I have written before about my belief in the power of Truth and Reconciliation projects. It comes up towards the end of the long comment conversation on this post, which itself links back to two posts I did about jury duty. The three posts together are one of the most fascinating and most widely-read conversations on the blog. (And if you go read, be warned — I had a database upgrade glitch a while back that whacked out the formatting of old posts, so it might look a little weird…).
Anyway, regarding reconciliation — here is an unexpected example.
When we offer truth and apology without defense in the hope of reconciliation, we take an enormous risk. When we offer reconciliation to people who have harmed us, we take an enormous risk. But look what sometimes happens. Well done, well done to all of these people.
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Write-a-thon running total: 3,040 words out of 12,000. Things have taken a sudden new turn. I love the way that writing the story leads me to such unexpected places. One of the benefits of being more experienced than when I was younger is that I don’t need to hang onto an idea just because it’s the one I started with. I feel as though I can “follow my nose” down the trail of a story and know fairly quickly if it’s a path I want to take. I no longer need to have my early ideas be right. Ideas are easy. There are a million different ways to tell a story. What I am doing is finding the story, rather than forcing my earliest notions to become the story.
Back in my early days, writing was a very serious activity (picture me with Serious Face: I Am Writing). These days, writing is serious play. Picture me with How Cool Is That! Face. I am writing.