A New Year, A New Perspective

"Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail." That's the quotation on my blog today. I admit, I'm a quotation junkie ~ I get an email every day with one (related to education), I own a Bartlett's, as well as several other books of quotations, and I have a growing Word document filled with random quotations I've found.  I make small posters of some of them to post in my classroom.

This one, the one on my blog today, spoke to me. I've been feeling, to be honest, too much like that "world's my jail" lately.  I've been letting the outside, or at least part of it, determine my inside, and I have to stop doing that.

It's easy to succumb to that. I mean, there's a lot going on in the world that intrudes in some way on my consciousness. Bad news is always available. Gloom lurks. Despair is gearing up for a banner year.  It's a precarious year for a thinking, feeling person. The shootings in Tucson. The level of hate used in communicating almost anything these days. The continuing attacks on public education, on teachers, on teacher unions, on all unions.  Our seeming inability to rein in the easy access to guns ~ any gun, anybody, anytime is not a slogan I think the world needs, or can survive. Arizona decides that transplants are a luxury, so patients on death watch, waiting for a transplant, formerly covered by Medicaid, are turned out, told they have to pay for it with their own money (like someone receiving Medicaid has money. Duh!) And now they are dying, waiting for sanity to intervene.  And other states are getting ready to follow suit. States with Republican governors and assemblies. Who screamed about "death panels" in the (Democratic) Health Care Act. Who knew they thought death panels were a good thing?  Even the news, in the NYTimes today, that greed has come to microlenders ~ those "banks" that lend to the very, very poor have suddenly decided that they can make a profit from that by raising the interest rates and going public. Never mind that the poor can't manage the new interest rates and have begun to default on the loans. Dollar signs are blinding the lenders, again. I mean, really, what is wrong with us? Why do we do these things to ourselves?

I've decided, though, to invest my time and energy in the creation and use of several mental filters. To change my perspective. To escape from that "jail" I've let the world create. Instead, only the things I do, personally, determine my "palace". This is, obviously, a work in progress. My heart still aches for Christina Green and the other 5 who died a week ago. I'm pulling for Gabby Giffords' recovery. I'm still funding Kiva loans. I'm still political, in speech and action.  I'm still teaching in a public school, and spending my own money to supplement the decreasing dollars available to the school to educate other people's kids. I'm just changing the way I look at the world, the way I let it impact me. I think I'm developing a much healthier, more sustainable perspective. Only time will tell.