Rainy Morning Reflections

I'm in a reflective mood on this gray and rainy morning, so I hope that you'll excuse my meanderings for a few moments.

I was thinking that history is really just life, recorded one day at a time. We often have no idea how important some of it will become to us later on. I think about that every time I write something for this blog, whether I'm presenting my own words or someone else's.

Who of us would have guessed that we might look back so fondly on something like a hot dog vendor in the HSA compound or an evening stroll through a park during Moon Festival in a city several thousand miles from home? These were just day-to-day kinds of things of no great significance at the time, and yet just thinking about them brings a smile to my face more than thirty years later.

At the same time, I am surprised by the number of "critical" events, at USTDC and elsewhere over the years, that now seem relatively unimportant to me. Every adolescent thinks that every issue is a crisis. But if we live long enough, we begin to understand that almost nothing is a crisis, despite what many politicians and journalism majors would have us believe. It's really just another line on the page.

So today I plan to pay attention to those little things that just might bring a smile to my face twenty years from now (if God decides to keep me around that long) and I'll try to keep all of today's "crises" in their proper perspective.

Feel free to join me if you like.

Don