It's Time to Shine

We’ve been doing this to one another for more years than I care to remember. The City Council’s deliberations Monday night which resulted in a municipal budget that no one is happy about cannot be considered a surprise, unhappy or otherwise.

The word in the newspaper headline was ‘contentious,’ which, in light of the demand for resources to pay for goods and services conflicting with the amount and volume of tax money available seems nearly an understatement.

And not the way to define "success" but these are strange days that call for strange ways if we hope to adapt and overcome in equal measure. We have been here before and that we'll be here again is believed to be a given but isn't really promised though we behave as if it were.

At times like these, I tend to offer words that I hope are thoughts but are maybe more like prayers to try to talk myself back off the ledge. If they sound familiar, and they should, feel free to say them along with me and perhaps by saying so we can make it so. But I wouldn't put a lot of faith or money on that happening which is more than appropriate in light of where we are. So here goes:

The distance between who we are and who we hope to become can vary from very great to very small depending on our plans, abilities, aptitudes and perhaps, most importantly, our desire and will to improve. The difference between being a victor and being a victim is often making a choice to take a chance. 

I think we'd all agree that you have to risk something of yourself to move ahead. But the more you have, the more you can lose and the cost of a poor choice can do damage from which recovery can be difficult.

Perhaps that's why the fear of making a mistake is, in itself, a mistake and why, as we age, as persons and as a society, we become more risk-averse. We see what there is to lose should we fail more readily and easily than what we can gain if we succeed. 

The arguments against taking that first, possibly flawed, step into the unknown and untested grow louder as the time to choose to do something grows shorter. We confuse stasis and stability and hope the former can be accepted as the latter when in reality it can only mean failure.    

I've lived here for close to three decades and for much longer than that I think we’ve had too many discouraged experts and never quite enough enthusiastic beginners. We have a surfeit of those who have a problem for every solution and who never forgive anyone who has tried but has failed without realizing our real problem is failing to try. I'm not naïve enough to say Norwich could be turning a corner because for before that can happen we must all agree to step closer towards the light on the horizon.

-bill kenny