Observations of life in it’s natural habitat
My husband and I had several different errands to run yesterday while working on the house. There is a chimney that serves no purpose rising from the basement to the attic (now, yesterday it rose above the roof). We had storm damage of our roof, and we are getting a new one, thus making it the perfect time to start the chimney removal process. We needed a tarp, a piece of 3/4” plywood and a couple other things like power tools.
The home improvement store was a madhouse and the while we were all grabbing things for lastminute projects before the summer ends; we have slid unaware into Halloween. 10’ tall, animated creatures waved at startled children who clutched desperately at parental hands. A young couples carried a baby in their arms, obviously unprepared for the overwhelming choices in color and ideas for home improvement. Had they known how many steps they were going to walk, they would have grabbed the car seat for the tiny parcel and put it in a cart. As I was searching for a parking spot, a harried husband pushed a big cart distractedly stopped in the middle of the lane to unlock the car with his fob for the hounding spouse. He looked up at me with embarrassment and quickly drug his project out of the way. A sales person for the store found himself trapped and surrounded in territory that was not his domain because he was wearing the right color vest in the wrong area. So very kind and patient, he helped each one of us release our choices from the locked cage to bear our trophies off for our weekly workout condensed into the next 5 hours. Despite the stress, chaos and madness; we were all patient and kind to each other. I made observations about the prices as we rang out but my frustrations were for people beyond my location and my actual reach.
Driving home, people were making a living the way they could. There was a concert fund raiser in a parking lot with a group of vendors and the parking lot hadn’t filled up yet but everyone was getting ready for a good time. We came to a street corner where a hotdog vendor was talking to a father and a small boy. She bent down to look the young man in the eye and what ever she said to him made every limb gyrate with uncontained excitement. The father looked on with comfortable pride over the son and my husband shared memories of our grown son when he was that age.
I told a friend recently when she was worried about the state of the world: We are but a short period of time for this big glue marble spinning in space. Like stirrup pants and big hair, we are nothing but a short phase for it. It was here for a million millennium before us and will spin on long after. We are nothing but artifacts in the dust for the next evolution to study. I realized that I needed to consider that same statement myself. It doesn’t matter the state of the world, we still keep living the best life we can.
Some people think we need to take time to show our grief publicly to honor those who died. Victorian England perfected the ritual and drug it out for almost a year. Whether or not that is where those people got the idea that we can’t be happy and celebrate at the same time we live in times of despair, it isn’t healthy to stand in a negative emotion for extended periods of time. Our mental health is affected, and our physical health declines and I can’t say which is more important for a human being’s longevity but I know that they both hurt us. It isn’t appropriate for us to wallow in frustration, in anger, in fear and not embrace moments of joy. We need friends, not just for ourselves but for their well-being as well. If we can keep being kind to each other and to strangers, maybe we can swing things back the way they were before everything started going south.
Think of it this way, If each one of us makes the world we live in; a place we would want to give our children for only one interaction with a stranger, maybe it will get better faster. Live the way you want the world to be all the time and hopefully, people will follow your example. At least, you make the world better for those around you for a minute or longer. Treat each other well and have a wonderful week.