THOUGHTS ON PAPER CUPS & STRINGS.

To you, out there,

I’ve been thinking a lot about you – you became such a huge part of my collective memory. We did so much together. When I run, I think of you. When I close my eyes before I sleep, I think of you. When I hate myself for not being pretty enough, I think of you – and how you told me you’d love me old, young, 200 lbs larger, or through any disaster. When I drink coffee, I think of you. When I dance, I think of you, and that room that we would dance in every night with your favorite electric blue lights that shined just enough to let me see your smile. And then I laugh thinking about how we got yelled at for staying in that room every night too late, because the security man outside felt uncomfortable that I was there since I didn’t work there.  I think of how we built an imaginary future together. It was so detailed that I feel like I lived it in another life. And, I try to think myself out of thinking of you, but it doesn’t work.

And all this thinking makes me wish that we could transmit our thoughts on cups and strings, you know like little kids learn to make in science class, so that every time I think of you, you would know, and then maybe you wouldn’t be so mad at me for thinking that I never thought about you after I left.

And,  it would also be good to have it for friends who exist in different cities and across realities, because sometimes every one is so caught up in what their doing that we don’t have time to pick up a phone and say, “Hello out there, I’m thinking about you” but we are thinking about the people we care about.

Your cup on a string would be so full of my thoughts that it would break and I’d have to send you a new cup every day, or maybe I would attach multiple strings with different thought processes, so that at least all my thoughts wouldn’t run on one wire and become too powerful to serge through at once.  And if there were multiple strings they would be categorized like this: a string for memories, and a string for new possibilities, and a string just to say, “I CARE ABOUT YOU” all the time, and a string for feeling sorry, and also for feeling happy that everything happened.

Even with all the technology in the world, I could never convince you that I thought about you when we weren’t talking, but if you could hold a cup half way across the world with a string attached to it then maybe you’d know that I did and do love you, and that I will continue to think about you until the end of time.

MIRACLES IN MUNDANE.

They sang, and it mattered.

THE TRUTH ABOUT FEELING.

Sometimes I can feel the realities of the world straining on my shoulders, and it's all too much for me. The good and the bad -- the beauty of human kindness and how many colors exist in everything and the ugliness of unrelenting hatred and the greyness that spews out of that.  

And, lately it seems that there are a lot of people who feel helpless in a world where so much is happening. I find myself in conversations with friends who watch news stories and then get sad by the things they can’t do to help all the people in the world who are feeling pain. Or, I get an e-mail with a sad story in it, about some human, in the midst of Botswana who is sick and the person who sent it to me will write something like, “I read this every day and try to figure out how I can change this.” Or, I sit with someone watching the news about Libya and she throws her arms up in the air and says, “This is all too much now.” Or, I hear something in my office about a trip someone has been on to some place in the former Soviet Union where people deal with the struggles of poverty every day and they tell me that they’re moved and they wish they could do more.

And then I think about those same people in day-to-day life and how they treat people that are right in front of them. I think about how the same guy who sends me sad stories about people from Botswana is the same person who deserted a girl he loved at a bus station when she came to visit him on a free weekend, because he got too drunk to be mindful of the time she was coming in, and I think about how the same gal who is suddenly overwhelmed by Libya, just told me how ugly some girl was walking down the streets who she doesn’t even know, and about how the person who saw poverty in the Soviet Union never even stops to acknowledge the homeless man begging on the streets. And, I think about all the people who want to change the universe, but they forget how to love and give and support the people they interact with every day.

I am just like them.  I’ve done things I regret, made choices I shouldn’t have, hurt people I love, judged wrongly. I’m flawed, and we’re all human. But I like to believe in the power of little moments of kindness and positivity. I like to believe that maybe if I just smile once at a stranger, I can alleviate a little bit of pain that the world is having.

I like to believe that if every person who existed in the world invested more care in the people around them, then every one, every where would be happy. Maybe we can’t fly across the universe; or maybe we don’t have the money to give to organizations; or maybe we can’t perform surgery that will fix diseases; or maybe we can’t build walls strong enough to prevent oceans from consuming land or floors sturdy enough to stay intact when the earth shakes; but we can hold doors for people. We can be there for our friends when they’re hurting, and we can put band aids on people who fall, and we can learn how to smile at people who don’t look like us (have you ever stared at people and noticed how different we ALL really look?).  

And maybe, slowly, we don’t have to feel helpless, knowing that the world really is ours and that our actions are far more powerful than we ever knew they could be.

(Photo credit: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Georgia, FSU 2011).