The Blog--Anything Mentionable #Fred Rogers

On a pilgrimmage to Arizona, sunrise fellowship, honest talk about grieving, and grateful tears in the desert for the hero of my life.

But most of us live as if the opposite was true. We go through life believing in our “terminal uniqueness,” that we are the only ones feeling anger, sadness, shame, grief, fear, depression and self-doubt. Feelings are character defects, not inevitable and universal aspects of the human condition.

You don’t get to control it all. But choosing simplicity whenever possible adds to life an element of deepest freedom which so easily eludes us, and many opportunities to discover that less may actually be more.”

Fred Rogers did not come to us from a spiritual mountaintop. He was fully human instead, a person who grappled with the inner difficulties so familiar to the rest of us. There is comfort in knowing this.

Yet we remain inclined to believe that we are unique, comparing our tattered insides with the outsides of others, not knowing that most of those others pretend like we pretend. The dark genius of humanity is our great ability to conceal the truth of our insides from one another. We are all such great actors.

Making the decision to go where others hurt.

As a friend fights for his life, memories of a day I was "loved into being."