A Mountain or a Molehill?

My dear sister in-law was recently diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma. :-( I am not a religious person, but I do respect and admire her steadfast faith in God and the fact that she has a large support base of equally devout friends and family. And of course, she does have fan club members like hubby, myself, my sis and bil, and other family members on the in-law side who may not be as devout or not at all religious. ;-)

My sil, S, is also a good friend as well. Not only do I admire her steadfast faith, but also her sunny disposition and levelheadedness. I have never known her to be ill-tempered in the least. Her sister recently put up a webpage for her at caringbridge.org. Check it out!

I think cancer has to be one of the scariest things known to man. When a loved one gets it, it tends to remind me of the fact that my problems are small, compared to the one that received that diagonsis. I'm starting to lose count of the people I've known who've suffered the effects of cancer.


Someone's got it worse than you, I tell myself, whenever I feel overwhelmed.

That helps me to shrink my head a bit. ;-)

One of the reasons I made a decision long ago to have at least ONE volunteer activity throughout my life was to ensure in some small way that I was giving back to the community...and to remind myself that no matter HOW sucky things may seem at any given time, there is ALWAYS someone out there who's got it MUCH much worse than I do. Or perhaps, more than I ever did.


My first volunteer activity was as a mentor. I started with mentoring an elementary school girl from a broken family (most mentoring is with children from troubled families). I did that for 2.5 years. Then we moved and I decided to try the middle school age group and I got another girl for another two years. That was great. THEN, I got a girl for one year...and that was enough for awhile. She was totally unmotivated--and despite my efforts, I began to feel I was wasting my time.

I took a year off. Actually, I'm still not mentoring, due to my schedule. But I am tutoring English to an ESL student, off and on. As long as I have at least one thing going on, I'm feeling useful. :-) I hope it's true that you reap what you sow.

All I have to do is listen to the news or open the pages of any National Geographic magazine issue to realize there is someone out there who is living in danger, squalor, without personal freedoms, or unimaginable misery. Or all of the above. It helps me put things in perspective.

In recent years, whenever I'm in a bad situation, I try to ask myself whether I'm going to make a mountain or a molehill out of it. To stress or not? Get heated and age myself...or chill and breathe? I'd like to think I'm improving on the "not stress" and "chill and breathe" aspects of healthy living. ;-)

How did I come by this thinking, you may ask?

When I was a roving reporter on my college weekly, I interviewed a student who was confined to her wheelchair and who needed someone to take notes for her. She was studying for her master's degree in liberal arts and had returned to college after raising a family.

I asked her a question which could have invited scorn on her part since the answer seemed so obvious, but I asked it anyway. I can't tell you what my question was because I'm too embarrassed to remember and I don't have my clips of written work on me at the moment! But basically, I inquired, did she feel challenged by her disability to complete her degree?

She gave me a very sharp reply with a matronly tone of disapproval: "Of course not! This is what I set out to do!" She set out to enrich her mind as did each student on campus. Her disability was not on her radar, it was only a fact of life, not her focus.

This was Mills College, for goodness sakes! Women rule! WE can do ANYTHING we want! :-))

Wow! When I wrote her story in the paper, I realized I had nothing in the world worth complaining about. Not at all. She was my inspiration for the rest of my time in college--especially when I thought I was going to die of stress during finals week/graduation week. ;-) But to this day, I still remember her, even though I can't remember her name. She still inspires me.

As does my sil in her journey to recovery. :-)

I've actually never seen a molehill, by the way. Have you?