The Marvel of an Ordinary Life

“Sometimes I wonder about my life,” mused Kathleen Kelly, the character played by Meg Ryan in the movie You’ve Got Mail. “I lead a small life. Well, not small, but valuable. And sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave. So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around? I don't really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void.”

I find myself wondering the same thing at times, especially late at night when I’m tired and pensive, or other times in the aftermath of the disappointments I’ve experienced, as we all have. At such times, I, too, ask myself if the choices I’ve made were driven by what I really wanted or because I lacked the courage to do something else. Have I been as adventurous as I could have been? Have I taken the risks that I should have? Have I sought to be my best self or simply coasted along in safety? My career did not take me to faraway places – at least not for longer than a week or two at a time – and yet I’ve managed to enjoy a rather satisfactory career here in Winnipeg. It’s easy to flatter myself for my prudence and modest achievements without asking whether I might have used my gifts better.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” may be the most commonly asked question of children once they reach the age at which they’re capable of imagining themselves as adults. (I still wonder. I wonder when I’m going to grow up, and I wonder what I may yet still become.) We’re fond of asserting that our children can grow up to be anything they want to be, even though we know that isn’t true, and we tend to pair that with our own quiet confidence that our children are somehow exceptional, that they each have some unique gift or capacity by which they stand out from among their peers. Our own hunger to be extraordinary in some way or another is something we naturally project onto our children and grandchildren, our nieces and nephews, or any child with whom we feel a special connection. We say that our children are our future, and, for this very reason, our hope rests on their shoulders. But as the poet William Martin cautions us:

“Do not ask your children

to strive for extraordinary lives. ...

Help them instead to find the wonder

and the marvel of an ordinary life.”

When I was young, I had big plans in life – big, big plans – the bigliest of big plans. I dreamed of fame and fortune, encouraged to do so by well-meaning adults around me, especially teachers and neighbours and a few mentors along the way. Of course, I was also influenced by the myths of opportunity and achievement that abound in our relatively prosperous society. And my natural ambition was reinforced by the ideas of thinkers like Henry David Thoreau, who admonished people to aim high: “In the long run, men hit only what they aim at,” he wrote in Walden. “Therefore, though they might fail immediately, they had better aim at something high." And, as we all know, women need to aim even higher.

So, my youthful aspirations led me to strive to be extraordinary, even though I was a rather ordinary boy, and despite my mother’s frequent reassurances that I was neither better nor worse than other children, though I may have been different. And by different, I was never sure whether she meant unique or peculiar. In conveying this wisdom, she usually invoked her father as the source, a man I never knew, which tempered any sting from this egalitarian reminder of my ordinariness. My grandfather was as ordinary a man as they come – and my mother idolized him. This didn’t stop me from dreaming about wealth, fame, and power – the outward manifestations of success – but it did cause me to break out in occasional bouts of humility.

Both of my parents knew that wealth could be lost more easily than it was gained, fame could be as shallow as a wading pool left to evaporate, and power could be corrupting. They valued character and relationships, and they were mostly indifferent towards outward signs of success and thoroughly unimpressed by people who overestimated their own importance. Don’t get me wrong – they weren’t opposed to wealth, fame, and power, in and of themselves; they were simply unimpressed by them if those who possessed them weren’t people of good character. And they were equally unimpressed by ordinary people who fancied themselves extraordinary. So, I’ve never been quite certain where my inflated childhood expectations came from – it certainly wasn’t from my parents. They followed William Martin’s advice without ever having read it.

The grand plans of my youth did not come to fruition, and whatever aspirations for fame and fortune I may have once had have not been realized, and yet I am content with what I have achieved, and more than a little relieved to have escaped the burdens and responsibilities that come to those who shoulder considerable power. In my work life, I have been largely unsuccessful in securing the positions I have actively sought, but the positions that have found me, because someone else thought I would be a good fit, have proven to be deeply rewarding. Volunteer work that I have stumbled into has been equally satisfying. And the human relationships that have blessed me – family and friends, colleagues and neighbours – are not something you can plan for, study for, or demand. All you can do is nurture them once they begin to develop.

Along the way, I’ve learned that each of us has less control over our fate than prevailing worldviews would have us believe, discovering that John Lennon was correct when he asserted that “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, the noted psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl advised: “Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.”

We do well to let our lives unfold, allowing life itself to shape what we mean, rather than presuming to tell life what it means.

If I were starting over, I would forego the hubris of setting any goals for myself. I would have started young by answering the question, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” by saying, “whatever.” Instead of planning my future, I would have let it unfold, pursuing what interested me while cultivating intangible values. As it turns out, I’ve done both, but it has happened more by accident than design. And it has proven to be extraordinary, even though it looks nothing like what I imagined.

Over four decades, the American humourist Garrison Keillor wove stories about the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” Aiming to be above average is an easier target that striving for extraordinary lives, so I’d like to imagine that those who grow up in the world’s Lake Wobegons are likely happier and healthier than those who are forced into exclusive preschool programs for the gifted children of ambitious parents, where they may be indoctrinated into believing in their own exceptionalism.

One of my greatest blessings in life was marrying someone who got this message while she was still young. There was a beatitude that hung on the wall at Cindy’s house when I began dating her; it showed a puppy lying in the grass, its eyes staring out in a soft silken gaze, and at the bottom it read: “Blessed are those who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed.” And that’s pretty much Cindy’s approach to life. She meets life on its terms, makes few demands of her own, and savours everything that comes her way. She gets more out of watching the sun rise than I get out of watching our investment portfolio. She appreciates the marvels of the natural world, the marvel of being alive at all, and because her expectations are love – something that stood me in good stead when I asked her to marry me, the seventeenth time, she cherishes life.

Last spring, having not been invited to deliver a commencement speech anywhere, Garrison Keillor penned a short essay describing the message he would have sought to convey to some graduating class if he had been given the opportunity to do so. “I would’ve told the Class of 2023 to be wary of the advice of commencement speakers to aim high and be the best you can be, which has led many people to spend a pile of dough on a fancy college degree who could’ve gotten a more useful education by driving a cab in New York for a few years,” he wrote. “My college education taught me how to write intelligently about books I never read, a talent that leads in the wrong direction. I wish that instead I had interviewed my parents and written their life story. Knowing where you come from is a good thing before you start out to achieve greatness. Someday you’ll wish you had done this so why not do it now? Drive cab by day, write family history at night. I guarantee that inspiration will strike.”

As it happens, I dabble in family history a lot, both my own and others’, as well as local history and the history of ethnic groups and rather obscure social movements. If it’s not marketable, I’m happy to study it. Tip O’Neill, a former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, is often remembered for having said that “all politics is local,” although he wasn’t actually the first person to make this observation, and I would extend it to say that the very lives we live are local. We live in the company of small groups – the family and friends, colleagues and neighbours I mentioned earlier – and the more famous we are, the larger the group of people who think they know us, but hardly know us at all; the wealthier we are, the more dependent we become on the labours of others; and the more powerful we are, the less we directly influence those beyond our own inner circles. It is possible to have fame, wealth, and power, yet still be profoundly alienated from the world, its people, and the very source of our being. I prefer to live close to my family and friends, even the difficult ones, because it is they who know me best. We live our lives locally, as do those whose lives are projected onto the world stage. Their fame, wealth, and power are fleeting, which is what the great tragedies, from the Greeks to Shakespeare, and from the Bible to latest public figure to be revealed as a fool or a charlatan, have always sought to teach us.

I’ve never been much interested in the lives of the rich and famous, which makes my own childhood ambitions even stranger, something I’m glad to have outgrown. Celebrity is not the same as character, money and possessions should never be confused with wealth, and the exercise power can be exhausting. From age to age, monuments crumble and statues are toppled, but the generations of humankind carry forward the lives and influence of everyday people.

I often find myself wondering about the ancestors I know by name, about whom I know a few things related to the ordinary lives they led, and I marvel about what I imagine their skills to have been. Because they’re my ancestors, I hold them in reverence – the kind of reverence that I feel called to have for all the ordinary people who surround me today as neighbours.

My paternal grandfather was a milkman for Standard Dairies; my grandmother sold shoes at Eaton’s. My maternal grandfather was a stationery engineer at Canada Cement; my other grandmother sold candy, also at Eaton’s. They were urban workers with humble homes, descended from long lines of farmers and fishers, carpenters and housekeepers, brewers and weavers, with the occasional artist or teacher, minister or minor official thrown in to provide an added ounce of pride for a generation or two. I even have a reputed sorcerer who moonlighted as a bootlegger, or maybe it was the other way around. They all had talents that I will never know, let alone hope to master. Yet all of them are more important to me than anyone who’s ever lived at 24 Sussex Drive or in the White House, anyone who’s appeared on the television or the silver screen, or in the pages of the newspaper. I grow bored reading about the over-documented lives of celebrities, but I’m fascinated by the snippets I’ve discovered about my own ancestors or the people in my neighbourhood, not to mention the individuals who have gathered together in this congregation for several generations now. Read People magazine if you will; I’m content to read the old minutes of this congregation’s Women’s Alliance or listen to you tell me about the people and places you have known and loved.

Wealth, fame, and power can be addictive, even idolatrous if we pursue them – and once hooked, the pursuit of these things is insatiable ¬– but we don’t need them to lead extraordinary lives, for the extraordinary is embedded in the ordinary. Like the naturalist John Burroughs, I have learned that “one may live a happy and not altogether useless life on cheap and easy terms; that the essential things are always near at hand; that one’s own door opens upon the wealth of heaven and earth; and that all things are ready to serve and cheer one.”

We will see than we are surrounded by the marvellous if we stop trying to control life and simply let it unfold. Our lives may be small, yet valuable; humble, yet abundant; challenging, yet joyful. The extraordinary will come to us if we have the patience and the bravery to wait for it. And so …

“Do not ask your children

to strive for extraordinary lives. …

Help them instead to find the wonder

and the marvel of an ordinary life. …

And make the ordinary come alive for them.

The extraordinary will take care of itself.”

 

A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg.

The Great Asymmetry

While thumbing through a century-old issue of The Winnipeg Evening Tribune earlier this week – evidence of the exciting life I lead when the eyes of the world aren’t gazing in my direction – I stumbled upon a lengthy commentary by Mary Johnston, an American novelist and women’s rights advocate from a rather aristocratic Old Virginia family. The bestselling author of 23 novels, and a frequent contributor to both The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine, as well as a close friend of author Margaret Mitchell, her progressive social views and provocative writing drew the scorn of her conservative neighbors, including the widow of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. She embraced socialism and abandoned mainstream Christianity for mystical spirituality.

Challenging the racism and snobbery of another contemporary author, Gertrude Atherton, Mary Johnston revealed herself to be an enthusiastic advocate of social equality, a more equitable distribution of wealth, and the superiority of love over money when it came to social relationships. Directing her attention specifically to marriage, she insisted that love – “love that is so strong at the centre that it can expand over the depth and height and width of things” – is the sole basis for a sound marriage and that neither ancestral pedigree nor religion should be allowed to get in the way of a loving relationship. Even differences in political opinions shouldn’t come between partners, in her view, and by extension, she envisioned a society in which neither wealth nor occupation, social status nor race, religion nor politics should be allowed to come between people.

“The happiest families are not those in which every member thinks, speaks, and feels alike; in which there is only one note that hollowly reverberates forever!” wrote Johnston, adding: “The Good Earth is our home. Humanity is our family. That today this is far from being appreciated with any thoroughness does not mean that it is not so, nor that the centuries to come will not see that it is so. … Life is a symphony, a vast record of rich and beauteous sounds. Harmony isn’t a matter of identical voices, one piling in on another, but of balanced unlikeness, of a multiplicity of exquisite strains, held in common love and admiration.” Balanced unlikeness striving for harmony!

If only it were that simple. A century after Mary Johnston articulated this vision of harmony, society seems as discordant as ever. Polarization and partisanship seem to be on the increase, even as growing numbers of people withdraw from public engagement, retreating to smaller than ever circles of friends and like-minded people. We’ve moved from front porches to back decks, from movie theatres to televisions in our living rooms, from stores to online shopping, and from churches to … well, nothing in particular for most people.

It's hard to listen for the harmony when the sopranos are in one room and the altos in another, when the tenors are next door and the basses down the street. It’s even more difficult to hear the harmony when the notes played by some – politically or religiously, behaviorally or intellectually – are notes we’d rather not hear at all, notes that puncture the quiet comfort of our own bubbles. Let’s face it, often when we talk about what’s appealing in this church, as people do in others, we talk about the like-mindedness rather than balanced unlikeness. Like-mindedness draws us together and, just because we don’t notice that we’re in a bubble, it doesn’t mean we’re not. Harmony isn’t the result of everyone playing the same notes and keeping the same time.

Modern media invites us to hear the discord that falls short of harmony. The news is filled with stories of human conflict, and the small kindnesses that dominate our days are rarely considered newsworthy, save for one feel-good story that typically ends most newscasts. For the most part, the news accentuates differences that seemingly cannot be resolved, pointing to troublesome events and developments from which we cannot turn away, even though we cannot think of a way to do anything about them, either.

And many organizations thrive on the discord, whether economic or political, social or religious. Disasters and depravity are good for holding our attention and opening our wallets. Businesses turn profits by filling the perceived holes in people’s lives with merchandise or services, politicians attract followers and raise copious amounts in donations, various organizations gather the spoils of ruptured community, and even churches trade upon people’s anxiety by promoting some doctrine or another as a balm to heal their wounds. Discord is an opportunity for some. And yet the dream of harmony endures.

Johnston’s words echo the meaning behind our own “Harp Window,” created by Fred Swanson based upon poem by Björn Gunnlaugsson called Njóla (Night), which posited that there is a fundamental harmony underlying all that exists. The vast universe of which we get but a glimpse coheres in ways that we can scarcely fathom. And here on Earth, where we stumble along beneath the heavens, there is likewise a harmony of which we are scarcely aware.

Two weeks after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 – a horrendous act of violence that occurred so long ago that there are now young people who have been born, raised, and graduated from university since it happened, although it remains vivid in my memory, as I’m sure it is in most of yours – the acclaimed Harvard paleontologist and science commentator Stephen Jay Gould penned an op-ed in The New York Times. It proved to be one of his last writings since he succumbed to cancer the following spring.

By then, Gould had a well-established reputation as one of the era’s leading “popular scientists,” for want of a better term – alongside the likes Carl Sagan and David Suzuki, among others – having produced several bestselling volumes of popular essays.

At a time when people’s faith in their fellow human beings had been seriously shaken, and mistrust in others swelled, Gould spoke out to caution people against assuming the worst, arguing that the apparent balance between good and evil, which, in terms of human behaviour, he called decency and depravity, still weighed heavily in favour of goodness and decency. This was something that was easy to forget in a time of crisis and confusion. Even at the best times, we can have an unfortunate tendency to magnify the negative, focusing on what is broken rather what is working, noticing who is acting out rather than who is cooperating, what disappoints us compared to what delights us.

“Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one,” Gould maintained, seeking to restore a sense of calm and comfort when people were anxious and afraid, reassuring everyone that goodness still prevailed, notwithstanding the shocking events that dominated most people’s consciousness. This is easier to see in the aftermath of a fire or a hurrincane, which sweeps through a community and calls upon its people to bind together, for while we call these events “acts of God” – an interesting turn of phrase – they are acts of nature to which we do not attribute moral agency. It’s so much harder when confronted with a willful act that might be characterized as evil, rather than natural.

“The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people,” he explained. Yes, disorder can overwhelm order, and destruction can wash away hours and years, even centuries, of creation, but the trajectory of human history still remains with the forces of order and creation, goodness and decency. He called this the Great Asymmetry, noting that, “every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible as the ‘ordinary’ efforts of a vast majority.”

The numbers Gould cites are poetic rather than numeric, of course, for it would be impossible to calculate precisely how many actual acts of goodness there may be compared to a single act of evil. And, judging by crime statistics and other measures, it seems pretty obvious that the magnitude of human goodness compared to human failure, ranging all the way from simple shortcomings to outright acts of evil, doesn’t seem to be in the order of 10,000 to one. Or is it? Even horrible people unwittingly do good things along the way, which, if nothing else, is how they can go undetected for long periods of time.

Standing at Ground Zero, Gould described it as “the focal point for a vast web of bustling goodness, channeling unaccountable deeds of kindness from an entire planet” as he recorded in his own mind “the overwhelming weight of human decency.” It was a small number of men who had committed the evil deed, but it was thousands – indeed, tens of thousands – who responded to make things right, bolstered by the goodwill and support of countless millions. Perhaps 10,000 to one underestimates the magnitude of acts of kindness compared to acts of evil. “The rubble of ground zero stands mute,” he noted, “while a beehive of human activity churns within, and radiates outward, as everyone makes a selfless contribution, big or tiny according to means and skills, but each of equal worth.”

Gould went on to offer a few illustrations of the ways that individuals and groups sought to be present in the moment, offering open hearts and helping hands to others, in small efforts to redeem the situation.

One really caught his attention, though, because he scoffed at it at first. A woman in a café where Gould and his wife and stepdaughter were picking up a bite to eat handed them a bag with a dozen freshly made cobblers. They were still warm, she noted, and she asked them to take them back to Ground Zero where Gould and his family were volunteering. They did so, but Gould thought to himself, what could a dozen cobblers mean in the face of an enormous problem? What difference would it even make? But they took them back and passed them out. The last person to get one was an aging firefighter, sitting down for the first time in a while, who ate the cobbler, saying it was the best thing to happen to him in four days. And then he said: “And it’s still warm.” In that moment, Stephen Jay Gould recognized the importance of an apparently small and insignificant act of kindness to buoy the spirit of others and to help make right a difficult situation.

Still, it’s rarely a simple matter of good people vs. bad people, but more often a matter of how everyone – each and every one of us – falls short of the mark from time to time. Through intent or neglect, sometimes through mere indifference, we each contribute to the world’s problems, no matter how good we strive to be, nor how successful we are in the effort. But on balance, there is more goodness in the world than not, evidenced by the fact that, at any given time, most of us – the overwhelming majority – would prefer to be alive than not, even though the battle for goodness becomes fatiguing after a while, and often less certain.

As Dorothy Parker mused in her poem, “The Veteran” –

“When I was young and bold and strong,

Oh, right was right, and wrong was wrong!

My plume on high, my flag unfurled,

I rode away to right the world 

‘Come out, you dogs, and fight!’ said I,

And wept there was but once to die.

“But I am old; and good and bad

Are woven in a crazy plaid.

I sit and say, ‘The world is so;

And he is wise who lets it go.

A battle lost, a battle won –

The difference is small, my son.’

“Inertia rides and riddles me;

The which is called Philosophy.”

Our lives, individually and collectively, are asymmetrical, “woven in a crazy plaid,” or “vast web of bustling goodness” – our acts of kindness may be random, but that doesn’t mean they’re insignificant – and just as the “arc of the moral universe bends towards justice,” the Great Asymmetry tends towards goodness.

“We have a duty, almost a holy responsibility,” declared Stephen Jay Gould, “to record and honor the victorious weight of these innumerable little kindnesses, when an unprecedented act of evil so threatens to distort our perception of ordinary human behavior.” And we must do so, as well, when we are dealing with mundane and routine differences, polarization and everyday indifference. We are called to redeem the world with our goodness our everyday acts of kindness.

It matters where we focus our attention, especially when so much seems to conspire to distract us and distort our perception, so that we can keep our eyes on the greater good that surrounds us, acknowledging that, on balance, people are overwhelmingly kind, it is a good world, and we are blessed to be alive to enjoy it.

A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg.

Works Cited

Stephen Jay Gould, "A Time of Gifts," The New York Times (September 26, 2001).

Mary Johnston, "Better to Marry an Upstart than a Downstart," The Winnipeg Evening Tribune (December 15, 1923).