Over the holidays, I will be having dinners with the family and friends that impact me. Every day for ten days I will be writing about something I have learned in the first two months of this project.This is lesson 4.

Exceptional people do not seem to suffer any more or less than the rest of us. Nor are the people I eat with consistently born to a special set of circumstances or privilege.Arguably, the difference is in their response to their struggles and their triumphs.

The people I eat with do not feel entitled to live free of difficulty and they take what learning they can from the circumstances they encounter. They make meaning, grappling with circumstances that might seem insurmountable, compelled to find a purposw in what they and others experience.

The experiences can certainly be daunting. Ennis was very aware of the impact residential school abuses have had on many members of his community. DS’s experience of the Gulf War occurred when he was very young, but the impact is lasting. Claudette has overcome the injuries she sustained in a devastating car crash, only to find herself supporting her son as he recovers from his own injuries from a separate accident.

The argument for despair could certainly be made.The people – eat with reject that argument, not as an epiphany realized in a single moment in time, bit as a daily decision. It is not any easier for the people I eat with to deal with suffering than it is for the rest of us. What sets them apart is the decision to deal with it as honestly and as openly as possible.It is a decision made over and over again.

I do not think for a second that the extraordinary work I document requires any less of the people I meet than it would of the rest of us. It may look glamourous or sound terrifically affirming, but it is work nonetheless. Mike still deals with life and death situations in his work as a paramedic and wilderness medic.Steve’s Ride To Conquer Cancer is a response to a disease that takes many lives.

Many of these people talk about the journey. They are not standing still waiting for more help to arrive.Nor are they stuck in place by apathy or sadness.They do something because to do nothing is simply not a choice they can live with.

While not everyone I talk to is optimistic, they continue to do the work they are passionate about,even as they question the impact it has.Even the cynical observe that people are extraordinarily resilient.

What sets the people I eat with apart is not exceptional suffering nor exceptional privilege, but the ability to continue their work through success and failure, in the face of exhaustion and especially when ther is not yet any perceptible impact.They persevere because there is always more to learn and a responsibility to do something with that learning.