Here’s the way today’s piece went:
I had a great idea. A perfect quote. I was mulling it around for a few days, rolling it under my tongue like hard candy. The source was high brow enough (a 100+-year-old well-respected essay on cultural relativism and the inevitability that otherness is met with criticism and judgment), the quote so simple and elegant that all I had to do was find my angle.
I had my to-do list down pat:
Bank
Gym
Shop
Soup
School
Hand wash
Call Lego people
Finish committee work
Write
I was cranking. I’d been to the gym and the grocery store and the soup was on the stove by 9 am. I was set to shower up and head to my son’s school but took a phone call; my friend wanted to coordinate last minute Thanksgiving details. She decided to pop over as she was in the neighborhood, and sat with me while I puttered around getting things checked off my list.
I was a bit embarrassed that she’d seen my list – as if writing is an errand to be checked off like bank deposits and hand-washing lingerie. But there it was. I was excited to tell her my quote, showed her the ripped piece of paper I’d been carrying around with my chicken-scratch handwriting, and read it out loud:
“Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves
are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.”
– Kakuzō Okakura (1906), The Book of Tea.
Go ahead, reread it. It’s really good. It matches exactly what I encounter a lot in my work – people with a self-inflated sense of how important they are who are continually disappointed and disenfranchised because they do not recognize beauty or greatness all around them. Some used to have the ability to see and appreciate GREAT things, but appreciate almost nothing in the day-to-day small life moments. Bored, disaffected, they search desperately for that which is GREAT, that which will make them HAPPY. They fail, of course, not knowing that their search has set them up to fail.
For it is not GREATNESS in which happiness is possible, but small moment greatness: rain pulling leaves down, holiday lights being put up, a stolen midweek romance romp in a week overcome with busy-ness, being a willing audience to a duo of middle school boys who are perfecting card tricks. I sometimes feel as if I wear 4D glasses, seeing things ordinarily beyond the surface that many others don’t.
Well, this is what I was intending to write about. Great, huh?
Except for this. The moment I read the quote to my friend, her face froze. She didn’t hear it the way I had. Needed time to break it down and make sense of it. Wondered where and how it applied to people she knew and how she frequently felt.
I was stymied. I was expecting a reaction that would mirror my own. I anticipated a moment of reflected greatness – my astuteness, my cleverness in being able to apply a quote about the way Americans were, a hundred-plus years ago, incapable of valuing the Japanese tea ceremony for it’s smallness and discipline, to the everyday experience of narcissism and emptiness and my own gratitude that somewhere along the line I learned to live in appreciation of small moments and littleness that is actually great.
My reaction lets me know I do not live as humbly as I thought. My “littleness” rests only very lightly on humility, and instead I often inflate it to fit the situation. I experience little things, sure, but I capitalize them all. I’m a WRITER. I’m a GOOD MOTHER. My husband LOVES me. I have a GORGEOUS new office. I ADORE my friends. I make the PERFECT turkey. I have one and only one Thanksgiving stuffing I enjoy, and it’s MINE. I am the LUCKIEST mother on the planet.
OK, this last one isn’t inflated.
My friend’s underreaction was the cause of a perfect detour. It reminded me of the purpose of reading together – an author may have something personal to say, and your response to it may be exactly what your response to it is, but the minute you hear another’s response, you have the chance to shift, deepen, experience something anew.
I’ve had that quote in my mind for days, weeks, actually, as the book has remained on my kindle app for a very long time. I read a tiny amount, savor it, then put it down, just as if I’m sipping very hot tea. Each time I come back to it, the words have turned ever so slightly, as if the geisha has turned the cup around and around and around until its presentation is forever new and just right.
Just so, today’s turn of the words presents me with something new. The greatness of the small moment of my friend’s honest confusion. The actual smallness I might hope to attain for all those things I usually capitalize. Perhaps e. e. cummings was tapping a similar underlying philosophy when he rescued his poetry from the confines of grammar and capitalization. If I am merely a good enough mother, a person who sometimes writes, imperfectly loving and loved by my husband and son, with a warm and inviting redecorated office, that is sufficient in a way that opens to the door to contentment and peace.
I am littler than I presume to be; honest smallness a greatness yet unachieved.
For my friends, whose detours make the trip worth more than I imagine. Thank you.