“Inherited Responsibility”
Reading from Mary Oliver’s Upstream she reports hearing a phrase spoken By Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. The last two names are connected to the New York Vanderbilts and to the namesake Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. In other words, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was doing alright financially. Anyway, Oliver wrote of hearing Ms. Whitney use the phrase “inherited responsibility” and notes that she (Oliver) “slipped it from the air and put it into my own pocket.” I guess I have appropriated it onto my computer screen via Oliver’s pocket and book.
As Oliver notes in Upstream we may not all inherit financial wealth as Ms. Whitney, but all of us inherit something, or perhaps more appropriate, some things. We may inherit a set of values or a way of thinking. We may inherit a mess. If nothing else, we inherit our surroundings, this orb rotating around the sun. Significantly, though, we all inherit something different. As Oliver puts it:
“Thus, the great ones (my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me – to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly.”
In the end, it occurs to me that the issue is less what I have inherited than what I do with what I have inherited.
It occurs to me... 