The first full week of 2019 has come to a close, and already I am not managing to maintain a schedule. But are schedules necessary? or are they artificial constructs?
Actually, if this first week is any indication, 2019 is off to a good start. A week ago Sunday I had a lovely lunch with my step-daughter, chatting and laughing, regaled with tales of her recent trip to California, and getting caught up on visits with her childhood and college friends. Lunch was at one of my favorite spots in Knoxville, a place I got to eat twice this week, and it was half-way from my house to the UT campus, where I had a concert on Sunday afternoon.
In fact, I was so enjoying our lunch and the conversations that I was late to the concert, late enough to miss the first piece, but I did make it in time to hear Mozart's Oboe Quartet in F Major (which was fabulous, by the way). This was followed by a Schubert Octet, also beautifully performed, but long. I must admit I grew restless and slipped out the door early. This had nothing to do with the concert and everything to do with me, a result of over scheduling and a yearning to be outside. Luckily, being late to begin with, I was near the door, making it easy to slip out again about 3/4 of the way through the piece. I spent the remainder of the afternoon planting bulbs, the 400 bulbs I reported planting previously, before impending darkness and the increasing cold drove me inside. Mozart was bouncing around my head the entire time I was planting, and afterwards, when I lay on the floor with my feet up on the sofa, allowing my back some time to recover.
There was more bulb planting over the next four days, another 350 bulbs or so, although planting smaller numbers per day was easier on my back. It all seems a little excessive, no? Well yes. I had ordered the bulbs early, almost as soon as the catalogs were available, because I knew some of the bulbs would sell out, ordered the bulbs when I still thought I would be living in my house, before I knew the yard would be torn up, before I knew so many things. Now the whole order seems excessive, and perhaps foolish, but it is too late for regrets. Sometimes all one can do is move forward; sometimes one must just plunge one's hands in the dirt and hope for the best.
Tuesday I went to Knoxville's new Change Center; a trip which filled me with inspiration and hope. And yet, at the same time, my head was also filled with questions. I am proud to be a member of a city that is putting such effort into helping at risk youth and yet I also wonder how I can do more, partly just in volunteering to help on an individual basis, but also what role I can play in bridging the divides in this city that also often seems like two cities, the more affluent, educated, western city, and the less affluent, at risk, eastern city. It is not a situation that is unique to this city; in many ways we are a microcosm of the country, but that does not make the divide any less shocking, or the need any less crucial. We inhabitants of the western city tell ourselves it is not about race, but of course it is and it isn't. Even more than about race it is about class, but class is the thing we hate talking about more than we hate talking about race. Yet neither of those words is enough to contain the problem, they each represent a narrowing and a labeling, and externalizing, if you will. And externalizing and labeling are both forms of avoidance. Avoidance is key. Increasingly I think the issue is one of the walls we build and the bubbles in which we enfold ourselves, ostensibly in the name of protection. We console ourselves with labels, just as we console ourselves with our complacency, with good intentions, by telling ourselves "it is not me". Like so many of the divides in our country, the obvious divisions are all too real, and yet are also a part of a greater and more complex interleaving of issues that play themselves out in our individual lives and in our society, on issues large and small.
And so it seems I have been spending much of this first week of 2019 thinking about bubbles, how we each live in our own little community bubbles, and whether our bubble is one of hope or one of despair, we are too often trapped within it, unaware that we are even encapsulated. Much as I want to help individuals transcend one kind of bubble, I am also torn and worried about all the other bubbles, the bubbles that keep people separate and in ignorance, the bubbles of complacency that, under the guise of security and protection, actually drive us apart. For as long as our lives are contained in our bubbles, and I live in as much of a bubble as anyone else I know, we are building walls that keep us apart and isolate us, many kinds of walls, and many kinds of isms. As long as we live in bubbles, I fear we cannot honestly live in harmony and humanity. I suppose what I am really wondering is how we stop being bubbles and return to be being water.
I don't know where I am going with any of this. I still need to figure it out, but it is good to start the year thinking of things that need figuring out, good to question my own assumptions and biases, even as I live within those biases: lunching with friends, planting bulbs, going to concerts, caught in the activities of my really pretty privileged life. There was another concert on Wednesday, a fabulous concert that stuck with me more than Sunday's concert, and for which I stayed until the end. A concert that had my head spinning, and thinking about harmony and dissonance, and the ways bubbles can be burst, yielding new harmony. There was an hour spent holding a baby on Friday. There was a christening on Saturday, and another few minutes holding that same baby. There is nothing like a baby to bring you to center of all things, the center of life, the center of potential, the center of what we call can be.
But these were all distractions in a life, and I am not even sure they were the essential elements. Or perhaps they are exactly the essential elements. A baby, seeds and bulbs, new life, music, these are all things that unite us and promise new growth, these are all the stuff of potential and promise, fully present before walls and conditions hem them in.
I was thinking about how young babies are just happy to be held, held by anyone who is warm and loving and willing. It is usually months before walls start to go up, before only parents and known people are wanted, before bubbles start forming. We don't tend to think about the artificially of what we impose and what is absorbed. What we think of as common knowledge is really just our own bubble, a reflection, something we've been taught. What we think of as truth is often also only a reflection of what we see inside our bubble. I am no different. I am a product of my environment, my head filled with assumptions and biases I am not even aware I harbor. I acknowledge that we need bubbles, we need filters and membranes, but there is a danger when those walls stop being permeable and become rigid.
I think we need weaker walls, softer walls, walls that are more fluid. How do we let the walls of our bubbles grow softer? How do we stop harming others by protecting ourselves? How do we let our bubbles live in harmony instead of disharmony? How do we become water?
For some odd reason I have been remembering John Lennon this week, remembering particularly the words to one of my favorite songs: Imagine. Only bits and pieces are here.
"Imagine all the people
Livin' life in peace.
Yoo hoo
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
....
No need for greed or hunger
The brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharin' all the world
...
Welcome to 2019.
Perhaps it is long past time we start to change the world. Perhaps I am still a dreamer. But if it weren't for the dreamers, I think we all would have destroyed each other long ago. Perhaps, as long as we are here, there is always hope.
