Wonder.
If you ever need a jumpstart for your mojo, check out a delightful little book titled Wonder by R.J. Palacio. You’ll be able to read it in one night. Even better, it’s a powerful book to read aloud with your family or a friend.
Through characters like August, Jack, Charlotte, Summer and Julian, you’ll discover a little bit more about who you are and what really matters to you. Throughout the angst of their middle school years, these youths have mentors and mentor each other toward the same discovery.
The fulcrum of their discovery is the protagonist, August, who embodies everything the title connotes.
How we love, how we meet challenges, how we befriend, how we parent springs from knowing who we are, from knowing our strengths as well as our weaknesses.
I think that the best gift we can give ourselves and anyone we love is a gentle nudge toward recognizing individual goodness and bolstering weaknesses when the timing is just right.
Who are you – minus the television or technology, minus the clothes, the car, the home, the job that suggest who you are? Who are you and who do you want to be?
When given the choice between being right or being kind, do you chose kind?
Are you comfortable with your deeds if they are your monuments instead of stone?
Questions like these, unfold in Wonder.
A good friend of mine draws the distinction between resume qualities and eulogy qualities and strives to improve the latter. Eulogy qualities are those for which we hope to be remembered. They are qualities that hopefully weave into who we are (The Road To Character by David Brooks).
Imagine our individual lives as oceans of experience, filled by aching loss and by gains so beautiful they make us cry. Our mooring post is who we are.
Childhood changes with each generation. The long-hair-hippie-freak concerns of parents in the 1970s are replaced with Facebook-video-game-lack-of–unplugged-time fears that haunt most parents today.
What tends to cross those shifts with each generation – the mooring post – is knowing who we are.
When I get really, really busy I sometimes forget who I am. I get kind of numb.
And when I get numb, I get outside. Or I ride on the joy or energy of someone I love. I escape into a church hymn, a pop song, the words of a poem or an alternate world in a book until the numbness abates … until I remember who I am, what I value.
Wonder is an incredible jumpstart for your mojo. Another jumpstart is a simple conversation with someone else about who they are or who they want to be. Perhaps, also, what keeps them from being that person? Ask about eulogy virtues rather than resume virtues.
Thanks for picking up Carroll Magazine. I hope you have plenty of down time to read and enjoy it.
Special note – with this issue we welcome Jim Lee, the former editor of the Carroll County Times. Jim joins our staff as the copy editor and as a writer.
