Heroes
Who is your hero? Do you have a new one every day? Have you had just one for as long as you can remember, or do you have many? Is your hero real or a fictional character?
What do heroes really do for us? Do they delude us with unreasonable expectations, distract us from the real world where prosaic things plod along as they are? Maybe they’re sensational emotional filler, like cotton candy in place of a warm, nourishing meal.
Or maybe they’re the most important role models we’ll ever know. Hasn’t everyone at times felt this? Gee, I wish I was . . . instead of me. This can be a healthy fantasy because there are times when you need to take a wee vacation from yourself. Imagining being someone else is a convenient and inexpensive way to do that.
But it’s nothing to build a practice on. Heroes are mirrors of the compassion, humility, and greatness inside each of us. Heroes are archetypes that measure the span of years each of us has to travel across before we morph into something else.
Today, I’m honoring everyday heroes: the firefighters who keep busy this time of year in the west, and public school teachers who are beginning to look ahead to the fast-approaching first day of school. I’m also thinking of the father I know who took a day off from work to hang out with his twelve-year-old daughter, and my friend who was laid off from his bakery job last week. He sweetened a lot of people’s lives over the last fourteen years.
Who are your heroes? Make a list. Talk to some. Write to one. Connect, connect! We have good and valuable stories to share with each other.