During her three-month visit to Jerusalem, Natalie Goldberg writes about her Israeli landlady, a woman in her fifties. The woman called a repairman to fix her broken TV. It took the repairman four visits to fix the screen.
"But you knew even before he came the first time what was wrong," Natalie told her. "He could have brought the correct tube and fixed it immediately."
The landlady looked at her in astonishment. "Yes but then we couldn't have had a relationship, sat and drunk tea and discussed the progress of the repairs. "
Of course, Goldberg writes, the goal was not to fix the machine but to have a relationship. To make a connection--to touch, to see, to listen, to discover, to drink from the well of the day's gladness.
Which begs the question: How then do we measure?
What is important? Or essential? How do we decide (or using Plato's verb, honor) the things that really matter?
This all sounds like a very good idea. You know, rearrange our priorities and all that. Ducks in a row. And it is easy to resonate with the goal part. It provides needed ballast for that fragment of our psyche that requires closure. So we're all in. And if it comes with an easy to follow checklist, all the better. (Which is all well and good until someone changes the list.)
But what if measuring is not even about the list?
Is it possible that we are asking the wrong questions?
During the Iraq War, a five-year-old boy watches the news with his father.
The boy keeps asking, "How big is this war? How did it start? What is war? Why are so many families, on the TV, so sad?"
The father tries to explain why countries go to war, why some people think wars are necessary, and other people believe that wars are wrong. But the boy keeps asking the same questions, night after night.
Finally, the father listens. And hears the real question.
He holds his son tight and says to him, "You don't have to worry. We are safe here. Dad will keep you safe. And our family will be safe, and we will do whatever we can to help keep other families safe."
After his Dad spoke, the boy became peaceful, because it was the reassurance his heart had been asking for.
Here's the deal: the question is almost never the question.
And more often than not, fixing the broken TV is not the goal.
I wonder what happened in this culture to make our measurements so catawampus? (We talk about and parade and live vicariously through so many skewed measurements for success.) I realize now that if my measurements are predicated solely on achievement or efficiency or accomplishment or resolutions or public opinion, then it is likely I will be removing myself from this present moment, not drinking from the well of the day; and I will miss the exquisite gifts of life. As adults, we think of measurement as a skill set. I'm smiling because even writing Sabbath Moment, after I have spent the afternoon in my garden, I am prone to ask, "What did I achieve? What did I accomplish? Was it successful?" (Did I get the TV fixed or not?)
"Momma, momma, listen to me; but this time with your eyes!" The little boy said to his mom. And I say, Amen.
People have told me that pain will be my teacher. They just didn't tell me what I would learn. I can tell you this: with pain--or uncertainty or way-laid plans or fractures of the heart or broken TV sets--it is too easy to focus only on the fixing. Or the right path.
And in my urgency for resolve I can miss the spirit of life. Natalie's landlady gives me a jolt to my heart. In Eve Ensler's words,
"Find freedom, aliveness, and power
not from what contains, locates, or protects us,
but from what dissolves, reveals, and expands us."
So if I'm honest I will admit that what I want is to manage life, not live it. I need permission to change the questions... permission to be carried by the surprise of life's unfolding.
A friend sent me this... Some stories have a beginning, a middle, an end all tied up with twine and sealed with a kiss. These ones can be told with satisfaction, lessons drawn out like fresh honey from the hive. They're my favorite kind.
Some stories are larger, though, and we must make our homes right in the midst of the mystery.
I am ever grasping for a timeline too, wanting to know whether this is a short season to savor or a long one with hatches to be battened down. I keep scrambling to arrange the scraps of my story into some semblance of cohesive narrative, a work that holds the tensions of grief and joy, longing and contentment. We live in a kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven in a world where we see only through a glass dimly.
Story arcs are made of chapters,
are made of paragraphs,
are made of sentences,
are made of words,
are made of letters,
are made of single strokes of ink.
Today's story arc? It is sunny. The kind you bask in. And heavenly at this time of year. In a little over a month, dusk will set in by late afternoon. So today is a gift.
And it is enough.
Maybe this story doesn't need twine and a kiss. Although another kind of medicine is called for. I need a dose of the Liquidambar (Sweetgum). Have you seen their leaves this autumn? Today, an inflamed or flushed red, against a cool blue sky. It's involuntary and spontaneous, this smile or grin that stretches across my face, altering my mood. I don't know how deep is today's well of gladness, but I do know there is enough to raise a glass to the sun as it sets beyond the steel blue Olympic Range.
Visiting Joshua Tree National Park, children are given a guide with suggestions for enjoying the park. One of them says, "Find an oasis. In silence, spend ten minutes there. Ask yourself these questions: What did I hear? What did I see? What did I notice that surprised me?"
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