This morning there was a meeting, at the meeting house, of the Bright Lights Book Project Board. This was in preparation for the upcoming meeting with the executive director and the board president of the recycling center.
We have nothing to worry about. The meeting is going to go well, and there continues to be, on the part of the Bright Lights Book Project, a strong sense of like mindedness.
Pete, who was at this meeting, has repeatedly said that we have to remain of the mind that we are doing the recycling center a favor rather than vice-versa. It is easy to think otherwise.
Me, I am not a leader. I don’t have years of leadership experience. I also tend to march to the beat of my own drummer. This was why, today, I had a hard time getting a toehold in the conversation. No matter, knowing this, my strategy at the Thursday meeting is going to be to remain quiet and speak when asked questions. This is because I, based on past history, will be in the line of fire.
I’ve been thinking a great deal about history lately, mainly because I’ve been told to not talk at this upcoming meeting about the bad things that occurred in the past. This does seem to me to be nonsensical because to dismiss past history is to dismiss essential truths. This, at least, is what Milan Kundara is getting at in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. He’s talking about the history of Romania; me, I’m just talking about the history of a book project. But the same holds true for both – pretend that certain things didn’t happen, and the same things will happen again.
So knowing this, it will be difficult to remain quiet, but I’ll do it.
Bill Schmidtkunz has Covid, so I am getting to distribute books, which is my favorite thing to do. This is because it’s the end stage of the salvage, categorizing, cleaning, and distribution process. At the same time, it’s the stage at which there is affirmation for the project.
Clap, clap, calp. A round of applause for those who put the books out on the shelves.
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