Perhaps you heard us recently on the Good News Update talking about Veronica, one of the members of the cooperative in Kantolomba, passing her grade 12 exams, an enormous accomplishment. What so inspires me about her achievement is a quality common to all my great heroes—the ability to focus attention.
If Veronica is anything like the rest of us, and no doubt she is, from the moment she decided to pursue this goal she had voices both internal and external working against her. “What’s the point? You’ll never make it. What difference will it make? It’s too hard. Just be like everybody else.” And yet, from somewhere within her she found the willingness to persevere. The Buddha, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Peace Pilgrim, Rosa Parks, Cheri Huber—all examples of those who saw a possibility and had the willingness to sit through “the voices” in whatever form that took, to not believe them, and to keep attention focused on the possibility itself. What a tremendous service to all to be willing to learn the skill to direct attention away from egocentricity and towards Life.
In gasshō,
Jen