It occurs to me…

Funny how the mind works.

So my phone rings at 9:52 last night, late even for west coast clients.  A glance tells me it is not a call from one of the kids, or from anyone else in my address book as my phone doesn’t recognize the number.  All that data suggests that I let it ring.  But it is a local number, and my phone does not give me the “Telemarketer” or “Spam Call” indicator that someone is wanting to sell me something, convince me to vote for someone, or take a survey.  And who would call this late anyway unless they needed to reach  me.  Still, three rings and three seconds into it, the decision is made – do not answer.  If it is a legitimate call for me I’ll get a message, and if it is a wrong number, she’ll hang up.

I say “she” because my phone tells me there is a message, and on checking it the caller was, by quality and character of voice, as well as content, an elderly woman.  She leaves this message:

“I’m sorry.  I was calling my grandson and I dialed the wrong number.  Thank you.”

So all is right in the world.  No calamity I need to address, no troubled soul for me to listen to, no child of mine broke down on the side of the road, or worse.  But as I go to erase any evidence that the call or message ever came, my mind engages further.  Who listens to a phone message, and knowing they made a mistake, instead of hanging up quickly, leaves a message expressing regret and seeking forgiveness for dialing a wrong number?  Well, SHE does.  The word that pops into my mind, though it is not quite the right word, is “kindness.”  Then my mind engages further.  “All is right in MY world.  I, me, mine.  Funny how the mind works.  It then occurs to me – why was SHE making a call so late?  Is everything okay in HER world?  HER GRANDSON’S?  I mean, she didn’t sound panicked or particularly troubled in message, but why was she calling so late?

Though I have the phone number that could provide the answer to these questions, that would be a weird call, even creepy.  Still, I purposefully say a prayer of thanksgiving for well-being, for enlightenment, and for her and her grandson.

Funny how the mind works.

Photo taken a few years back; recently came upon the poem.

Wandering through a book of quotations I came across these two:

“A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.”  David Foster Wallace

“It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end up as superstitions.”  T.H. Huxley

It occurs to me that those help explain our (presumptuous, I know) collective anxiety in these pandemic times as we are being shown with glaring clarity how “wrong and deluded” we have been on some of our “certainties,”  (e.g. I have to hop on a plane and fly cross country to be at that meeting), how easily “heresies” (e.g. working from home) can become “normal” on their way to becoming (?) superstitions.  Did we ever really “need” the handshake?  Spectator sports?  Music concerts?….

Interesting times, for sure.

A good first step in the direction of humility, and, well, toward many things:

“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.”  Bill Nye, the science guy

It occurs to me that this is just further proof that we all have something to add to the conversation, but of course that requires listening.  (Damn, there’s always a catch!)

I read this today from Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart:

“We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who’s right and who’s wrong….  It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to make us feel better.  Blame others.  Blaming is a way to protect our hearts, to try to protect what is soft and open and tender in ourselves  Rather than own pain we scramble to find some comfortable ground.”

In the pinball machine that is my mind, this sent me immediately to a song I had not listened to in a while – Jesus Was a Capricorn, by Kris Kristofferson, which includes this unfortunately timely rendition (though the song is nearly fifty years old) of (at least in my mind) this same concept Chodron was discussing.

“Some folks hate the whites, who hate the blacks, who hate the klan

Most of us hate anything that we don’t understand

“Cause everybody’s got have something to look down on

Who they can feel better than at anything they please

Someone doing something dirty decent folks can frown on

If you can find nobody else, then help yourself to me.”

There they are, blame and looking down on others – two tried and true, imperfect, even hideous methods to make myself feel better.  UGH!

Always sound advice from Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata that seems to fit every day:

“Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence.”

Dusting off this piece of writing by John Donne, contemplating how fresh and relevant it is 400+ years later:

 

No man is an island, entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,

as well as if a manor of they friend’s or thine own were:

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,

and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

it tolls for thee.”

In these times, what bell am I hearing in the distance, in my community, in my inner circle?  What does it have to do with me?  How do I respond?

“This world is a great sculptor’s shop.  We are statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.”

Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis

Now that throws a wrench into the works.  Here I’ve been going around, hammer and chisel in hand, thinking I was the sculptor in the shop!