Most paint jobs cover other paint jobs, changing with the fashion of the time. What the world sees is rarely the whole story of what is there. But sooner or later the older layers are likely to show through. In moments of stress, or moments of quiet reflection, we might find a shade of ourselves that we had forgotten coming through the cracks.
If each major phase of your life had a different color, how many layers of color would you have by now?
“Forgiveness is the needle that knows how to mend.”
―Jewel
Give up pretending.
Everything, you know,
everything, sooner or later
gets eaten. Little fish,
big fish, no difference—
the world’s mouth
is on you. Outside the personal,
it even has a certain glory.
When the mouse, in its last
short dash to the grain,
feels the great rush of wings,
in the flash before
the crushing beak descends,
it is finally, luminously, airborne….
―Lynn Ungar
What is worth giving your life to feed?
It’s so easy to fill those moments of waiting—for a friend to arrive, for the doctor to call you in, for your turn in line at the grocery—with texting or Facebook or email, with something trivial to fill in the gaps. But sometimes it’s worth just waiting. Seeing what’s around you. Allowing things to happen at their own speed and simply noticing as they occur.
What’s the most interesting thing that has happened to you while you were waiting?
There’s a well-known article about white privilege by Peggy McIntosh (PDF) which talks about the ways in which each of us carries around an invisible knapsack of privilege—unearned benefits we gain from being white or male or able-bodied or any number of other categories. It’s rare that anyone has every possible privilege, and it’s rare that anyone has no privilege at all. The privileges don’t mean that we are bad—or good—but it’s helpful to recognize both what you carry around as a matter of course and what others might not have gotten.
What do you see in your knapsack of privileges?
