What I want to keep
As I prepared to leave the grocery store yesterday, I hit one of those small potholes of everyday life. I hadn’t left enough room in my pack for everything I needed to carry. So I chucked ballast before taking off on my bike, removing my bike-lock from the pack and wrapping it around a signpost. II’ll pick it up later in the day, I promised myself.
This got me to thinking, as I pedalled home. With its cable wrapped around the pole like a string around a finger, a bike lock never forgets what it is meant to do. I’d like to carry this quality of never-forgetting into the new year.
In particular, there are three things I learned this year, which I want to hang onto as I cycle into another spin of the calendar. Even if it means chucking out some other stuff in order to make room.
Delight in the smallest social interactions. This year I have learned to communicate across the chasm of masks in public places, by using a semaphore of winks and gestures. But these strange interactions often amplified my experience of the goodwill in our community. I want to keep that.
Appreciation of the people who make things run. Also in these COVID times, I have started thanking the people in suits and masks who bring boxes and padded envelopes of stuff to our house.. And people at checkout counters, gas stations, tradespeople, and every other kind of person who keeps my infrastructure alive. I realize now more than ever how utterly I depend on them.
Awareness of my privileged place in history. Whatever else the pundits may say, 2020 feels like the biggest national disaster of my lifetime. I have been staggered by the endless ticker-tape of COVID deaths, the egregious lack of leadership, our chasmic civic divisions. Confronting these realiities in my own world has sensitized me to the nightmares in distant places and times, of victims of local wars, racial cleansing, systematic oppression. When the going gets easier around here, I never want to forget how hard it is in other places.
I’m wrapping up this post on New Year’s Day, the morning after my grocery trip. I can report that I did remember to retrieve my lock yesterday. But today I see something different in the picture. The looped cable reminds me of the face of a vaudeville performer. He has orange cuffs, and he’s holding his cane - the bar across the bottom of the picture - in front of him as he yadda-yadda’s off stage right.
So long 2020!
But I’m going to keep those three new actors onstage… .
Note to self: retrieve my abandoned bike lock.