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Category: perspective

Terra Firma

Terra Firma

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Ever since I moved into my new office I’ve had an aerial display to observe out my window.  The first week it was directly across from me on the building across the way. Now, entering my third week, it has moved slightly to the west.

At first, I thought these intrepid souls were window-washers. But I quickly realized what they were doing was infinitely more complicated and nuanced, something that involves power-washing as well as chiseling, scraping and applying what appears to be a seal at the base of each stone panel.

Of course, what they mostly do, what absorbs my attention when I’m in between tasks and “resting my eyes,” is hang off the side of an 11-story building.  Right now, for instance, they are almost at the top, swaying in the breeze on a little platform with only a few ropes to hold them up.

I know they are belted and secured and wearing helmets. They appear to be safe. But I still get a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach watching them work.

I may have hard days filled with crazy deadlines and tight turnaround times. But every writing and editing assignment, no matter how difficult, is conducted with my feet firmly planted on terra firma. Watching these guys has made me very grateful for that.

Tripping the Light Domestic

Tripping the Light Domestic

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Sometimes the tasks of the day seem to weigh me down. They are just more to-dos in a sea of them. But other times, they are actions of such richness and delight that I wonder why I ever thought them otherwise.

Take today, for instance. Since I’m working at home I leisurely brewed a pot of tea, whipped up one of my strawberry milkshakes and had both at the ready as I read through email. It was a pleasure to give Copper his pill, to coax him to eat his breakfast by sprinkling a meaty treat on the dog food.

What makes the difference, I think, is time. When I rush through each chore, I am only in check-off mode. There is no presence. Whereas when I’m not in a rush, the day spreads out before me, a banquet of sights, smells and activities.

Tripping the light fantastic means dancing nimbly. Tripping the light domestic means walking lightly through the day.

Turning Right

Turning Right

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I left the house early, out for a walk and an artist’s date. The walk was one of the usuals — until I turned right instead of left at the end of Glade and ended up on an unpaved section of the Cross County Trail.

It slowed me down, this packed-dirt, root-strewn path. And slowing down was a good thing. I noticed the light filtering through the early autumn leaves, some just starting to change. I heard a bluejay squawk. Finally, I took my earbuds out so I could hear Little Difficult Run sing as it tripped over its large smooth stones.

Back to my car and inspired by the trail, I decided to drive past houses that line it. Some of them look small and down-sizable, worth a second glance.

Now I’m writing at a coffeeshop I recently discovered. The Doobie Brothers are playing, I’m tapping my feet and trying to concentrate.

Maybe not the perfect artist’s date, but it’s a start.

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.)