We Can Make the World Better

by noticing that it's still beautiful.

I’m feeling a little prescriptive and poemy today.

There is so much ugliness. Maybe you’ve heard. And we’ve got to fight it until there’s more beauty than anything else. Till there’s more community support, more doors open to the tired, more thermostats cranked for the cold, more toys for kids, and more health for the hurting. I know that you’re trying to do that work and I’m trying to do that work and maybe we could do more than we are, but look down at your hands and thank them for what they’ve done instead of castigating them for the moments when they had to lay still.

And then look up and find something beautiful. I don’t mean that you should hold yourself to the task of making something beautiful, of fixing something ugly, or anything else other than looking into this wide open space of people and realizing that they are living and taking care of each other and dreaming things that are a lot simple and, at the same time, so much bigger. They aren’t dreaming up job cuts or closed borders or scared sets of eyes backing into a corner readying themselves for one last dying defense of their lives.

They’re dreaming of someone they love, or the satisfaction of a need, or just the warm place they hope to get back to sooner than later.

I was reading something by Pádraig Ó Tuama (yes, some lucky bastard gets that kind of name – and we wonder how they ended up a poet!) about what we notice and what that noticing does to us. He tells us such a simple and familiar story about watching a workman on a subway train, eyes closed, holding his phone to his heart. Ó Tuama wondered what was on that phone – music that soothed the man, a voice he needed to hear, a picture reminding him of something he was desperately clinging to, or just a bit of pressure up against whatever he was feeling. And when the guy got up and walked out, it was clear to Ó Tuama that he was standing up from a moment of nurture.

Isn’t that a fabulous thing to remember to notice?

It makes me think about Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, and just the general tendency of (some) poemy people to draw out the splinter of something hopeful from the soft sole of a sniffly kid’s foot. So I’ve been trying to do that too. I’ve been trying to notice joyful people, and I’ve been trying to let that shape me this week.

So here’s one.

I was on the bus (so much beautiful stuff happens on the bus – get out of your cars and join us in a cleaner and closer-packed existence!) and saw this girl. She was probably mid-twenties but I’m in that point in my life where people in their mid-twenties can only be girls and boys to me. She looked like she’d had some rough times recently. But she was looking at something on her phone that was bringing her to the brink. Do you ever see this? When someone is texting, walking along, and they get that quick flush of a smile and you want to shoot through the strands of the network and slap the shoulder of whoever made it happen? It was like that.

But it kept going.

She eventually put her phone away in her coat and took out a magazine, but she couldn’t even read it. She just kept sorta bouncing and drumming it on her leg, looking up into the distance like she was watching a meteor shower.

And when you see that, if you take time to notice, you catch the feeling a little, like a long time back when something was happening to you for the very first time and it felt like all your cells were trying to hatch, but you had no idea what kind of critter was about to crawl out. That kind of feeling is still happening in the world and you just got to see it!

I’m gonna piggyback off Ó Tuama and ask what other folks notice, especially if it’s beautiful or hopeful, and what that noticing does to you?

Oh, and here’s a poem I wrote after that girl got off the bus.