small wonder

the difficult I'll do right now; the impossible will take a little while. Billie Holiday

Don’t sweat the small stuff. And it’s all small stuff. - 12 step rooms

Standing in line at the grocery store, I stepped on something. I lifted my foot and looked down; it was a penny. I realized the guy behind me was watching me. I glanced up at him. He said, “is a penny even worth picking up anymore?”. I weak grinned and looked back down at it. We both looked down at it. Now I was in a conundrum: to not pick it up would be saying something, but he was right. It hardly felt like a penny would make a difference.

I remember the feeling of luck and glory on finding a coin. I never have coins any more. I so rarely have cash, which fact I sometimes ponder when stopped at a traffic light where someone is begging with a paper cup; it seems I used to have relationships with people I don’t have any more. Of course, the value of a cent has changed. I’m not sure which sense the guy in the grocery store meant.

I bent and picked the penny up.

It’s the little stuff that will kill you. You are aware of suffering because we are all aware of suffering; you yourself have some problems but you are more or less holding it all together. You are more or less holding it together until one day your lover’s eye drifts, just for a second. Maybe you trip and in that one tiny moment you realize how old you’ve gotten, that you cannot do things you used easily to do. Maybe your electric bill is past due: that red slashed incrimination is the only letter you receive all week long. It may be that the hate speak appears in your own social circle, not as some news item or social media post but right there in the mouth of someone you thought you knew. Even if it’s half a joke and half a question, if there’s silence all around, you’re still left wondering who these people, what this world, and who you yourself even are. The floor, the very room in its ordinariness, seems somehow wrong.

Little things will also save your life. The first wiff of spring in your nose will do things to the base of your brain if you pay attention. The wag of the dog’s tail will vaunt the chambers of your heart and hence defy gravity. A bit of cheese and good bread, a moment in which birds lift as a whole over the telephone wires, a pop of color in your wardrobe or live music do actually change the meaning of life. They sketch the shape of redemption. They are not redemption, but of redemption’s shape, flavor, and essence. I’ve stridently, I think competently, said that small pleasures don’t answer underlying problems. They don’t. They certainly don’t answer to world sorrow or political mayhem. There is a question of our humanity at stake, here: the difference between a petty person and one who knows the value of small things. The difference comes down to love. Not desire or a particular relationship but a more essential love of life itself. I think it was economist Adam Smith who talked about the ‘paradox’ of value, diamonds, and water. Paraphrasing here, but the gist is that diamonds are useless but worth quite a lot, while water is essential and not valued at all. Pettiness or wisdom.

Beauty exists. To forget this because of sorrow, resentment, or political mayhem is deadly. To allow sorrow, resentment, or politics to overshadow beauty is to miss the point of being alive.

Our main cultural narratives are tropes of failure and demonization: injustice and pending disaster are said to outweigh personal concerns. Cultural guilt is a whole mood.

Pessimism seems entirely logical.

I deny this. It just isn’t true. Pessimism isn’t any more realistic than possibility is; it’s just an easier argument to make. Pessimism isn’t a logical but an emotional thing; it’s that flinging of an arm to catch our fall when we start to realize something is wrong. It’s a self defense mechanism. It wields blame and also - somehow - lets us off the hook. Pessimism obscures reality. This means that in the end, pessimism is just as blind and as futile as faith.