Last fall was a tough time. My mom had been battling cancer for almost a year and it was clear the end was approaching. It was a tough new reality to come to grips with. It's natural for us to always think we have more time. Just in discussing the situation, she reminded me to "look for the candles." In other words, wherever we are in life, whatever situation, there are those bright spots we can identify. We may just have to look a little harder for them.
After my mom passed away and we got through the holidays, I thought, here's to 2020 being a nice smooth year for us all. And as they say on social media, 2020 has been like, "hold my beer."
There's a lot of craziness right now, but it does help to look for the candles. The late CBS newsman Charles Kuralt was quite good at that in his career. Two decades of his career were the 1960s and 1970s. If you read your history, there was a lot of insanity going on in those years: the assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, and more. I can't imagine what those years would have been like if social media had been around.
And yet, Kuralt had a brilliant ability to find the candles in our society. That's in evidence in this quote attributed to him:
If you haven't experienced any of Charles Kuralt's work, look for his book "A Life on the Road," written just a few years before he retired. There are some wonderful stories of humankind.