Overwhelming Good

Coming back home is always an enriching experience.  Returning to California in many ways represents a simpler living, away from the extremities of weather, the stresses of school and work, the constant worries of potholes and will my train come on time? But the real difference in modus operandi stems from returning home to my family.

In the last few days, I’ve moved and (partially) cleaned rabbit cages with my dad, laughed through old pictures and clothes with my mom, fed baby peacocks catfood out of my hand, helped build a few walls for my dad’s class in building a mini house (with only a few bent nails!) (but apparently cripples are a pain to nail, anyway), helped my dad and grandfather level the new rabbit coop, listened to Stevie Wonder and Fleetwood Mac records with my mom, picked fall-off-the-tree apricots/figs/plums/tomatoes/avocados with my parents, and watched the better-than-a-well-oiled-machine my grandfather, mom, and dad form as they make a fresh, majority locally-produced (or home-grown!) meal every night. Every moment has been insightful, happy, and magnificently natural.

As I shift my view from within and begin to look outward, I realize it is not always such a pretty picture on the outside.  I begin to note a few things about the world outside…

1. Ignorance.  It runs rampant and strong, and it can be terribly sad to watch.  Isaac and I sat in In’N'Out last night and listen to the girl who sat beside us brag and go on about how she had stolen her dad’s car once and she had gotten in so-much-trouble isn’t-that-funny-ha-ha-ha-ha and how, in high school, she had teamed up with her friends to convince another girl that she was colorblind to the point where the girl had broken down in tears and-it-was-the-funniest-thing-EVER-she-was-crying-so-hard.  She kept talking with barely a moment for breath in twenty minutes of uncensored malevolence and a maligned sense of humor–all enjoyment derived from the pain of others.  I hope that this example was merely an exception, but I recognize that this vacuousness of benevolence is a harsh reality of much of the world we live in.  Vapid is a good word.
2. Obsessing over the virtual world.  From Facebook to Twitter to even some of the things I’m learning with Probity, the lack of real human contact scares me.  What happens when the show gets boring?  Whip out your cell phone and tap away, beside your friends who are doing the same.  No amount of facebooking and texting can replace or even mimic sitting down at a meal together with those whom you care about.  I think of how my dad is able to command such a presence among his peers and others without even opening a Facebook account.  It’s from him spending time connecting with people in-person. Physical and real.  Credibility isn’t established by blog posts; it’s built and created with real-live human contact.
3. Learning services over trades.  Another idea credited to my dad, and not at all thwarted by my reading of Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic Cell (as one of my gun-toting friends would say, “Mais quand les morts se levant et commencent a manger les mondes, je vais etre préparé”).  So often we focus on learning these nebulous skills that don’t really accomplish much in terms of actually advancing oneself.  I think of my chosen profession of law, and wonder what I would do with it if I were stuck on a desert island.  Argue with myself?  Write a treatise on the precedent for the fish to come to me?  I know I’d rather be stuck with a carpenter than a lawyer or politician.  The absence of trade-learning, yes, is probably bad for our nation’s economy, but it’s also bad for us individually.  Going along with ignorance and our obsession with the virtual world, it amazes me how many people can’t figure out how to fix something (anything!) that is broken.  I’ll never forget how a certain dance group once brought two five-foot planks into a workshop, screwed them together into a backdrop, then tried to bring the backdrop out through a seven-foot elevator, and couldn’t for the life of them figure out why it wouldn’t fit back out the way it had come.  Think to yourself:  if you had to, could you build a house for yourself on your own?  How confident would you be?

So as I wrap up my time here in California, I think about taking pleasure in the simpler things in life.  We’re back to the basics.  Be aware.  Stay real.  Learn to live.  Life isn’t about a virtual world or putting others down, it’s about working towards common goals and learning, not just for the sake of learning, but learning to live.  And let’s get lunch.