When I began writing this blog, several people got in touch with me from my days as editor of Special Events magazine. One of them was Tony Daggett, president of Daggett's Catering in Philadelphia. He reminded me of a piece I had written way back when. It was about life being a cosmic grindstone -- depending on what you are made of, it can make you hard or make you shine. It's message stayed with Tony and it rings true for me now more than ever.

The central character in this fable was a rock polisher that my father had brought home one summer. I think he was trying to encourage the interest my brothers and I had taken in geodes, perhaps bringing out the budding geologist in one of us. That never happened but we had a great time that summer searching the hills for stones to polish and discovering that nothing is what it seems.

Some of the rocks were ordinary, bordering on ugly. Others were already beautiful. We brought them all back to the garage, loaded them in the polisher and began a loud, long process that consisted of several changes of water and the addition of certain types of other rocks.

At the end of the week we would dump the stones out and find that the process had revealed gorgeous colors, patterns and shapes that we couldn't see before. Whether the rocks had started out pretty orordinary made no difference. The deciding factor on whether they polished up or ground to nothing was their composition.

As we grind along day to day, stone against stone,we begin to reveal our true colors. In so doing, we either become something truly inspiring or dissolve into sand. Who we are, what we think, what we say, what we do -- determine our outcome. But this is certainly not something set in stone because while rocks really can't change what they are made of, we can.