Purpose

Thank you for allowing me meaningful work.

Work I believe in, work I am interested in.

Work that is like play for me.

I appreciate my current job, my current situation.

Let me see it in a different way.

Please bless my frustration. Show me how to relax.

I know you hear my longing for better work,

More suited to my temperament, my gifts, my interests.

I feel good about this, knowing you are arranging my right livelihood.

Beyond my awareness, people and events are happening,

In summers, during most of high school and college, I worked in a summer camp. My assignment was, pretty much, to protect and entertain a cottage full of three-to-five-year-olds. It was such fun that I decided I’d like to teach children as a career.

After graduating from the university, our certificates covered: nursery, kindergarten, and grades 1-8.

As luck would have it, before graduation I was hired to teach in my hometown. The year was 1969, a year of many problems and few jobs. So this was a blessing.

I have found that I can be in a room full of people, and feel absolutely isolated and lonely. Perhaps this happens to you, too.

So, there is something more going on with loneliness than just needing to be around other humans.

Perhaps we are lonely for this, that, and the other.

When I take care of a garden, I feel that the flowers, vegetables, herbs, and all that grows out of the soil are my friends. So, I like visiting the Hartford Flower Show, the Bronx Gardens, and the Durham County Fair.

I thrive being around people with imagination.

People who can see things that aren’t there yet and talk about them as if they are real right now. Like cars that fly, a practical end to hunger and healing sounds that work infinitely better than chemical drugs.

People who can create – pictures, music, dance, inventions.

People who can see the world in a better way.

Without these people, I feel lonely. Yes, my wife and children fill a kind of loneliness, for which I am very thankful.

Grandpa and grandma came to the USA when they were in their very early twenties.

They came with little money, so they had to rent a place to live. Grandpa was a wise man and a great observer.

In Italy he trained as a shoemaker, but here that job would not provide adequate income. So he found a factory job for steady income, but he also found wealthy clients who could pay richly for handmade shoes.

Grandpa marveled at the public transportation system. With one coin you could ride, then “transfer to anyplace you want to go.” He never spent money on owning a car.

This is the story of how I learned about Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who had a jungle hospital in Equatorial Africa. The reverence for life for all animals, he created this idea when he was in Africa in 1913, when he first went to the hospital in the jungle.

The reverence for life came to me when my mother passed away. I was stationed in Germany. I came home to New York, and my father said, “I want you to meet this woman”. She was a Jewish refugee from Vienna. She won the 1958 Oscar for a documentary on Albert Schweitzer, who I’d heard of.

I grew up as a basketball buff. Once I was a player, and a person who follows the sport, in all phases: professionally, college, high school, grade school.

And the thing that I remember is that a lot of people tell you, “You couldn’t do it. You couldn’t make it because other people are better than you.” And I constantly fought that.