Anything is possible: this is one of my personal mottoes and beliefs. Call it a mindset or an attitude; it is a guiding principle in my life. I don’t only hold that as a belief for myself, I hold it for others as well. I’ve watched for a week now as Congresswoman Giffords, the Congresswoman who was shot in the head last Saturday in Tuscon Arizona, has defied the odds of her injury and continued to move forward in her healing: anything is possible.
I am not sure why her situation has resonated with me so strongly. I was horrified by the shooting and felt a sense of mourning as I watched the tragic event unfold on tv. I found myself stepping back, wanting to reflect more on what had happened and waiting before I drew any conclusion or meaning from the event.
I have also felt myself waiting for updates on Gifford’s condition and celebrating each small step towards recovery. Perhaps it is the part of me that loves to root for underdogs. Despite all of the doctors’ cautioned words, she is getting better and I find hope in that. While it’s true that most people do not recover from this type of injury, there are some that do and I hope she is one of them. Maybe it’s because she was the intended target and this time, the universe said no.
In the movie The Lord of the Rings, good and evil fight out control for Middle Earth. Evil takes the form of a “ring of power” that falls into the hands of a naive and pure soul, a hobbit named Frodo. In order to truly beat evil, the ring must be destroyed in the very fires it was made from. Gollum, the character who lost the ring in The Hobbit, tries to get it back and becomes a key player in destroying the ring. In fact, it is Gollum, not Frodo , who ultimately ends up falling into the pit of fire with the ring, consumed by his own desire for the ring. Sometimes it takes an act of great evil to shift a tide and move things on a different path. The other lesson I take from this example is that no one achieves great acts alone. It takes many people and sometimes we don’t know the parts that people will play.
Anything is possible. I believe that people can survive horrific acts and still go on to live a life of meaning; I believe that when people are given a choice between what is right for themselves as individuals, and what is right for humanity as a whole, that most people will choose what is right for humanity as a whole. I believe that people are inherently good and that we all have similar wants and needs.
Today we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s life here in America. He also believed that anything is possible when people work together and align themselves for the good of humanity as a whole. He too faced great evil and his life and death transformed our Nation’s view of what it means to be truly “equal.” It was a moment of forcing ourselves to look in the mirror and see if our reflection was truly what we as a Nation wanted it to be. We stand before that same mirror in the wake of what happened in Tuscon Arizona last week and as congresswoman Giffords continues to defy odds, I hope she also believes that anything is possible and that from this tragic event, there is hope and possibility of a truly free and democratic society where differing beliefs are respected and that those differences are what makes us a great Nation.