Picking Your Perspective
Life had been intense here lately. How about you? I sense it’s everywhere — this burning, twirling, chaos of good and bad all mixed in like some ice cream swirl. The question comes, as it always does: how are you? Answering with anything like honesty brings me to a stop. Where the hell to go … I’m great because it’s summer and the tomatoes are coming on and I can stand at the sink and eat one peach after the other. I’m hesitant to open the news every morning (every hour!) and see what’s next with the heartbreaking heatwave in Europe, the ongoing saga in Ukraine, the jaw-dropping details of January 6. I’m anxious as hell about all of this, as well as money and the water that’s seeped into my basement recently and my kids’ well-being. I’m in deep deep inner discernment about my life. I’m so grateful to be living where I am in this tucked-away house with good neighbors all around.
So yeah, it’s way way complicated. And it changes so quickly.
The other day, I was at my friends’ blueberry farm picking one sweet little chunk of fruit after another. I’d find a gathering of ripe ones and pick, pick, pick. When it seemed I’d exhausted that bush, I’d step forward toward another, but when I looked back at where I’d just been I’d see another dark purple cluster that was behind and above where I’d just been standing. This repeated and repeated so that I was laughing at myself, laughing with the bushes and their joke. They were providing me a folksy knowledge drop: it’s never over, there’s always more to pick. And to find it, you just need to take another step and look at things from a different vantage point. Oh, wise sweet berries!
The lesson goes on and on—it’s a matter of remembering it. Like remembering to drink water. Remembering that maybe you’re cranky because you’re tired. How the anxiety about money actually tends to ease when you pay more attention to it. How going toward the pain can ease it.
My jaw is stuck these days in a position of stress — so much so that my dentist has ordered an MRI and I’ll likely be the lucky recipient of a device called a Deprogrammer. From my basic understanding, this contraption will force my jaw to take new positions. It is the “big guns” of change. Our world needs deprogramming—the kind of radical change that so few of us are willing to take on — stop flying, stop buying new clothes, change out your heating and cooling system to get off of fossil fuel, radically alter our systems of education, policing, healthcare, and so on.
We aren’t good at radical shifts like these. Many people are seeking the tools to move us more quickly out of harms way and toward better futures. Futures where there’s not such dire inequities in the world, where hearts are more available to empathy. Where learning isn’t about competition and compliance to rules but is about learning to listen to one’s body, to one’s inner compass. This is heavy work. Unending work. And while we’re at it, we must keep picking blueberries. We must keep looking for the small ripe patches that are right there for the picking if only we look.
Photo by Mario Mendez/Unsplash.
