…today’s secret…Old voices.

Prepare to ponder.

Henry David Thoreau wrote that “For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.”

This 166 year-old Thoreau quote expresses exactly how difficult it is to work with marginalized populations these days.

Very few organizations have the time and financial resources to go deep and address the root cause of a marginalized person’s troubles. Vision, yes. Time and money, no.

Organizations are restricted to helping the marginalized become unmarginalized by hacking at specific leaves like education, employment, treatment, etc. We chase symptons according to Thoreau. Not good for over-all healing.

However, take heart, you are not the first, nor the last, to help people
improve their lives.

“I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.”
Charles Dickens

“When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people.”
John Steinbeck

“Our scars make us know that our past was for real.”
Jane Austen

“The most beautiful stories always start with wreckage.”
Jack London

“He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.”
Herman Melville

“It ain’t the roads we take; it’s what’s inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.”
O. Henry

“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.”
James Joyce

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
Mark Twain

“We are the opening verse of the opening page of the chapter of endless possibilities.”
Rudyard Kipling

“If the truth were to be known, everyone would be wearing a scarlet letter of one form or another.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne

(Note: The intellectual joke with Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter…”Hester Prynne was the first woman to letter in an indoor sport.” )

Personally, I think Oscar Wilde nailed it about helping people change their thinking.

“Be yourself, everyone else is taken.”