I was reading Sy Safransky’s Notebook in The Sun magazine this morning. I love this page of my favorite magazine, in which the editor, Sy Safransky, shares short thoughts through individual paragraphs about a range of ideas and experiences. Sy’s writing is always thought-provoking and often moving, and today’s page was so much so that three of his paragraphs will serve as the topics for this week’s blog posts.Sy wrote this:
As we lay in bed this morning, Norma asked what I was going to do today. “Save the world,” I replied in a deadpan voice. “Did you say ‘save,’” she asked, or ‘savor’?” I laughed. “Try savor,” she said.” (The Sun, January 2010)This got me thinking. My work is of the “save the world” sort. It’s not as if I have so much hubris as to think that I am going to be instrumental in “saving the world” (and I’m not sure what that means anyway), but I do believe that I have a responsibility to use my skills and knowledge toward creating a more humane, sustainable, and peaceful world as far as I can. And sometimes the weight of this responsibility is heavy, and I feel guilty if I don’t put in what I consider the right amount of “save the world” hours. The truth is, though, that I relish savoring the world, and I do so regularly. I snowshoed this blizzardy morning up our small mountain and savored the incredible beauty of the carpet of fluffy, star-like, sparkling snow thickly coating even the tiniest of branches and turning the evergreens into a Dr. Seuss book.
But often I feel like my life is divided between savoring and saving, and I strive for a balance I can live with.
After my hike this morning I returned home and logged onto the MOGO Online Commons on this first day of our month-long MOGO Online course at the Institute for Humane Education. Today’s exercise for the course comes from my book, Most Good, Least Harm. Participants imagine and then share what they would say to a child who comes up to them on a park bench at the end of their long life and asks what they did to help create the better, safer, healthier, more peaceful, and restored world that the child now lives in (and that the exercise presupposes will come about).
One participant, Kathy Hally, a friend of mine and a local elementary school teacher, wrote this:
"What I would want to be able to say to this child on the park bench:
"My role in helping to change history was easy and enjoyable. It was painless to give my time to animals left in shelters who had been abandoned and/or abused and were lonely and scared. It was easy and fun to pat a cat or throw a ball for a dog and take them for a walk in the woods. It was comforting to have a lonely pet lean up against me and show me how much they liked a little friendship and affection.
"It was satisfying to find ways to spend my money on food that wasn't sprayed with chemicals or mistreated with cruelty and/or shot up with awful antibiotics and other chemicals. It was painless to buy things I knew were not being made by children your own age in sweat shops and/or other inappropriate child labor means.
"It was interesting to find ways to decrease the amount of pollution I created by knowing how and where things were made all over the world and the impact they had on local people and the globe. It made me appreciate and care about nature more and more.
"It was painless and enjoyable to grow my own organic vegetables to eat and share with friends and family.
"It was fun. Try it."
I immediately thought how wonderful it was to read a response that was about simultaneously saving and savoring. No distinction. No need to “find balance.” No separation. No either/or. No “now” and “later.”
I know I, like Sy, will continue to distinguish between “saving” days and “savoring” days, but how comforting it was to read Kathy’s response and realize that a shift in attitude, attention, and awareness can meld these two into one.
~ Zoe Weil
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