Ringing True

My mothers words come rattling back to me at the oddest times. She would often say, “Every cloud has a silver lining,” and although I can’t say that this is always true in my experience, I figure that the least we can do is look for it. Rwanda was the blackest cloud I have ever experienced. I hate to keep mentioning the Rwanda trip in this blog, but, as you can guess by now, that trip was a very powerful experience for me. Although I won’t go in to the details now, I will just say that it took eight months of deep thinking, but I found the silver lining in that terribly black event.

Life is full of clouds in varying degrees of darkness. I just returned from the India/Burma border and the Tibetan high plateau, and God knows there are many clouds in the lives of the people living there. I am not suggesting that bad things happen to provide us with learning opportunities, but when bad things happen, the least we can do is try to learn something from them. Sometimes the best thing to come from a bad event is knowledge of what we can do to stop it from happening again.

So here is the jump (stay with me): I have never been one for jewelry. Many times jewelry is worn to improve our appearance, and, trust me, there is not a jeweller out there that could do much for me. Sometimes jewelry is worn as a sign of affluence; again, not something that interests me at all. Jewelry can also be worn as a sign, such as a wedding band or engagement ring. Not a bad idea, but there is another reason to wear jewelry, and that is as a reminder. I worked side by side for many years with an engineer who wore a small, discreet engineering ring made from the steel of a collapsed bridge. I learned that every engineer gets one as a reminder that no one is infallible. Although he taught for more than 30 years, he always wore that ring. I believe he wore it as a reminder.

In a little shop in Zadou, China there is a family who works forging silver into jewelry. In the middle of nowhere, this family make beautiful things to adorn the people of the valley. These people face clouds every day and keep on going. I promised myself that I would have them make me a simple silver ring as a reminder of what my mother said to me so long ago: "Every cloud has a silver lining." The older I get the more it rings true for me. In the face of adversity, I need to look at my ring, to look for the silver lining. I need to learn from the bad situation. I truly hope that the other members of the Rwanda trip who struggled so hard with what they saw can somehow find their silver lining.