Loving the World

I’m eating take-out Creole with my people, cornbread and yucca fries. The window sill is deep in end-of-season green tomatoes. It looks for all the world like a normal Sunday night in the suburbs. I’m trying to linger in this sacred place where people eat and talk about what’s up, make plans to go to a family funeral on the weekend because births and deaths continue even in the midst of catastrophe.  On its own track, separate from the devolution of the environment, the collapse of political culture, the rise of autocracy, the wanton slaughter of civilians and the reemergence of mass ideologies of hatred, we are all still trying to keep our heads down, find our way. The everyday tragedies, children left uncared for, old men dying, continue to unfold on a parallel track. This means that we can, we must, go on living. Life itself needs our love.

To that end, I’m working on something new, could be revolutionary. It’s called smiling. It’s said that raising the corners of your mouth so that your cheeks puff out and your eyes crinkle causes endorphins to be released in your bloodstream resulting in feelings of wellbeing, possibly elation. Not only that but lifting the corners of your mouth allows more air to pass in and out of your nose. In other words, you don’t smile because you feel good, you feel good because you smile. It sometimes even makes other people feel good as well. It’s free and requires no previous training. Babies can do it. As Orwell wrote in 1984, “At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little.”

Photo by Daniel Thomas on Unsplash

I was fairly sure I had read Orwell’s apocalyptic masterpiece in high school in the early ‘60s. But either it was so over my head that I didn’t retain any of its visionary power or, it was one of those books I convinced myself I had read as part of my credentials as an educated person. In either case, it bears re-reading, so accurate is its intuition of the darkness that is now covering the face of the deep. In response to the sorrow that rolls over us in great waves, drowning us in a reality that doesn’t seem to support a future, many writers are prescribing delight, that small “area of sanity.” On Substack, Elizabeth Brownrigg (Walking the Inspired Path) has written “If being an informed person invites a dictatorship of sorrow, delight is a poke in the dictator’s eye.”

Delight in the world is first of all a practice of noticing. I see the pond from my balcony, its surface rippling in the breeze. I smell the garlicky spaghetti sauce simmering. I hear my grandsons narrating their lives. Bow hunting season has just begun. The debate team is arguing the pros and cons of drilling on federal land. Against their vibrant newness, I feel the aged skin of my left hand with the palm of my right, confirming that I’m still here, alongside all the suffering in the world. I’m still here, competing for the last of the yucca fries, disrupting the ambient gloom.  Sometimes this resilience astonishes me and causes me to smile. I can choose to smile, in spite of my longstanding suspicion of people who walk around with beatific grins plastered on their faces. I tend to think of such people as deluded, freakish. But really, I can’t pretend to understand the brass band playing in other people’s hearts. All I can do is make note of the time and place that I am standing in and try to be an influence for good there. All I can do is react to the incontrovertible evidence that life has been generous with me and that, like you, I am deserving of the sunshine, the ducks, the warm blanket of family happiness. It may be self-evident, but it bears repeating. Refusing to smile at the ducks gliding on the pond will not result in a ceasefire in Gaza or the return of the hostages. We will have to envision an end to the violence from inside our own cocoon of blessing. We will have to embrace the world with such a fierce love that the fences and weapons begin to melt down. That’s the hand we were dealt. We are not commandos awaiting orders in our carpeted rooms. We are cups and saucers, fragile and heat-bearing. What other choice do we have?

************************************************************************************************************

Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In November, we look forward to a contribution from photographer, printmaker, and psychotherapist Peggy Braun. Beginning in October, all subscribers will be able to read Many Voices posts. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething, have access to the archives, and become a contributor to Many Voices. Your ideas are always welcome.

*************************************************************************************************************

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

*************************************************************************************************************