pre-Thanksgiving musings

This article is a long but worthwhile read. I have been thinking these topics a lot lately (race, everyday and mundane frustrations, what it means to be nice, Plato's take on arete, etc).

I liked some of the following excerpts.

Although I do not know the struggle of cancer firsthand, I am infinitely familiar with sadness, family, and loss. And learning to hold onto ourselves amidst losing so much has been our journey over the last 8 years.

As I am thinking about seeing the family next week, and marveling over that upcoming tradition that our seemingly heartless world keeps alive (despite the insidious placement in the calendar year right next to Christmas), consider the following:

What are the arenas in your life where you feel most alive?

Where do you go when you realize you are suddenly catapulted into a world colder and more blinding?

And most importantly, what are you doing today that makes it an honor to exist in this world?


"I thought about that woman and the people mocking her for the rest of the night, and during a post-dinner walk, I told my mother what was bothering me. “They were so mean to her,” I said when I got to the end of the story. “I just don’t know why they were being so mean to her.” My mother stopped walking and turned to face me, her lips pursed and her brow furrowed the way they always were when she was unsure of exactly how to put something. “The world is a mean place,” she said at last. “Sometimes people are mean, and sometimes things will be hard. One of your jobs is to try and make sure that that never makes you mean and hard, too.” 
[...]
"A few times a year, I’ll find myself gripped by the feeling that the spaces in which I live are inadequate arenas for the occasions when I feel most alive. My bedroom is a good place to shut off my brain and watch Netflix. The patio behind the Mexican restaurant down the street from my apartment is a nice venue to engage in small talk about work. But even the most familiar places feel like a jail cell when someone you love—the person who taught you how to love in the first place—is sharing with you that they’re worried the poison growing in their chest will eventually kill them. It seems like a kind of secular sin to absorb that moment within eyeshot of a stick of Old Spice deodorant or a pile of dry cleaning or a line of people snaking out of Starbucks; in other words, the mundanity with which we surround ourselves to forget that such moments exist. The day my mother called me to say that she was afraid, I hung up the phone and cried. It was less the weeping of a grief-stricken adult and more that of a baby exiting the womb, a thrashing while coming into a world colder and more blinding than the one that existed before. After that, I went to the beach.
[]
"I have to think something most everyone with a sick loved one shares is a frustration over our inability to effect change in the situation. Life already offers up so many different ways to make you feel weak, and now you get to watch someone dear to you wither from a disease that confounds even scientists who have studied it their whole careers. You can offer an ill person support with words, food, or a hand on the shoulder, but ultimately you are little more than a spectator watching fate play out from seats even farther removed from the field than usual.
That day at the beach, with the brightness dulling to dark as the sun sank past the ocean, I realized that part of what I was struggling with in the wake of my mother’s diagnosis was a heavy sense of powerlessness. The same sort of powerlessness I’d felt years before on almost the same stretch of sand. If I’m being honest, the same sort of powerlessness I feel dozens of times a year. I then remembered that the only thing that’s made me feel consistently strong in my life is the recollection of my mother holding my hand, looking into my eyes, and entreating me to fight to stay kind in the face of the viciousness and grief existence likes to heap upon all of us."
[...]
"As a man who’s done it, I can say with certainty that it’s easy to roll down the window and call the person who cut you off on the freeway a “fucking asshole.” It’s easy to revere tradition over people’s feelings. It’s easy to respond to a broken heart with a devastating comment, one that cuts so deeply because you know everything about the person to whom you’re speaking, including the exact thing to say to crush them. It’s easy to be a racist. Tapping into the darker recesses of your lizard brain in order to live a life unencumbered by self-examination or regard for others is simple because it’s reflexive, like throwing a punch, like stealing Monopoly money from the bank when your little sister isn’t looking. Conversely, waking up each day and devoting yourself to being kind, even and especially to people who are not kind to you, is actually incredibly difficult. It is arduous and deliberate work, and the doing of it will at times make you feel small and foolish. What’s more, in the end, it will on its own merits almost never yield a person awards or honors or riches.
I am hopeful that my mother will be around to share many more years with us. But I’m now attempting to find some comfort in the idea that I can keep her close to me for as long as I live by struggling to remain decent, the pursuit that I’ve seen conjure up incredible power during the course of her life. The world takes from us relentlessly. It takes our friends and first loves. It takes our parents. It takes our faith. It takes our dignity. It takes our passion. It takes our health. It takes our honesty, and it takes our credulity. To lose so much and still hold onto yourself is perhaps the most complicated task human beings are asked to perform, which is why seeing it done with aplomb is as thrilling as looking at dinosaur bones or seeing a herd of elephants. It’s an honor to exist on Earth with these things.

via {medium}

0 comments:

Post a Comment