Put Down The Finger

It’s time to walk toward our new road together

There are a few things you won’t see here in this collection of observations and musings known as our Monthly Spotlight. You will not see sentences filled with words I wouldn’t say to my mother (actually, I think she uses more of those words than I do). I’ve come to believe that if you spend an extra moment or two, you will often find other words to use that wind up being more powerful and specific, and might not get you kicked out of the class/meeting/store/courtroom/etc.

You will not see religious preaching. I’m not a preacher nor proselytizer and I leave that to those who are. For this space where we share thoughts, I’d rather look at day-to day dilemmas that sometimes call on our personal codes and our own consciousness for consideration.

And thirdly, you won’t see political rhetoric.

One more thing you won’t typically see (and this will be the second-to-last thing I’ll mention, for now) are the dates on which each piece is written. That’s because this is not my pseudo-cyber diary and so the dates are usually not pertinent.

But not this time.

I am writing to this to you on the morning on November 9, 2016. And one more thing (yes, this is the Last Thing): I don’t know who is our newly elected President. Of course, by the time you read this a week or two or more after I’ve written it, I will know. In fact, I’ll probably know a few minutes after I hit Save on this entry. But for now, I remain blissfully ignorant, sitting on the couch in my quiet apartment, writing.

Last night, I watched the coverage and I stayed up well past midnight and took deep breaths along with most of my countrymen and women. Eventually, I decided that neither candidate needed me to watch anywhere as much as I needed to rest, so I turned out the light and at some point, finally fell asleep.

Before I drifted off, I thought of the candidates. Their campaign teams. Their families. I thought of the news commentators, and the reporters, who have probably had even less sleep than the campaign managers. And I thought of us. The voters. We have put ourselves through the wringer, ramping up to an exhausting end.

Only the end isn’t the end.

Whoever has been voted into office has a new starting line in front of them. And the rest of us? We're at that new starting line already.

Now is the time to start moving on to life even more unknown than in recent months. What will that life be like? I don’t know and, dare I say, neither do you. We don’t know what will happen, how it will happen, or what we will make of it. And try as we might to prepare ourselves, none of us know ahead of time what we will think or do when “What’s-to-Come” comes, because it’s impossible to truly know what that will be.

During the election coverage, I paused and wrote this in my journal:

“I don’t know how we will proceed from here.” That was not to say I didn’t see how we could, just that I had no idea how that will look.  We’ve ripped ourselves apart wrapping ourselves up in a campaign filled with name-calling, accusations, insults and shaming.

“At this point, no matter who wins, there will be so much healing to do. And I don’t know when we will be ready to stop pointing fingers and start holding hands. When we will make concessions and when we will compromise for a greater, more universal good.”

So here we are, at our starting line. With each other. The race may be over, but our new journey is just beginning.