Tag Archives: Introspective

I have a confession to make.

Not that I’m trying to place you, my reader, in the role of priest in a virtual confessional, mind you. I just think that its important to point out that I’m dealing with the issue about which I’m about to express concern.

It went down like this: I had to run an unexpected errand to pick up some carpentry supplies on Monday night. I was driving my wife’s car. I was irritated because I had had one of those days. Virginia is not the place to drive if you’re having a bad day, because everyone who is native to Virginia seems to experience difficulty with this concept of driving. This was proven by the gentleman in front of me who, while on a major artery of traffic, felt it appropriate to come to what was nearly a complete stop at a green light in order to let the car in the right turn lane make the turn, because apparently it hadn’t occurred to him to get into that same lane in order to make the turn. As I abruptly found myself in a position to test the reliability of my wife’s brakes, I pounded in vain to locate the horn in the dim light of dusk. When that failed, and the gentleman in the car gave me an accusing look, I did it. I lost control.

I gave him finger.

In retrospect, I have no idea what that guy’s night had been like, or even if he was, in fact, a Virginia driver. Perhaps he was following the vehicle in the turn lane, unfamiliar with the city and trying to not get separated. Who knows what might have caused him to drive that way? Yet, I found myself without mercy in that moment. It took only minutes after for me to be able to find that mercy, to want to retract the rude hand gesture. No matter how bad of a day I had had, he could easily have had worse.

The concern that I’m expressing here is that of a loss of civility.

Friday night, I was out with some friends for dinner and drinks, and ended up having a great conversation with a new acquaintance about film and theatre and literature and society. Specifically, the girl we had just met was pining over the fact that she hadn’t grown up in the thirties, because things were so much different then, and different for the better. I agreed. We talked about how everyone dressed with class, about how women were sexual without being (her word) “trashy,” about how the music was better, about how we were just more civil as a society.

Now, in my personal opinion, I don’t think the U.S. has ever done too terribly well at this whole civility thing. I guess we chose to let that go in favor of functionality when we rebelled against the crown. In any case, and whatever the cause of this downward cultural spiral (which could be the topic of a good dissertation, but certainly can’t fit within a blog post), we’re not as civil now as we were then. We’re more prone to violence, to a sense of entitlement to retribution. We’re more inclined to scream at each other and refuse to consider any perspective other than our own (as witnessed in recent political deadlocks). We’re less tolerant, and more judgmental. We’ve shed stains of certain forms of racism, only to begin to fall into others. We hunger for warfare.

What we don’t do well is talk softly. Or listen. Or empathize. Or, for that matter, consider anyone before ourselves. We ignore the communities around us in order to defend our individualism, and to “stay out of it” if we think something is wrong that we don’t want to make our problem. That’s how people end up lying deceased in their homes for days before the neighbors bother to investigate. That’s why our politicians have forgotten that they were elected to practice the art of compromise. That’s why we call each other hurtful and bigoted names instead of seeking first to understand. That’s why we watch reality television programs to judge others who end up taking their own lives.

That’s why we give the finger to the car in front of us who made a simple driving mistake, one that we’ve likely all made at some point or another.

I need to remember that my actions have repercussions, not only for myself, but for others. There are concentric circles moving out from us, and they cause the ripples of our actions to move others through this pond of life in which we co-exist. If I focused on smiling and picking up someone else’s bill, for example, instead of visually expressing my displeasure at the driver in front of me, those ripples can cause good, instead of ill. And, if I am to take my faith seriously, then I should be motivated to do exactly that.

The term “civility” has a Latin etymology. I’ve never taken Latin, but I understand it to mean (loosely) “what is proper to a citizen.” I wish that those of us who live in the U.S. would re-discover the concept of behaving “properly.” We seem to be under the misconception that this would involve living prudishly, or forsaking freedoms. I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think it simply means considering others before ourselves, or at least at the same level that we consider ourselves.

We’re all human beings. We all have bad days and good opinions. We should all begin there in our interactions, use that as a staring point. I’m hoping I can model that for my daughter when she joins us soon.

I hope.

Photo Attribution: whereisat

Its odd that the simplest ways of measuring time seem to replace the most advanced for me. And, as often as not, the simplest ways of marking time are much more abstract, much less quantified, than the more advanced. As such, I suppose, they make a great deal more sense to me.

As regular readers know, Karen and are I expecting our daughter in September. Once you find you’re expecting, guess what? There’s an app for that. We use an iPhone app to track the stages of the baby’s development, and it keeps a countdown of how many weeks and days until “D-Day.” Honestly, those numbers never really mean anything to me. Recognizing that I’m, how shall I say, mathematically challenged, I instead mark our progress by Karen’s belly. That’s where I go to talk to my little girl now, anyway.

There are other ways that I’m realizing we’re close, though. The amount of stuff accumulating for the baby is one way to tell. Last night, though, I realized it in an odd way.

Every household, every marriage, has a division of labor. That is, different people take care of different household chores. In our household, I do the laundry. On most Sunday evenings, I’m able to re-live the adventures of the week by going back through the outfits we’ve worn that week (go ahead, laugh). The fact that we were moving into this new season of life was driven home to me first by taking care of the maternity clothes that showed up in the laundry. Those, after all, were some of our first “baby purchases.” So, I recognize that we’re right in the middle of the process by the fact that I’m laundering almost exclusively maternity clothes for Karen. I really realized this, though, when I asked Karen Sunday night how much longer we have until those begin fading out of the laundry ritual, replaced by what she normally wears…that funky, unique style that I fell in love with years ago.

It seems odd, at first blush, to measure time by what sort of laundry you’re doing. Many artists have pondered this sort of thing, though…Bon Jovi sang that “sometimes you tell the day by the bottle you drink.” For those of us who aren’t given to hard data and quantitatively measurable fields, I suppose this sort of thing makes sense. And, although I’m not certain offhand what sort of poetic devices one might employ about laundry (“sometimes you tell the week by the shirt that you press” just doesn’t have a ring to it), I’m confident that it lends itself to much deeper expression than just saying “six weeks.”

In the meantime, I don’t know what time it is (because I don’t wear a watch), but I know the sun is falling in a way that tells me its evening. Much more beautiful than reducing that to “four o’clock,” or some other numerical value. I recognize that those sorts of measurements have their place, and that a civilized society would have difficulty functioning without them. I just find myself instinctively circumventing them whenever possible.

I’m such a rebel, I guess.

How do you tell time?