If you looked out your window early on a Saturday morning and the half ton of topsoil waiting to be worked into the raised beds in the garden made you feel good, or if you derived the same sense of well-being from a pile of wood chips or gravel, I think we could have a friendly conversation waiting in the checkout line.
If there is a small stack of seed catalogs, or a large one, covering the TV remote on the coffee table, if the tip of your shovel is polished, if you are breaking in a new pair of work gloves because you wore out the old ones, if you sharpen your chainsaw before putting it away, we could have a good visit sitting on the deck drinking iced tea. No matter who you voted for.
If you would rather walk up a mountain than take a picture of it, if the tread is worn on the boots you keep by the back door, if you would rather read a book than watch a movie, you can come to the barbecue. If your chickens have names and you sing silly songs to your pups, you can bring the potato salad.
It would be a small gathering, and considerably quieter than days gone by. Time has a tendency to do that. Time changes us as we follow our careers, get married, have children, get divorced, get sick, and grow old. The longer we live, the more we lose by attrition.
The deck is stacked. We are social creatures, but our brains are designed so that we can only keep up with a limited number of contacts, and anyone outside our innate capacity for collating data is considered “the other.” There is a physiological basis for the things that divide us, like prejudice, racism, social status, ideology, and political bias.
It is the latter, ideology and political bias, which has done the most in recent years to shrink the size of the circle gathered around our fire. I suspect the same may have happened to you. The things that divide us have always been there, but thanks to social media and our constant exposure to everyone’s opinion about everything, our opinions about intangible things, opinions about opinions and people we will never meet, are valued over our common lot as meat-covered skeletons riding on a big rock that’s hurtling through space at 67,000 miles per hour. We value “identities” over immortal souls, and the way we cast our votes every four years over common daily interests.
A wise man once told me that the secret to living well is to do the things you love and this will attract the people you are supposed to meet. Politics and ideology magnified by the lens of constant connectivity are corrosive to this natural process.
My solution to that on this bright Saturday morning is to have another cup of coffee and watch the purple finches trying to convince the cardinal to give up his perch on the bird feeder. I’ll call up an old friend and have a second cup with him while we pretend for a while that we don’t live 500 miles apart. Then I’ll put on those boots by the back door and go out to greet the day.
Outside The Box 