Slow cars. Daft customer service. Dim employees. Crafty kids. People who cut through your yard. Kids who whack flowers as they walk thoughtlessly by. Telephone menus (okay, let me uncross my eyes.) Life is filled with inconveniences. Waiting. Explaining, again. People who need help.
Actually (I’m told I say this a lot), the “people who need help” doesn’t bother me a great deal. I think I inherited the helper gene, and it’s actu… it’s really not an inconvenience to stop and help. My parents always picked up people for the long drives to church, participated in the big community service projects, and stopped to help stranded people by the road. I think they inherited it from their parents, who lived through The Depression (yes, you capitalize both words) and learned deeply the lesson that we can’t make it without each other.
I hope my kids have this gene and that it’s constantly asserting itself. That’s all I have to say tonight. When you’re old and gray and read this blog somewhere, I hope you find that you’ve worn your life out helping people. Listening. Brightening. Towing. Whatever was needed.
I hope you write books and build things and heal people and whatever else your soul sighs to do. But I hope you’re willing to stop doing those things when you see the car beside the road billowing white smoke or the stumbling steps or the tears. You will find patience distill upon your soul when you embrace a willingness to be inconvenienced.
But no whining. I don’t want inconvenienced that way.
Kazzy
June 18, 2010
I am pretty sure you have kids with that same great gene your parents and you have!
The flower whacking might stop with a little reprimand here and there.
bonnieblythe
June 18, 2010
Ah, thanks for the confidence in my kids’ genes. I see it creep up fairly often. And it’s well-known in my house that flower-whacking is punishable by whatever I can think of that’s most heinous. It’s the kids walking home from school. I’ve given coronaries to a few when I’ve yelled, “HEY, KNOCK IT OFF!” from my office window. No *little* reprimands when it comes to flower whacking.