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The way things have unfolded for me this past month has forced my perspective on what is important and what is not. This begins with my own personal mental outlook, and then the decisions, care, and needs of my family, but it is also not a stretch to think in terms of how my choices can, in their small way, impact community.Take a snapshot if you will of all the activity around you – people and organizations addressing needs and helping various causes in a community. Cut that with the individuals and their groups of paid and volunteer folk who help those in need and the helper and helped going through transitions in their lives and routines. Some of those groups who help are doing well and others, bluntly, for whatever reason, simply could be doing a better job. Here I am in my lane with my own field of vision thinking I am doing the important stuff and a few weeks later, in the same community, I am seeing equally important activities and busyness go on that I never knew about. And these folks in these other parallel lanes are doing that important work either because of their dedication, necessity, or they have determined that this is most important. While I don’t count this as an epiphany, I am most curious as to how this realization will inform my thinking. Perhaps I kick myself for not seeing, or run through a range of feelings, but I come back to just trying to stay kind, focused and humble.
So the point is, for this conversation, on a global scale I am glad to help fight Polio and support meaningful projects through our Foundation. On that, you have me and knowing why I give. There was a point in my Rotary journey though where I wanted to look beyond ending Polio and ask ‘what’s next’. I see and hear others in Rotary identifying next steps and I think having these conversations are healthy. But I have come to realize that we are going to be in this fight for a long time, given recent news, even though these parallel courses of need seem to be calling. Here is the good part: Our ‘forever commitment’ to eradicate Polio, plus the collective impact of other projects, gives us the opportunity to enter into conversations with other groups, at scale, in those parallel areas, to work together on some of the deeper structural issues. Yeah, it’s a big notion, but something I suspect that each Rotarian knows that the organization can handle. And because we are connected and can bring in interesting speakers and their causes to our meetings and conferences, we can find ways to build relationship through the convening power of our organization. Again, I am most curious as to how this will evolve, but how our dedication – our thinking and conversations – indeed inform our actions.