Recent Musings:

Spring in the city.

Friday, April 6, 2007

I am so excited to be in the city in the springtime! Yes, right now it's wintry outside, but last week was gorgeous and I even read outside in the sun and the wind. It's fabulous to see the buds opening, to fill my eyes with the color of tiny green shoots of leaves on the tips of the trees and to hear the birds chirping in between runs of traffic.

I've recognized something about being in the city. We're all crawling on top of each other here... in our cars on the crowded streets, in the lines at the grocery store, in walking down the sidewalks with umbrellas in the rain. There's a lot of humans crowded into a small geographic region and we make it work - we have to. You know what that says to me? In the city, you need to learn to tolerate people. You can't get away from them, you can try to ignore them and certainly things are much easier for everyone when you learn to work WITH them. It's a tricky thing and I'm just now barely mastering that skill.

This skill is foreign to me because where I came from it was easy to get away from people - we had our own driveways, our own yards which fenced us in, our own businesses and our own parks. We had quiet lots for our houses, miles and miles away from traffic and other people. I happen to be highly noise-sensitive, yet recently I've been amazed at how I've learned to tune out the noise. For me this is a large accomplishment; for me this is quite satisfying. This says to me that I am capable of surrounding myself with life, instead of hiding away in my quiet library reading room trying to shield myself from all the activity.

So, how well do you tolerate people? I'm not talking about our families, our friends, those we love and choose to be with. I'm talking about complete strangers, random bodies of existence, that force our daily lives to be filled with patience and understanding and kindness. How well do you tolerate our humanity?