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Category: perspective

The Teabag

The Teabag

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The first time I saw the tea bag, I barely noticed it was there. It was morning, I’d parked at the high school and was walking through the tunnel to the station. I was rushing, of course, and I figured it was there because someone else had been rushing, too. I paid it little mind.

But the tea bag was there in the afternoon when I walked back to my car. Nothing had disturbed it. No animal had burrowed in it to see what was inside. No one had kicked it into the grass. It looked as clean and untouched at 6 p.m. as it had at 7 a.m.
So I thought more about it. Did it fall out of a box of teabags? Was it perched on top of a cup, its owner unaware until reaching the office that his hot water would never become tea?
The next morning, I decided that if the teabag was still there, I’d snap a shot of it. And so I did. Not because it was anything special. But because it was not.
Civility

Civility

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Maybe it’s something you learn as an editor, that if you’re going to take the thoughts and feelings of someone who took the time to write them down on a page, and cover these words with red ink, you’d better do it politely. But I think it’s more fundamental, a lesson we learn as children, to treat others kindly and with compassion, as we would like to be treated. You can argue diametrically opposed opinions, but if you do it with kindness and tact, you’ll get much further.

I’m hardly the first person to note that civility has disappeared from public discourse. But let me add my voice to the chorus of those bemoaning its absence. Yes, we may hail from different sides of the political aisle, may not see eye-to-eye on much of anything. But can we at least address each other respectfully?

“Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart,” said Kentucky statesman Henry Clay in another century. I’m hoping we make civility a 21st-century value, too.

(Speaking of Henry Clay, this is the old Henry Clay High School in Lexington, Kentucky, my alma mater.) 

Morning After

Morning After

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On the morning after Congress announced the beginning of impeachment proceedings against the 45th president of the United States, I picked the newspaper up off the driveway as I usually do, knowing, before I opened it, how much there would be inside to read.

I had been glued to the television the night before, uncharacteristically watching news instead of a British soap opera, and yet I had to have more of it this morning. This is the way things are now — that after two and a half years of craziness, there will be even more.

Sometimes I think that we’ve all become addicted to craziness, that we won’t know what to do if we ever again have a bland status quo.

But then again, I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that for a while.

(A blurry Washington, D.C., seen from above and afar. Looks a little like an Impressionist painting, doesn’t it?)

A Thicket

A Thicket

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Yesterday I heard a peep, bright and insistent. It was a sparrow roosting in the bamboo that flanks the west side of the house. The little bird found a good place to shelter.

Our bamboo grove is a mass of leaves and stems, lush and green, some bending, many still upright. I look into the tight center of it all and remember the joy of hidden places, of climbing under the forsythia when I was young, of entering the cinder trail (below) as recently as last Saturday.
It is the human need for enclosure, for a safe spot from which to peer out at the rest of the world. It’s Robinson Crusoe and his protective hedge, or our Neanderthal ancestors in their secluded cave. We don’t always need it, or always seek it out. But it’s good to know that it’s there. 
Shock Absorbers

Shock Absorbers

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As a walker in the suburbs I do a fair share of pavement-pounding. But as a homeowner in the suburbs I do a fair share of driving, too.

Today I pick up a car that was in one shop and now must go to another. It’s an — ahem! — older vehicle, a tad finicky, and has lately begun swaying like a covered wagon on the Oregon Trail. Faulty shock absorbers are the culprit. 
This has me thinking about shock absorbers in general, and how nice it would be to have them for the daily irritants of life, some sort of invisible bubble wrap that would protect us from missed trains and long waits at the doctor’s office. 
I know they exist — they’re called prayer and meditation and the active practice of gratitude. But sometimes I’d like an easier, more self-indulgent solution. 
Small Changes

Small Changes

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Changes: can’t live with them; can’t live without them. Whether willed or imposed, they present difficulties — or perhaps I should say “opportunities for growth.”

Shifting to another spot in the Metro parking garage because there’s an 18-month rebuilding plan, for instance. Or switching my commute from drive, Metro and bus to … drive and Metro alone.

Small changes, one imposed and one chosen. Both a lot to wrap my head around before 8 a.m.

They’re just ways to stay limber, I tell myself as I walk to work. As if to underline these thoughts, I trod upon the first crinkled brown leaves of the season. Is it autumn already? No, just a couple of streetscape oaks that have fallen on hard times.

Writing a Life

Writing a Life

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An article in yesterday’s Washington Post says that writing a narrative of one’s life helps prepare one for death. It makes sense to me. But I would amend it slightly to say that writing a narrative of one’s life prepares us for … life!

I’ve been keeping a journal since high school, and wouldn’t trade those books for anything. They are a motley bunch of spiral-bound and hardbound volumes, with writing cramped and tiny or loose and free depending on my mood. They preserve more than I could ever remember — and quite a bit I’d rather forget. But they are a record of my life, for good or ill, and as such are valuable to me.

An expert quoted in the Post article mentions that merely listing one’s life events doesn’t work. It’s creating the narrative that brings perspective, linking one incident, one person, to another, a chain of belonging, a chain of being.

In other words, it’s figuring out the question that Charles Dickens so aptly asks at the beginning of David Copperfield. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

(If life is a journey, it is also a narrative.) 

Fresh Starts

Fresh Starts

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The rain moved out overnight and left behind a bright breezy morning. As the wind blows you can see the underside of the leaves, and that creates an even more varied palette of green. I finished a big work project yesterday and am catching my breath from that. It feels like something new is beginning.

I like to think about all the little fresh starts we are given in a lifetime. Of course, there are the big ones: new schools, new jobs, new loves. And then the really big ones, births and deaths. But in between there are countless others: new weeks or weekends, visiting a friend we haven’t seen in years, taking a trip and returning from one, finishing a book that sets the mind a spinning.

These little beginnings are the freshets of regular existence, burblings-up from the wellspring of grace that is there all along but is often forgotten.

What He Learned

What He Learned

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Today, walking to work from Metro, I thought about the book Everything I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.  It was crossing the street that made it come to mind and, once there, it wouldn’t go away.

The book was quite a phenomenon when it was published in 1986, and a 25th anniversary edition appears to be selling briskly. In it, Robert Fulghum says that he stands by his simple rules, that he still believes if we only practiced what we learned in kindergarten we would all be better off.

What did we learn? Things like “share everything,” “play fair,” “clean up your own mess” and “when you go out into the world, watch for traffic, hold hands and stick together.”

Though it’s easy to poke fun at the simplistic message, given the state of our nation and our world, Fulghum’s words resonate even more deeply today than it did when he wrote them.

Buds, Blooms and Petals

Buds, Blooms and Petals

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The climbing roses reached their peak yesterday. I snapped photos of them from every angle, and Claire took photos with her new phone camera, too.

I tried to drink in their beauty as I scrubbed the porch table and chairs, as I removed the green film from the outside of the flower pots.

I tried to enjoy them during dinner with the storm that would be their undoing already making itself felt in the heavy air and ominous clouds.

I think I was successful, in as much as we humans every fully are. To savor the moment, the perfection of the bud and bloom, knowing full well the pile of petals that will follow — that about sums it up, doesn’t it?