Start Year With New Attitude
A couple of weeks ago we asked if any readers had given up New Year’s resolutions. We received a wonderful letter from Eileen Volz of Sandpoint.
She wrote: “Last year in January, as I sat in the hot tub at the local health club, I found myself checking the clock to see if it was time to go. I went over a mental grocery list and a schedule of things to do that day. I realized I was not enjoying where I was at the moment. Then I began to see I was never really living in the moment. My resolution then and there was to ‘be where I am.’
“This resolution worked well for me in 1994 in ways I had not foreseen. In June, my brother died of AIDS and I realized the time I spent with him, I was really focused in the moment. My resolution for 1995 is to accept people for who they are and not judge them. That’s God’s job. I believe my resolutions have been successful because they aren’t so much a change in action, but a change in attitude.”
Volunteer opportunity: You can help keep families vital by participating in the Doula Project. The program matches trained volunteers with single parents. “Doulas” help the single parents through prenatal, birthing and early parenting months. Doulas make a year’s commitment and spend about six to eight hours a month with the single parent. For the first time, the program hopes to match experienced fathers with single males in need of mentoring. Training begins in March. If interested, call 456-7146.
March for choice: To commemorate the 22nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, several community groups are sponsoring a “Light the Way to Choice March” on Jan. 22. Marchers will gather at 4 p.m. at the Federal Courthouse in downtown Spokane and walk north on Monroe to St. Paul’s United Methodist Church.
Ideal folks: A character in Elizabeth Arthur’s novel “Beyond the Mountain” is described as having “the confidence that comes from spending time with people who do not expect from you anything but what you can give, who accept you as the person you are and do so because they have a wholeness themselves, an air of being rooted firmly in the present moment, able to deal calmly with anything that moment may reveal.”
Still wise words: Was it really two years ago that poet Maya Angelou wowed the country with her words at President Clinton’s inauguration? On Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, it seems appropriate to quote one of our favorite passages:
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.