Creating hope when you believe that the world is a shiny happy place filled only with easy decisions -- that's nothing.

Creating hope when you believe that the wonderful world is sometimes incredibly difficult, when you know that your best choices and your hardest work don't always go the way they should have, when you have lived enough of a life to understand that the best we can do is only sometimes enough and that bad things happen to good people -- that's an accomplishment. And it's a start. That hope for the next ten years may be the only thing that keeps you going, but it's also the foundation of whatever comes next. Keeping that hope alive by guess and by gosh is itself part of the good work.

- M'ris, over in Peg Kerr's journal

Also wise: Carol Kennedy, on being done with each day once it's lived.

---

A small item in yesterday's New York Times that made me happy: the Advocate is dispensing with privacy wrappers on its issues, using them only for readers who request them. According to its publisher, "The majority [of subscribers] no longer wanted the covering. For some, they said they were environmentally conscious and wanted to cut down on waste. For others, it was more of an out-and-proud issue."