something else

"Perseverance".

I wasn't looking at all forward to hearing Jennifer Lopez speak.  
I couldn't imagine that she would have anything to say that might apply to my life, to who I am or want to be or have been.
We are not alike, J-Lo and I.
It is also true that I am in no way similar to a Supreme Court Justice and yet I was thrilled that later in the day I would be in the audience as one of those amazing Madam Justices spoke.


"Blah blah blah", she might as well have said.
She wore a dress I wouldn't choose.  Had on make up that seemed excessive for morning, even in my eyes.   I was in no way familiar with even one of her songs.  She meant essentially nothing to me and so I busied myself as she began chatting into the microphone.  I browsed the beautiful keepsake/program that you are handed as you enter the annual California Conference for Women.
I felt lucky to be one of 14,000, mostly female audience members, for the second time in my life.
This experience is all together magnificent and magical.  I'm not exaggerating one bit when I use the word magical.
Like a bolt of electricity striking you - ZAP, you're cracked in half and then you are systematically filled all day long with information, communication, education, stimulation, explanation, imagination, exaltation, till you are exhausted and rung out like a soaking wet towel that has washed and dried 1,000 plates, from 1,000 different shelves, in 1,000 different houses, in 1,000 different towns, used by 1,000,000,000 different people.   You are touched and touched again on this one day by some of the brightest, most influential and fascinating people on the planet.  Except her.   She has nothing to offer me... or so I thought, until she said, "persevere".
It's a nice word, but not one of my favorites and yes I have a list of favorite words.
I'm not sure what she said next, but I can tell you what I was wearing, what I tasted in my mouth at that very moment, who was on either side of me and what I did just at the exact second the word "persevere" stopped rattling around my previously distracted brain.   I cried.
There it was again, the common bond, the inbred cell, the undetectable thread that binds us all, even her and I together in our sisterhood, our humanness.
She had my full attention then and she taught me something more then she likely meant to with her speech.  I learned, by mistake perhaps, that there is no experience we are presented with from which we cannot learn.
I liked her now.  I liked what she said and I liked what she did; persevered.


In my life of 1,000,000,000 experiences it still stuns me to recognize that I am fallible.  Very.  Highly.  It surprises me that I still make mistakes.   How old do you have to be before you actually know enough to recognize right from wrong for sure, all the time?  How old are we when we're no longer potentially erroneous?   Know what I find harder to swallow then knowing that I am still, with all that I know and all that I've seen and all that I've read and everywhere I've been, faulty at times?   What's harder then knowing I am sometimes completely wrong?  Knowing that I am absolutely right.   Knowing, really knowing that I'm not in the wrong, but am in fact just plain right, is actually more difficult for me to accept.
Isn't that something?