Dear Friends –
I’m moving through some in between time – time between Foxy treatments and visitors and mountain climbing milestones. And because really all of life is lived during the in between, the lessons I’m gathering up in this space feel too important not to share.
Forgive me here because we’re going to start on a bit of a tangent. A few friends know that over the past couple of years I’ve become more than a little distracted by those amazing heroes of history who found a way to stand up to injustice during deeply broken times. What prompts someone to take in a Jewish family hiding for their lives during WWII, or someone even this weekend to give an undocumented neighbor shelter, or even a mid-level Enron accountant to speak up and say the numbers don’t add up?
Who are these people? And why is it that the vast majority of us – really decent, kind people just like us – actually don’t take such risks? In fact, the vast majority of us are usually very quiet and well-meaning enablers, even as dark clouds gather.
So I’ve been wondering: what can lovely and good souls learn from the outliers who found courage, usually at great risk, to push back against great harm?
But in my in between time this week, I’m beginning to think I’ve been looking at this question all wrong.
Here’s why. I now sit on this bench and on one side of me is this gorgeous repository of hope. And on the other side of me sits an unbearable presence of horror. They aren’t friends. They barely even know each other. But they are both eager to chat with me, begging me for my attention. So I’m pivoting between them, sorting out a way to have one conversation at a time.
All this chatting with hope and horror has led me to a new place: If before I wanted to figure out how to be brave and somehow diminish the horror, today I’m far more captivated by the deeply purposeful souls who fuel the hope.
Part of the what my mountain is teaching me is how to draw closer to these souls, individuals who proactively make deposits into the hope repository. I’ve known them my whole life. We all have. Hopefully I am one, at least on my best days. We all are.
But on the mountain you simply have to marvel as they dance all around, in the most subtle and majestic ways. The mountain gives you permission to pause, and stand in awe.
Yesterday a beautiful bouquet of flowers were mistakenly delivered to a house about four blocks near my office. Someone named Russ decided to spend part of his morning Googling my name, knowing the flowers at his doorstep were in the wrong spot. Eventually he tracked me down on Linkedin, with a note saying how beautiful the flowers were, and how important it was that he sort out a way to have them eventually find me.
What is this about. It’s small and routine and we don’t know Russ, but we can all bet we’d adore his problem solving swagger if we did. But it’s more than that. It’s time and care and attention and goodness.
The last night I was in the hospital while I was receiving the last few hours of Foxy’s first brigade, tiny bubbles populated the IV line, causing an occasional and awful beeping from the machine near my bed. Lots of nurses rotated in to get a quick tap of the line, but about every 15 minutes or so the beeping would begin again. Then a new nurse named Raymond rotated in. He’d fix the line, but then stayed right outside the door at 2am to wait and see if another bubble would prompt a beep. And it would, and Raymond would be right there. Eventually at 3:30am I noticed he had a flashlight positioned between his teeth as he did a little open heart surgery on the box to fix the problem once and for all.
And of course this is Raymond’s job. But it’s more than that. It’s staying near the door and Googling manuals on a phone in the middle of the night and knowing that the frightened patient in the bed is getting Foxy bombed for the first time and how dreadful must the beeping be on top of all that.
It’s colleagues at work who don’t just send a card. They send posters framed with the kind of gold glitter that doesn’t flake and sparkles just so with the sunlight comes in my room in the morning.
It’s a dear friend who decides watching the Wimbledon women’s final at 6am with me feels like an excellent idea, even when that means he’s getting up at 5am to make the drive.
It’s dozens of other absolutely routine moments of sweetness, but on the mountain they are revelatory.
Because sitting here on my bench, specifically because of Russ and Raymond and pre-dawn tennis drives and gold glitter, hope has the very best stories to tell. The stories are rugged and full of twists and surprise and even heartbreak. But each is captivating, shaped by millions of purposeful moments that inspire the next million.
And somehow, who knows how, in all of those hope deposits, a new enabling environment takes shape. So if the brokenness of our day calls you to do something heroic like help shield an undocumented neighbor this week, I think it’s because of the good work of Russ and Raymond and gold glitter, and friends who look us all in the eye and say, “tell me more about that.” Those are the moments that steadily shape the kind of courage that stops horror in its tracks, forever changing the world.
There are so many more regular and revelatory stories of hope to share. I’m eager to hear yours.
xoxo