CELEBRATING THE GREATEST GIFT OF ALL BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA
w
AG closes out a year of celebration with the greatest
gift of all – the gift of service to others. In these pages, you’ll find 12 luminaries with connections to WAG country who spotlight the breadth of that gift. For some, service to others has in part grown out of a challenging personal experience. Such is the case of actress Glenn Close, who founded Bring Change 2 Mind in response to mental health issues within her own family. For others, service is born of a professional passion, as in former New York Yankee Mark Teixeira’s work with Harlem RBI, which uses baseball as a way into the lives of disadvantaged youth. Still others have seen service dovetail with a spiritual quest as with Richard Gere, whose commitment to Buddhism has led to activism on behalf of Tibet and in India. Celebrities, of course, have the money, fame and other resources to create foundations and command dollars and attention. Most of us will never be a Paul Newman or an Elizabeth Taylor, who turned a devotion to children with cancer and AIDS research, respectively, into brilliant second acts. (Some might say their movie stardom was but a springboard to their real life’s work.) But as Edmund Burke, the great 18th-century, Irish-born member of the British Parliament, observed: “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” Last month, Elizabeth Hurley — spokesmodel for the Estée Lauder Companies’ Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign — told a group gathered for brunch at Bloomingdale’s White Plains that you might make a meal for someone in need. Or just be with that person. Precisely. Sometimes service is a cupcake or a T-shirt. (See our entry on actress and lifestyle goddess Blake Lively.) But always it benefits us as much as others. “Selflessness and joy are intertwined,” His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a Nov. 4 New York Times op-ed piece. “The more we are one with the rest of humanity, the better we feel.” Or as Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”
WAGMAG.COM
DECEMBER 2016
17