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I use the journaling app, Day One, though honestly I’m a very sporadic journaler (and a former journal-ist). One thing D1 does is show you things you wrote on this day in previous years. Here’s an entry from nine years ago, April 2, 2015, where I responded to the following prompt:

What stories, images, and/or words most convey what spiritual growth is or looks like for you?

This is always changing for me. I’m a spiritual bumblebee. I have a restless mind.

Lately I have been listening to the book, Hiroshima, by John Hersey. Beyond the unreal, profligate suffering, what strikes me as I get closer to the end of the book is the ability of people to persevere through profound suffering to reconnect with joy. Of the six people profiled in the book who survived the initial blast, many were able to find themselves on the other side of this tragedy. The woman with the grotesquely broken leg, left for dead, finds joy in a job and works there for 13 years. A doctor who takes care of the thousands of burned and blasted and dying at the local hospital in the aftermath of the blast later sets up his own medical practice and succeeds. He is diagnosed with lung cancer and apparently thinks he has died, only to wake up short a lung. And what he realized out of this was that he did not spend enough attention on his wife and two sons. This moment, not the blast in Hiroshima, is what he identifies as the most important moment in his life, and he set himself upon the task of connecting more deeply with his family. His sons (who become doctors, like the old man) work in his clinic. His wife dies, but he throws himself into his work. It’s a fruitful life, remarkable in what he overcame.

I think too of the fact mentioned in the book that in the aftermath of the blast, and Japan’s surrender, that the people of Hiroshima reached a point where they did not hate the Americans, or the bomber pilot, or Harry Truman. They viewed the event as a natural disaster, unexplainable, something that simply existed and not the agency of a person or people. It’s an interesting way to look at the bad things in life, that when we look beyond blame or cause we can see that the act is simply the sum of a million things.

In the book, Practicing Compassion, Frank Rogers, Jr., tells the story of Azim Khamisa, whose son Tariq was shot to death while working as a pizza delivery person in San Diego in 1995. Azim was consumed by rage, helplessness, despair and vengeance. But over time, he found compassion. Eventually he met his son’s killer and what he saw was a young man whose actions were the sum of disadvantage and that there were victims on both sides of the gun. When his son’s killer Tony Harris was released from prison, Khamisa offered him a job as a counselor at the non-profit he had started in memory of his son.

At work, a story was brought to my attention of a young man, Derek Yates, in Tennessee, whose brother was killed by a drunk driver. He started a non-profit, 1N3, referring to the fact that 1 in 3 of us are impacted by the effects of drunk driving in our lives. The amazing thing was that after his brother was killed, he and his mom had a restorative justice meeting with the driver of the car that killed their brother and son. They made a choice to understand her rather than condemn her. They kept in touch. Nineteen months later, they attended Tish’s parole board hearing and asked the panel to release her. There was an agreement that she would be involved with 1N3, and she has since upheld her end of the deal, and then some.

Those are some of the stories moving me today. Not toward justice, though justice is surely part of it. But stories of people making the choice to see the world around them and to live in it. To understand that the injustice around us is rarely the result of individual evil.