Author: Sharron Burnett

Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans. —John Lennon

I’ve spent most of my life making the best of things. I’m a confessed control freak who has a bag full of alternative plans. Experience has taught me that reaching the endpoint of my original goals has almost always been interrupted by tragedies and surprises that changed the entire focus of my efforts. I’ve learned to be ready for the unexpected moments even as I am rarely able to predict exactly what will happen from one moment to the next. I suppose that after a lifetime when a best laid plan after another went astray I almost expect the pathway of my life to be serpentine rather than straight and narrow. 

I suppose that each of us has experienced the shocking moment when everything changes, some in more brutal ways than others. We don’t expect an evening at a baseball game to end in the murder of a loved one, but I have an acquaintance who endured that horror. We fear a medical diagnosis that by definition will shorten our lives because we witness people hearing such fateful words. We are never really ready for loss or pain that seems to come from nowhere even if we have led cautious and predictable lives. As the song says life happens when we least expect it. 

I never imagined losing my father at the age of eight. I assumed he would be around for years to come. I thought that he and I would share all of my milestones and I hoped that I would make him proud of me. I suspect that he already knew that I was going to be okay and that I would not have to prove myself to him. His love was apparent to me. I’ve carried it tucked away in my memories since nineteen fifty seven. 

My mother’s descent into the depression and mania of her bipolar disorder was shocking to me. At a time when I was only beginning my life with my new husband I was not ready to become her advocate and sometimes caretaker. I was frightened and even admittedly a bit resentful of having to dedicate a portion of my energy to protecting and caring for her. I had to remind myself of the sacrifices she had made for me and my brothers as a very young widow whose own dreams had been swept away in an instant. 

Over the years I have witnessed great suffering and almost impossible challenges that friends and family members have endured. I have seen the hardships of many of my students. I have watched the unfolding of life that breaks hearts and forces painful decisions, but I have also smiled at the happiness that often counter balances the most difficult times. Somehow we humans are quite adept at making lemonade out of lemons. 

I have often been fascinated by the human ability to rise from the ashes like a magical phoenix. I watched my Aunt Claudia lose her incredible husband when she was only in her twenties. Sixteen years later the daughter that the two of them had created also shockingly died. My aunt’s pain was unimaginable to me and yet she found the courage to just keep moving forward. She remained a happy soul in spite of the trials that seemed to come her way with uncanny regularity. 

My husband laughs at my tendency to make promises with the addition of the phrase, “God willing.” I learned long ago that nothing is guaranteed. In spite of my realization that we don’t always get what we want, I do believe that we humans have our ways of dealing with all of the vagaries of life with surprising resilience. It may take time to adjust to our new realities, but in most situations we somehow manage, albeit a bit more dented than we once were. 

I speak of my father often as though he died only a short time ago. In a pensive moment my husband wondered aloud if he and I would ever have met had my father lived into a ripe old age rather than leaving his family as a young man. Of course we can never predict what might have happened. Those “what ifs’ are so hypothetical. Still, I feel certain that somehow my husband and I were meant to be together and that we would have found each other perhaps in a different way. 

I am the sum total of all of my days. Each moment has shaped me into the person that I am. Both my tragedies and my triumphs have affected how I face the world. So it is with each of us. We are very much alike in that each of us will face challenges that seem to arise when we are busy making other plans. Sometimes the unexpected is glorious and other times it feels as though it has defeated us. That is the conundrum that we all share. Our stories shape us but we have the power to make certain that they do not define us as we keep moving down the road. 

Life is fragile. My father died at the age of thirty three. The son of a friend died when he was only seventeen. My grandfather lived to be one hundred eight. I have lost dear friends and cousins who would have been my age had they lived. My mother is gone as well as all of my aunts and uncles. My husband seems to learn of the death of a classmate with great regularity now. Most of us knew someone who died from Covid. We read about people taken from this earth by mass shootings and wars. While we know that death is inevitable we are always stunned when we hear of it. We are all too often filled with regret that we did not take the time to share our feelings of love and gratitude with the people that we knew and loved before they were gone. 

Time is relative in a psychological way. There are intervals when the days are unbearably slow. We trudge through them exhausted and frazzled. Other moments seem to pass so quickly. The often frenzied routines and demands of living keep us focused on surviving. Before we know it we realize that we have missed that opportunity to share our feelings and our joys with the people who mean much to us and even with the people that we simply pass in our daily dealings. 

I try to write a tribute to friends and family members who have died. My blogs about them seem to touch the hearts of even those who never knew them. People tell me that I have a knack for describing and praising the souls of my departed loved ones. Somehow I wish that I might be able to tell their stories before they die. I think of how wonderful it would be for them to know how their very existence impacted me and the many people who knew them. I wonder why we humans so often only open our hearts when someone has died. It would be quite lovely if we were to take just a few minutes each day to tell the living how much they mean to us.

I recently saw a post on Facebook that related the story of a math teacher who gave her students a list with the names of every member of the class. She instructed them to write something positive about each person on the roster. At the end of the exercise she collected the papers and then spent days creating a letter for each student that listed the compliments from their fellow students. Then she gave those praise letters to each of her pupils. 

Years later one of the students had died and she attended the funeral for him. There she was reunited with many of her former students. She learned that each of them had treasured the affirmations from their fellow classmates and returned to read them whenever they began to doubt themselves. They thanked the teacher for giving them such a tremendous gift. 

One Christmas I randomly selected a few of my greeting card recipients to receive an earnest letter outlining what they meant to me. I suppose that we are so unaccustomed to receiving such a thing that many of them contacted me immediately to out of concern that I must surely be sick or depressed or in trouble of some kind. They could not imagine receiving the thoughts from my heart just because I wanted them to know how important they were to me. Somehow my gift of love seemed to embarrass or confuse them. 

I understood in that moment that if I were to ever do such a thing again I would need to preface my love letter by explaining it’s purpose. Since then I have been careful about revealing my feelings of gratitude without a clear clarification of my intentions. I suppose that we humans are so reserved and maybe even unsure of ourselves that we wonder what is behind compliments. We tend to feel a bit uncomfortable whenever someone heaps us with praise. We find it difficult to believe how many people we have touched simply by being ourselves. We live in a world of hucksters who use flattery to take from us. We keep our defenses at the ready in case someone is attempting to take advantage of us. 

It is often the smallest of encounters with our fellow humans that transform us. We may only know them for a brief moment in time and yet a seemingly small sacrifice from them will change us in positive ways forever. We should all be aware of the power that we have to realign the trajectory of a person’s day or even an entire lifetime. Every word that we utter and action that we take matters, so why not use that power to build people up rather than to ignore them or tear them down?

The world is filled with souls working away just to make it through another hour or another day. Nobody should be invisible to us. Even the surly clerk who makes our interactions difficult will no doubt smile if we find something nice to say to her/him. Each of us enjoy those moments when we realize that the work we have done in our lives actually meant something to someone. No paycheck gives us as much joy as a single sincere compliment. Such comments are especially important when they randomly arrive when we are in difficult times. 

I’m going to try harder to showcase some very important people who made me the person I am today. I have spoken of my mother and father and grandparents quite often but there are so many others who changed me for the better. I hope to let them know the gifts of their being that taught me how to love others as well as myself. It will be one of my goals this year to let them know how much I have appreciated them. 

I grew up in the Catholic Church. In fact, I attended Catholic schools for twelve years where I was imbued with an excellent education as well as a strong sense of the beliefs of my religion. Somehow I realized that I needed to attend a college that would provide me with a more inclusive view of the world than the one that had sheltered me for the first seventeen years of my life. I turned down a number of acceptances and scholarships to Catholic universities around the country in favor of attending the University of Houston which offered a much larger and more diverse outlook on life. I felt the need to learn more about people of other faiths from other places and even those who had no faith at all. Somehow I understood that it was long past time for me to interact with more than just mostly Catholics like myself before going to work in the world at large. 

I had grown up in a safe bubble with wonderfully loving people but without any real contrast to my own carefully protected beliefs. Only once had I encountered a challenge to my religion and ways of thinking. It happened with a girl from my neighborhood who asked me questions about my church with some incredibly different beliefs that I had never realized existed. Then she challenged me to test my faith by attending services at her church for contrast. 

I never got that opportunity to widen my horizons because my mother’s reaction to the invitation was to ask the pastor of our congregation if it was admissible for me to visit another branch of Christianity. When he insisted that I must be protected from such an adventure lest I become confused, my mother promptly forbade me from even considering such a bold journey into another system of belief. Still, I wondered what would have been wrong with expanding my worldview in a fairly benign environment with my friend. 

College introduced me to people of many cultures and spiritual points of view. It was an exciting time during which I encountered people from around the world who approached the spiritual aspects of being human in very different ways from my own. I began to realize both the similarities and differences between the individuals with whom I made contact. I saw that it seemed to be in our natures to seek answers to eternal questions in spiritual ways and sometimes to use logic and critical thinking to deny the very idea of God. I saw that some beliefs were rigid and others more open to considering alternative ways of living. I found both good and bad people within the same or similar belief systems. I became more open to the idea that none of us possess all of the answers but we all have a tendency to seek them. 

Over time my mother became more open to differing ways of defining our individual philosophies about ethics and the rules that guided them. She seemed to realize that even among the microcosm of her family the spiritual evolution that had transpired to create life long Catholics, converts to other Christian sects, agnostics and atheists had left very good people within each group. She began to study eastern influenced religions to learn more about them. She opened her mind to the possibility that God very legitimately comes to each person in the form that best suits their situations in the world. She even saw that those who questioned the very existence of a higher being were often more spiritual and loving than those unwilling to accept that faith or lack of it is founded on our personal beliefs about our purposes in life. 

My mother-in-law became my religious mentor in many ways as well. She had been raised in the Episcopal Church but converted to Catholicism after marrying my father-in-law who was a devout follower of that faith. She did so only after much study and many conversations with a priest willing to convey the tenets of the Catholic religion. To insure that she was converting with an open mind he introduced her to a treasure trove of brilliant dissertations on the universal search by humans to find answers to our eternal questions. By the time she officially became a Catholic she had read texts from Augustine and Aquinas as well as those from every corner and belief systems of the world. She had become a quasi religious expert capable of discussing everything from the origins of the Greek gods to the nihilism of Nietzsche. 

On Sundays she and I held soirees together while the men watched sports in another room and the children played the games of youth. We sipped on tea and seriously discussed questions about the existence of a true God and what that being might represent for our lives. Those were heady times for me that made me more and more willing to understand those whose beliefs seemed to be so counter to mine. I was able to compare and contrast with a background of knowledge that helped me to realize that the search for answers about our human place in the world are universal. I learned how to respect the earnestness of our individual spiritual journeys. 

Not long ago I was invited to the baptism of some of my mathematics students. I had been baptized as an infant so it was quite interesting to see the ceremony that requires the participants to actively pronounce and seal their beliefs in the act of accepting Jesus as their savior. It was active rather than passive as my own baptism had been. I found many commonalities between my church and theirs, but also distinct differences as well. It was profoundly wonderful to participate in a ceremony in which I saw my students on a spiritual journey that took a slightly different path than my own. It reminded me of what truly makes humans different from other creatures. We are the only ones looking for truths about who we are and how we should be. There is glory in that even if the answers we find are very different. Instead of pushing others to share our own feelings about a higher being we might do better to simply honor the decisions that our fellow humans have made and do our best to be open to the idea that maybe there really are alternative pathways to the same place. It would be a mistake to enforce one way of thinking on everyone. The variety of ideas is a good thing. Let’s leave it that way.  

I have worked hard to reach the level of comfort that I enjoy, but there are times when I feel not just fortunate, but even a bit spoiled. Many of the advantages that I enjoy have come to me from simply being born in the right place to the right parents and the right time. My mother and father were loving, kind and wise. I never experienced even a moment of abuse from either of them. I felt safe in their care. When my father died a multitude of relatives rallied to the aid of my family. We were never alone. While we existed on a very small income, my mother was savvy enough to stretch our budget with her ingenious ways of running a household. There was never a day when I did not feel thoroughly safe and secure in her care. She made it seem right to conserve and sacrifice when much of the world subsisted on far less than we had. Mama believed that if the roof did not leak and there was a pot of soup on the stove all was right with our little world.

There was a time when I might have been destined to a traditional life of servitude to a man, but I was born just when women were asserting themselves. They were breaking barriers that had existed for centuries. Colleges opened their doors to me and nobody thought it was strange for me to think for myself and create goals that might have seemed unattainable in another era. With my mother as a role model for independence and my father’s insistence that I see reading as a gift I charted a course of learning that has brought me joy beyond description. I also found my true purpose in passing knowledge forward and encouraging thousands of students to reach for the stars. I was perfectly poised for success.

Living in the United States of America gave me freedoms that so many people around the world never enjoy. I have been able to voice my opinions and choose the people that I want to represent me. I am able to travel from place to place and to enjoy the economic opportunities that allow me to live a very peaceful and comfortable life. 

Because my skin is white I have been able to live quietly and without prejudice. Most of the time nobody even notices me which is a wonderful thing. I have never been stopped from entering a store or place of business because of the color of my skin. I have never been told to move to the back of a bus or to collect a library book from a window in the back of a building. In other words, simply because of place, time and parents I have have a most fortunate life with few to no barriers confining my spirit or my dreams. 

Kings and queens were once believed to have divine rights that gave them powers simply from being born in the correct birth order. In some ways that is how my life also feels. Much of what I have achieved might have been nullified if anything about the circumstances of my birth had changed. I might have been abused by my parents. I might have been born in a country that did not value me as a person or as a woman. I might have suffered under the iron rule of oppression or dire poverty and want. I am fully aware of my good fortune and as such I believe that it is up to me to pay the goodness of my life forward. 

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all believed that a good life needed to be shared with friends and community. Happiness was to be found in thriving and helping others to thrive as well. I believe such things are true but I all too often allow my human frailties to forget about what a wondrous life I have and instead brood over what is missing. I suppose that each of us falls prey to a bit of self pity now and again. It seems to be in our natures to sometimes want more when we already have so much. 

I look across the world and I see people who are no different from me suffering intensely simply because they did not win the lottery of place, time, and parents. I know that even in my remarkable country simply being born is not enough to insure the privileges that I have enjoyed. Prejudices abound and anyone perceived to be different will likely encounter insults and hurts that I have so far avoided. The world can be as kind as it has been to me, but it can also be incredibly cruel. 

I do not believe that God decides who gets to have a happy life like mine and who has to endure a lifetime of hardship. If there were such a God that would be counter to the compassion promised to us. I simply believe that things just happen as they did with me. Sadly some are not nearly as fortunate and life can be quite difficult for them. 

When I see refugees fleeing their homelands I view them as being just like me only circumstances have made their lives more difficult than mine has ever been. I have great compassion and concern for their plight and hope that those of us who have been luckier will welcome them in their quest to improve their lives. 

I am indeed the fortunate one. I got lucky with the roll of the dice. I am deeply grateful.