can communicate what no treatise or speech ever will."

Amen.

Setting death ablaze.
Writer Helen Cixous says "The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed."

With both skill and courage, Jeneane Sessum posts about her father, about death. She stirs up memories of my father's death and inspires me to stir around my stashed pile of poetry until I unearth this:

Testament
1.
I will bury the tuber of an arrowroot
at the head of my father’s grave,
where my brother enshrined
a cluster of quartz,
where my mother stands, each time,
wondering aloud about
what he looks like, now.

“There were signs, ” she says,
her words muffled in the upturned collar
of the coat I have outgrown
and she has shrunk to fit.

Above her breath, four crows
defile the lacework
of a snowy sycamore.

“One day I saw three small doves
flying above his car.
And then there were the crows.”

A nervous rustle. A shift of feathers.

“They gathered in the trees behind our house
on the day he came home the first time.
Thousands, like charred leaves.
like black snow.
He had gone alone to the back porch
to face the sun.
Suddenly, he was in the doorway,
his face dark with anger.
He said the noise was killing him."

From the snow, a frozen sigh.
The cold of the grave
claws at my boots.


2.
And when they folded him neatly,
barefoot and grim
into that final silence,
there was no space left to tuck a cry.
We fed him to winter,
to the honest needs of roots.

On Easter Sunday,
her bread wouldn’t rise.
She stood at the window
and stared at the crows.

She set the prayer plant
from his hospital room
beside his empty chair.
If the crows saw the leaves
turning dark and silent
they never said.

3.
I will bury the tuber of an arrowroot
near the stone of my father’s grave.
And hairs of the tuber
will twine with his hair,
beckon the rain
and dance with the worm.
And the tuber eyes
will watch in his place
for the message of the great crows
who keep vigil in all seasons
from the crotch of a crooked bough.

And I will buy her a new maranta
to pray in the tuber-mind.

And I will lie on my father’s grave
and listen.

copyright 1987 Elaine

The innate poetry of the blog.
in my ongoing quest for "olderwiser" bloggers, periodicallly I check the Ageless Project just to see if there are any new registrants. In linking to someone in NYC who's even older than I am, I discovered a link from that blog to Ron’s amazing poem generator, which uses a software program to make a poem out of anyone's web site. So here's what Ron's cyberpoet did for kalilily time:

kalilily time I were
born on is to make an
Easter Sunday sermon years
older than enough, technology optimism”
to us, the original
post? for you live in.
a chance to buy Hess gas anyway,
since been wrong,
turn on my regular
work on me at least
get that from the
online adult population that poverty But an
Easter people. His methodology is also
honest, open, LETTER
TO a new hip
and stems2000: roughage1970: popping joints1970: our neighbors. As
we live in 1969.That when the
voices and adventuresome will have enough.”

Click here and get a "poem" spun from your blog. I hope it's better than mine.

A money-saving idea that just might work.
I don't know who Phillip Hollsworth is, but an email I got pointed me to a creative idea he posted on how Americans might band together to stop escalating gasoline prices. Read his post for the whole campaign, but here's his basic point:

For the rest of this year, DON"T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies (which now are one), EXXON and MOBIL. If they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit. But to have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of Exxon and Mobil gas buyers. It's really simple to do!! Now, don't whimp out on me at this point...keep reading and I'll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people!!

His methodology is one with which most e-mailers are familiar. I figure if I put his link on my blog, I'll have met my requirement to share this call to arms with ten other people. (Ten, huh? I wonder....)

I tend to buy Hess gas anyway, since it's just down the block from me. I'd be curious to know where Hess gets its gas from.

I have only this to say to Dorkvak:
READ MY BLOGLIPS! Or at least get a blog of your own so that we can deconstruct yours. In the meanwhile, keep writing about us. Even without your linking to us, the curious and adventuresome will track us down. We win anyway.

What a weenie!
"Dorkvak" -- another winner from Jeneane of BlogSisters.

We forget that we are on the far side of the Divide.
The Digital Divide is loosely defined as the disparity between those who have access to Internet technology and those who have not.

If you live in America and have access to technology that makes it possible for you to be reading this blog (using statistics reported in a survey I read about on alternet.org but for which I lost the actual page link) you are:
--in the 38 percent of the poorest Americans, those earning less than $30,000, or
--in the 82 percent of Americans in households earning $75,000 or more, or
--in the 15 percent of the 65-and-up group, or
--in the 75 percent of the 18-29 age bracket.

In April of 2000, Forrester Research issued a study on the digital divide that said that income is the determining factor for engaging with the Internet, followed by age, education and "technology optimism."

The Pew Internet & American Life Project, which tracks Internet usage and habits, indicates that the online adult population has hit 56 percent, totaling 104 million adults.

So, we are the lucky ones, right? We belong to that better-than-half of the American population that has enough money, enough education, enough youth (heh -- except for me and a few others) and/or enough “technology optimism” to be wired enough into the Google universe. And because of all those things we have enough of, every day brings us closer to understanding how we are the same as, and how we are different from, and how much we can learn from our intra-planetary neighbors. As bloggers, every day gives us a chance to learn how important it is to be humane in a world of governments that seems to be increasingly lacking in humanity.

We don’t only have “enough.” We have more than enough – more than enough, certainly, than those other Americans who don’t have the money because they don’t have decent jobs because they didn’t get a good education because they went to schools in urban neighborhoods where school budgets were too low to support good teachers, and good libraries= and well-equipped science labs and up-to-date computer labs…….

No, access to computers and the Internet will not solve the problems caused by poverty. But computers and web access in every school located in areas of poverty might be able to give children whose lives are confined by that poverty a chance to better understand the choices and the chances that exist in the larger world -- a better chance to understand the cultures of their neighbors, both in the next block and on the next continent. As they learn to journey the web, they would have a unique chance to hear the heart and humanity in the voices of the people of this planet, a chance that exists no where else. And they even might have a chance to develop their own voices and to discover that there are people out there who will listen to what they have to say.

Now, maybe that isn’t enough. But it sure could be something really good!

I think that Weblogs in Education is on the right track. And the kids' version of Small Pieces that David Weinberger is working on is also on the right track. I wish I could figure out how to get them into the main education station.

The Quick and the Deadly
My mother always tells me that I’m too quick to make decisions, move on things. When a friend of mind came over this afternoon to see if he could fix whatever it was I did to screw up my computer, he made the same sort of comment. After he worked his magic on my computer and left, I started to work on several things at once and almost messed it up again.

I’m trying to remember if I’ve always been too quick and too close to deadly. I know that when I used to write poetry, I would spend slow, easy hours sitting, doodling, ruminating, incubating. Time. I took the time.

I think I began picking up the pace when I started the job from which I recently retired. That was more than twenty years ago. I stayed that much longer than my originally-intended five years because my boss, a woman only a couple of years older than I, gave me plenty of room to innovate, create – as long as I got my regular deadline-sensitive work done. So I learned to juggle many completely unrelated tasks at the same time – each with its own set of deadlines. I had to work quickly, think quickly, decide quickly. I developed a range of unrelated skills. I was good in a crisis, and I loved push-the-envelope kinds of challenges.

I don’t have to be that quick anymore. I can’t function well at that pace anymore. But 20-year old habits are hard to break. As a result, I screw up my computer, among other things.

And I transferred that break-neck pace at which I used to work to blogging. Like I still have something to prove. I don’t have to prove anything. I don’t have to prove anything. I don’t have to prove anything. That’s my new mantra (well, I didn’t really have an old one). I don’t have to prove anything.