Abundance

Happy Tuesday:

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” 

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Who the hell is Ralph Waldo Emerson to tell me what the purpose of life is?!” 

- my 17 y.o. daughter, sometime during the pandemic 

At the risk of stating the obvious, they are both right, of course.  Which is the point–my daughter, in her frustrated unhappiness with Emerson, was finding herself and honoring her lived experience.  There is, in the process of reflection, an opportunity to find oneself—hopefully moving through frustration into a sense of abundance: here we are, and we get to question, to experiment with our lives and what we might make of them, to the extent we can.  To put it another way: I’m aware that most of what I “have” to do is really a gift that I “get” to do—to live as well as one might, to be useful and compassionate and honorable.  That is abundance.