Big Thinkers; Feeling Small, Write a Bit
My certain friend accuses my daughter and I of being big thinkers. Sure, who cannot think big if you read Yuval Harari, Jared Diamond, and Peter Frankopan?
We can think big. Many people do. That process and those feelings can make us feel rather small, but by "using our voices", a word that certain friend just used for her own identity and development, we can possibly make a difference.
Possibly. We cannot know unless we try.
We try to think, to establish thoughts. From them we alight upon words, paragraphs, poems and songs, even articles, reports, and books. Books! Gadzooks. Even books.
Some books that I have tried writing have not come to fruition. However, my daughter is aware of them; she may go on and print the wisps and fringes of some of my incomplete notions. My own father has written and published at least three books. He has mentioned the story of a fourth, but that is not likely to happen.
The seeds and inspirations lie within me, the son. And the grand daughter may be a beneficiary of the hopes and seeds as well. We plant hopes and dreams as we go.
My book begun in Chile, that was supposed to be 52 chapters but only has turned into seven, was about a young brother and sister, perhaps around 500 A.D., who travel with their family across the north to south length of Chile in order to say good bye to their grandfather at the end of the world.
Only seven chapters, each representing a province of Chile, as there were 52.
Years before that as a graduate student at UCLA I was writing a book, more or less reflexive and with autobiographic underpinnings, about Mexico.
Most recently a book about an American or U.S. contractor in Afghanistan.
Books begun, developed, somewhat fleshed out, but unfinished and unpublished.
Seeds in the hopper, ready to disseminate and bloom.
Thinking big, acting small, but working their way to the surface, and the world.
Inter-generational and inspirational, influential and ongoing.
Writing a bit.
Thinking a bit about those disempowered around the globe.
The Israelis have been put in between a rock and a few hard places, with millions of Arabs surrounding them and others around the world that care too much or too little, or somewhere in the middle.
There a few million in South Sudan, on the edge of starvation, being malnourished, and no one cares much. Okay, maybe some paid United Nations folks, and some non-government organizations, and some well meaning people, including some churches and humanitarians.
All right, there are people who care.
But we cannot make enough of a difference for so many of them.
So, a few of us write a bit.
