Do you know that expression, ‘Stop me if you’ve heard this before’? Please don’t, because in this case, what I’m about to offer, you have read before, assuming (and I do) you stop by here on a regular or even irregular basis and read anything that’s offered in this space.
Forewarned is forearmed; I wear glasses-you can make up your own joke.
We're at that point in the calendar where festive feelings and festivals of hope and happiness are everywhere. Less than a fortnight ago, the First Friday’s lighting of City Hall followed the next day with the Norwich Winterfest Parade thrilling the young and young at heart from across the city and around the region.
We've already observed the first two Sundays of Advent and the Festival of Lights, Hannukah, began last Thursday night and concludes this Friday at sunset. The seven days of Kwanzaa begin on December 26th and last through the start of the new year.
Most of us look forward to this 'most wonderful time of the year' as an opportunity to renew old acquaintances with friends and family and share memories of happy past times while looking forward to better days yet to come.
This is a season ideally suited to underscore and reaffirm the importance for each of us, both as individuals and as residents of a city with a rich past and unproven future promise, the importance of Life's 3 C's: Choices, Chances, and Changes.
We each must choose to take a chance, or our lives will never change. Some people feel the key lies in the change, but I believe making and owning that one conscious choice is critical to recognizing an opportunity or a chance and then building on that to create a new circumstance and a different situation, in other words, a change.
Opportunities can be missed or can be golden. They cannot be both and once the Rubicon is crossed the decision is made and managing the consequences becomes the chance to change. Continuing to discuss the ‘would've, could've, and should've been’ is a wasted effort unless we choose to act and embrace change. Nothing ever happens if you don't make it happen.
Saying 'no' as we did in this city a month ago to a bonding initiative to build a new public safety building is not the last word either on the community's commitment to public safety or on the importance of elected and appointed city leaders in defining and defending their vision of our downtown's growth and improvement. The decision was neither fatal nor final in terms of the steps on a journey we will make choosing to either run toward our future or from it. There's no standing still.
The holiday season should be one of hope and I’ve often described my feelings about that word (hope is NOT a plan). We have three and half weeks left in a year that began, as they all do, with so much promise. How much progress we measure as the days draw down is, of course, important not only because we need to know where we are but to better decide where we go next.
Ray Bradbury, of Fahrenheit 451 fame, once wrote "Living is jumping off the cliff and building wings on your way down." Isn't it time we trusted ourselves to soar? Choice, chance, and change.
Or lather, rinse, and repeat. You decide; I already have.
-bill kenny
No comments:
Post a Comment