Almost anyone who can communicate has said something about what it Barack Obama's inauguration meant to them, but there was one sentence in his inaugural speech that struck me as particularly important. It's the last sentence in the following paragraph:

"Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task. "

What moves me most about this passage is the fact that the president seems to understand that the healing power of service to others comes from genuine compassion.

I'm happy that more schools are incorporating community service in their curriculum. It's a very nice way of teaching young people that their personal problems are not as big as they think. But the president wants even more than to just do the work of helping others in the larger world. He wants us to seize the responsibility gladly. And to do that, we must change the focus of our lens.

In "letters to Sam" I talked about an old Jewish parable (I guess all Jewish parables are old) about how before a child is born God infuses this child with all of the wisdom and knowledge they will need in life. And then he puts his finger on the child's mouth and says shhhhh, thus making a secret pact between the child and God. And as the story goes, that's why the we all have an indentation on our upper lip, that's gods fingerprint! Regardless of your theology or ideology, we do have a quality of inner wisdom and wholeness. All of us.

So in order to make the transition from caring for others "grudgingly" to doing so with genuine compassion involves that indentation on the upper lip. When we see another human being, try looking at the upper lip first and understand that person has more in common with you than you previously thought. And then look in their eyes and you will see what I mean.

It is then as you care for a fellow human being (even animal or plant) with openhearted compassion, you begin to understand that your world is bigger than you previously thought, that it is less frightening and more kindred. It is then that you can feel secure in the knowledge that real happiness is about what you do and not what you have.