Peace and Pekoe
1. It’s been a long winter, and it is finally over! The sun is shining, there are robins everywhere, and we’ve put away out winter boots and coats and broken out sneakers and rainboots. I love spring, and the delay only makes it extra-sweet.
2. It’s not only the weather which has made this a difficult winter. A month ago, my four year old nephew Sammy was diagnosed with leukemia. My brother in law suffers from a depressive disorder and they all moved to be closer to family after he lost his job last year, so this has just been one more blow on top of everything else. My sister bears the brunt of all of this, so if you do visit the caringbridge site, consider sending a donation via the paypal link given in the “My Story” section, I know it would ease the burden.
3. I haven’t written about Sammy’s diagnosis here, because it’s not really about me. But there have been so many other stories this winter of hard things happening to people, difficult trials, that it’s really hit home for me this year that there’s no protection from sorrow. There’s no guarantee against hardship. Bad things happen to good people, and ‘bad’ people, and prepared people and unprepared people. That’s one reason I reacted so strongly to last month’s marriage discussion and the suggestion that a sacramental marriage provides some kind of armor or guarantee against betrayal.
So, I suppose I’ve been wrestling with the problem of pain all winter. It’s fitting then, I suppose, that it was a longer than usual winter, because this is a difficult problem to wrestle.
4. I’d like to share my conclusions with you, but I can’t say that I’ve reached any that I know how to express, except that we all need to be compassionate and kind to one another, especially to those who seem at least in some sense responsible for their own suffering. I’ve seen beautiful acts of fellowship and kindness this winter (the most recent being the outpouring of support for Jennifer Trappuzzano after the loss of her husband, Nate). Our hearts turn and open quite easily towards the wounded innocent and the holy victim. It’s harder to find compassion for people who suffer from the consequences of their own sins, but it’s possible that they need compassion more for all that.
I’ve been glad to see the kindness shown to Robin Broun. I don’t know her backstory, but I don’t need to to be compassionate. I was glad to see that others didn’t insist on knowing her backstory (how she became a single mother, what happened to child support, etc.) before supporting her, either. Sometimes I can get kind of negative about human nature, and it doesn’t hurt to have that countered a bit. 🙂
5. On a different topic, this is one of the best descriptions of life with ADHD I have yet read. The “soft rain of Post-it notes” line made me laugh, but it’s the way he connects this to the adaptive ability to deduce from context, the need for routine, and the lived effects of medication that really rang true for me. I have to balance the effect that lack of sleep has on the effectiveness of my medication, and the effects my medication have on my sleep patterns, on top of having limited hours for sleep in the first place… I’m not as efficient with my time as I would like, and I’m still struggling to remember what habits and routines I’d intended to establish here in our new home, all while taking shelter from the Post-it notes and trying to harness my hyper-focus for Good, not Evil.
6. I work four evenings a week, from 8 PM to midnight. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday are my nights off, and every week I struggle with competing desires to a) use the time alone to get something done, b) sleep, and c) fritter my time away on media and/or other no-brainer stuff. Last night my daughter decided to solve that problem for me by refusing to sleep, making the first two options impossible, and the last unsatisfying. Tonight I will likely have a large client project in my inbox, to be completed over the weekend. I’m hoping against hope that my daughter decides to nap this afternoon so I can nap with her!
7. In between finishing An Astronauts Guide to Life on Earth (referenced in my last post for the Personalist Project), I’ve been working through Dorothy Day’s autobiography. This has given me a new ambition: to finally finish a Russian novel. It’s little deficiencies like this that keep me from getting cocky about my intellectual prowess. I blame my ADHD–I just have a hard time keeping all the characters straight in something like Crime and Punishment, let alone keep the plot points in mind as I read, frequently interrupted by my kids. But Dorothy Day writes so glowingly of the influence of Dosoevsky and Tolstoy, that I feel inspired to give it another try. We have a little deck that is just begging for a reading chair, now that the weather is pleasant…
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