Wolf Rants

My daughter and her friends have really gotten into wolves for some reason.  She has all kinds of wolf accessories: wolf tails, wolf ears and even a new wolf name (“White Claw”) her friends use to address her.  Because of that, I have been seeing a lot of wolf paraphernalia lying around the house.  I was cleaning her room the other day and I came across this old Cherokee Native American fable about two wolves :

A grandpa is talking with his grandson and says … “There are two wolves and they are always fighting.  One is darkness and despair, the other light and hope… The grandson asks “which one wins”?  The grandpa responds … “the one you feed”.

Make no mistake, each day there is an internal fight going on inside of each one of us.  Each day when we wake up, we choose the filter we want to apply to our view of the world.  There is an unconscious gravity that sucks us into the flow of the day and can easily keep us suppressed from elevating our thinking before we can take control of our aim.  The choice to be conscious is the great elevator.  The great illuminator.  The great enabler to a live a life worth living.

There is no shortage of sides to pick these days.  In a world that seems polarized, I think we live in two realities.  One reality, the virtual narrative that is built on Social Media and main stream news outlets and then the reality that we experience each and every day human to human.  At times, it can be hard to tell where the truth lies.  However, I am amazed to see the kindness that meets me in person as I go to the grocery store, church, work or even my kids basketball game, no matter which city or part of town I am in.  When you see someone in person these days, contrary to what I see in the digital world, there is a humility that over takes me as I realize that we are all the same when we remove the filters that bias our views of the world.  Living through a pandemic, trying to figure out how to survive mentally and physically in this period of time is the most human thing we as a society can do right now.  Take care of our family, remember our time on earth is short, but oh so sweet and be kind to each other.  Our “center of the universe” mentality often aides and abides us in focusing on things that are insignificant in the grand scheme of the cosmos.  The answer lies in the truths that have always been there, but we must choose to see those truths. 

As 2021, gets underway and so many unknowns are still on the horizon now more than ever we must feed the wolf of light and hope.  We must be the wolf of light and hope.  We have a choice.  That choice is critical to not only our own individual peace and mental health, but also critical to what we put out into the world.  I have no idea if my daughter’s wolf obsessions are driven by this concept of which wolf to feed.  If not her interests have serendipitously brought this timeless wisdom back to the forefront of my focus and forces me to ask the question each and every day … which wolf will I feed today?