Category: Choices

Ticket to P(R)ide

On By ednafroeseIn Chance, Choices, competitiveness, gamesLeave a comment
Photo of the game box of Ticket to Ride.

            In a world in which nearly every imaginary activity has been gamified and even “gaming” became a necessary new noun, I’m going to dare to write about old-fashioned board games. Yes, those games that come in cardboard boxes and are laid out on the table for the family to play, using dice and cards and little plastic people. What an anachronistic activity! Oddly enough, though, board games are still popular, if one can judge by the seasonal pop-up kiosks in shopping malls selling paper calendars (another anachronism!) and board games, both old and new. Apparently, the artifice of moving pieces on a board still holds some appeal.  

Photo of the board of Ticket to Ride with a game in progress.

            It was by happenstance that my husband and I discovered we had not fully understood either the rules or principles of Ticket to Ride, a discovery that changed my feelings about the game to a degree that I found disturbing. I’d never really paid attention to why I liked some games and disliked others. Now I needed to figure out what had really changed in my attitude to Ticket to Ride and if that mattered in any way. It wasn’t just an objection to a seeming rule change; given how freely we had adjusted the rules of Brazilian Rummy to make it more playable for just two people, I clearly did not feel that rules were immutable.

            When attitudes and behaviors seem inexplicable or downright weird, it usually pays to look back as far as necessary to work out what’s going on. In this case, that meant saying “hello” once again to my childhood self, that shy little country girl with minimal social skills.

 In my family of origin, games were played only on Sundays when work was not allowed. Often those game-playing sessions were enhanced with home-grown, freshly roasted sunflower seeds or still warm popcorn. These are some of my happiest memories of farm life, albeit not without shadows.

I was the youngest in the family, by a margin of 6 years, so games that required strategy or skill were impossible for me to win, unless someone let me win, which, I realized fairly early, was an insult of its own. So unless some element of randomness was built into the game, I wasn’t particularly interested.

 Strategy vs. chance: surely the makers of games have always grasped that much depends on the balance between those two. There were those in my family who definitely preferred checkers and chess, especially the latter. Both players begin with identical playing fields and number of pieces to march toward victory. The board is a battlefield that is level in all senses, and all possible moves are clearly delineated and equally available. There are no dice and no cards. Checkers and chess are games of intelligence only. There is some built-in aggression (the third key factor in games), since pieces are mowed down along the way. However, each assault on the opponent’s troops carries definite risk to one’s own. There is little tactical benefit in “killing” for the sake of “killing.”

            My father, I recall, never played Snakes and Ladders, which is entirely chance: the roll of the dice determines everything. (The moralistic notes on the board that connected ladders with good behavior and snakes with naughtiness were completely negated by the way the game was actually played. One can’t help but think of the way that good behavior has become suicidal in politics these days and naughtiness simply extends influence and power).

He also had little patience with Sorry (which I really liked) because while there were some limited choices, so much was determined by the luck of the draw that there was little pride in winning. Possibly my father had had more than enough randomness in life (he had come to Canada as a refugee) that he did not willingly tolerate chanciness. Not that he was averse to risk, per se; he just wanted as much control over the degree of risk as possible.

 Monopoly was another game that we often played; it did include some randomness—players roll the dice for every move. Mostly, though, it depended on economic strategy. It was capitalism in miniature. And I do not recall ever winning a game. Monopoly’s one virtue was that it didn’t lend itself to open aggression among players; winning didn’t depend on deliberately sabotaging someone else’s opportunity to make money, except by capitalism’s inherent principle of taking advantage of an opponent’s fiscal distress.   

 Interestingly, I recall laughter accompanying Monopoly, at least in the early stages of the game before the bankruptcies began. There was laughter with Sorry and Pit and Crokinole and other vintage games. There was no laughter at the chess games. Intellectual ability was on the line, and intellectual prowess was highly valued.

            So, back to Ticket to Ride.

two photos of little trains created on a blank background.

We had not figured out that the game was designed, not only to require strategy (every turn involves some choices), but also to reward sabotage of other players. Suddenly, the game felt less benign. My husband and I had enjoyed the game so much, I think, because it required us to think carefully and to work with whatever cards we were dealt (that element of chance), but left the inevitable interferences with one another’s trains also to chance: skill plus chance in a ratio that minimized the importance of winning or losing. There was little personal pride at stake: it was the process that was fun.

 We have watched our children and our grandchildren play board games – and we played with them, of course. As any elementary school teacher could have told us, not every child can handle the competitiveness fostered by games that depend on aggression as part of the winning strategy. One game, rarely played by our children and played only once by grandchildren, was actually named Aggravation. The entire point of the game was to be mean to your opponents.  Granted, there was a substantial element of chance in the game, but not enough to neutralize its corrosive effect.

  It has been fascinating to observe a new trend in board games: cooperative play. The competitive element has been eliminated and players are all on the same team, facing the challenge posed by the game itself, each contributing some skill to the communal effort. I have not played such games enough to speculate on what has happened to the role of chance in these new games. No doubt much research on precisely that element has already gone into their design.

            For now, my brief visit to the past has not only helped me to make peace with Ticket to Ride—as long as we can “adjust” rules to suit us, there’s no problem—but has also ended my sentimental attachment to the now very old board games that still sit on our library shelves. The time has come, I think, to dispose of some ancient paper money and some deteriorating game boards. I hope that I can find some recipient for the antique wooden chess pieces, since it seems a shame to consign those to the garbage.

Photo of a small wooden box containing wooden chess pieces.

            What I should consign to whatever dustbin holds mental behavior patterns is my competitive desire to win at games, however chancy they might be. I hereby admit that I have never been immune to the allure of beating the odds. After all, my pride is at stake.

Two Deaths That Matter

On By ednafroeseIn Choices, death, Life, spirituality2 Comments

“In truth, all deaths matter. What I say is simply that these two matter to me.”

Winter scene with a partly cloudy sky. Dark evergreens throw black shadows onto the snow. It is a country scene with no sign of human habitation except for a barely discernible wooden picnic table.

            That two men died on February 16, 2024, is not, in itself, a noteworthy fact. Thousands upon thousands of men and women and children die each day on our planet earth. All those deaths are important to those around them who continue to live, and all of those lives, now ended, deserve to have their stories told. I speak of only two.

            The name of the first, Alexei Navalny, is well-known in many countries besides his native country, Russia. He was still young, only 47. Had he been free to work toward his vision, he could have accomplished much. Even so, he has galvanized supporters who continue to expose corruption and call for fairer government. His fearless return to Russia after his recovery from the poisoning attempt in 2020 has inspired admiration everywhere his story is known.   

            Navalny lived with passion and courage. He loved his country and he loved his people more. So with all the skills he had—and they were many—he condemned Putin’s oppression of his people and his selfish exploitation of his country. Regardless of the efforts to keep him from speaking out, he refused to be silenced and that cost him his life. Whatever the immediate cause of death (in the Siberian prison where he was held), which we may never know with certainty, there is no doubt at all that President Vladimir Putin of Russia wanted him dead.   

            I am not Russian and have not even heard Navalny speak in person, let alone known him in any meaningful sense of the word. Yet I grieve his death, and pray that it will not have been in vain.

Winter photo of river with frost-covered shrubs on the bank.

            The name of the second man who died on February 16, Rev. Vern Ratzlaff, is definitely less well-known. He was also much older, having already had a long and full life. His last years were spent in a care home, dependent on staff for daily needs and on friends and family for what social life he could still manage, but those are minor details.

What matters is that in his own way, he lived with a passion for truth and justice as intense as any and loved his people, his congregations, with a compassionate heart. He had a brilliant mind and was a competent religious scholar and excellent teacher. He could have been a successful academic, yet he chose otherwise. The God he worshiped had called him to preach and to live out justice and peace and love. And so he did.

            For us, he is the tall bearded man, slightly stooped, with a gentle smile, who offered us friendship and a place in his church community. In his presence, we felt encouraged, trusted, safe. He had an ability to learn from others, with an astonishing openness to spiritual perspectives that differed from his. Although raised in a conservative-minded denomination with devout adherence to a clearly outlined Christian doctrine, Vern had learned a wider ecumenical vision that he fostered in the churches that he ministered to. His friendships were wide-ranging; he was welcomed with respect in other churches, and in synagogue, temple, and mosque.  

            He had a quirky sense of humor, an ability to laugh at himself, with a boyish sense of fun. Not all introverts appreciate so-called practical jokes, but Vern could delight in the absurd and the silly. At the same time, he had an inner stillness that let others breathe and be. He loved music and sang in choirs until that was no longer possible. He and his wife were generous and hospitable, welcoming others to their home and table; guest speakers in his church were invariably invited out for lunch.

He was not perfect – no human is. There were shadows in his history, interludes that a hagiographer would gloss over. However, Vern himself would not want a hagiographer: he knew for certain that God was gracious and forgiving. He would, no doubt, ask his grieving friends to go on living according to scriptural words that he loved and taught: this is what is required of you, “to act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).

Winter photo of a river bank and a steel bridge. Shrubs are covered with hoarfrost.

One Door and Only One

On By ednafroeseIn Choices, Doors, Forgiveness, hopeLeave a comment

              From somewhere in my memory, a fragment of a children’s song from my Sunday School days surfaced, unbidden:

One door, and only one          One door, and only one
And yet its sides are two,         And yet its sides are two,
Inside and outside,                  I’m on the inside,
On which side are you?          On which side are you?

I didn’t remember the rest of the lyrics; this bit might have been all that we sang. A quick internet search, though, revealed other verses, with equally stark choices. “One Lord and only one” offered the “right way [or] wrong way,” and “one Book and only one” put the singers in “the good place or the bad place.” I’m glad that as a child I didn’t sing about the good place and the bad place because I was already plenty worried about place.    

I hadn’t heard the arrogant certainty of the tone, nor had I paid attention to the astonishing gap between that dichotomy of choice and a God whom we believed to be the Creator of a world with mind-blowing variety and breadth. To be clear, the small agricultural community where I grew up, where almost everyone attended church (the choice of two churches was hardly a choice at all with their minimal differences), had given me no real awareness of a vast universe with infinite galaxies and equally infinite complexity in the tiniest clusters of cells. That came later.

Then I had obediently pointed to myself for “I’m on the inside” and to unknown others for “on which side are you?” while trying to stifle the persistent inner fear that I was probably not on the right side of the door.  

 Very likely, the song writer’s intent was to reassure children that all would be well if  they were given clear answers about how the world worked, both now and hereafter. I’m choosing also to assume that the song writer had not considered the long-term consequences of such direct, uncompromising “othering” of everyone who didn’t speak of God in precisely the same way or didn’t even believe in God. After all, this was a simple child’s song, with a very catchy, bouncy tune.  

            The appeal of the door as a metaphor is understandable. A door does indeed have two sides and in a wild rainstorm or a blizzard, the obviously welcoming place is inside. Who, after a long journey, hasn’t arrived to stand at a door and knocked hopefully? When that door is flung open, warmth rushing out to envelope the traveler even before arms offer hugs, all the travails of the journey are forgotten. Then again, another scenario is possible: the house lights are off, the door remains firmly closed.

Doors are, by definition, openings in walls, in buildings, in enclosed gardens, in institutional offices, and so on.  They are a very visible symbol of inclusion and exclusion. They offer a way in, or, if necessary, also a way out.

 When the persistent little ditty of “one door and only one” refused to leave my mind, I began looking at doors. I drove along streets in our neighborhood and others. Camera in hand, I stared at doors – so many styles and colors, so many different yards leading up to those doors. Such astonishing variety in just the doors, let alone the atmosphere that must have been behind those doors, or the greetings that would have spilled out in so many languages.

            This is not the venue to explore fully the nuances of inclusion and exclusion, either sociological or theological, although I do want to mention one book (no regular reader here will be surprised!), Myroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace, which is the best book I’ve ever read on the human need to form supportive communities and the divine imperative to keep those communities open-doored.  Volf writes as the Christian he is, but he points out that all world religions speak of love and the grace of welcoming strangers.

As I have pondered the meaning of the door, with its implied walls and enclosed spaces, I remembered an experience I had years ago, touring the ruins of St. Boniface Cathedral in Winnipeg with other family members. The cathedral, built in 1905-1908, had been badly burned in 1968. Its surviving outer walls had been left as a monument of an old architectural style, and a new church had been built in 1972, partially inside the ruins.

As we walked through the ruins, I began to linger, wanting to be alone, suddenly aware of a Presence. Light was everywhere, including within me.

People had worshipped on this site since 1818 (the ruined St. Boniface Cathedral was the third one built there); over the generations, they had expressed their faith through beautiful architecture as well as through songs and homilies and sacraments. Now the façade and walls stood open to the light and the wind. The solid beauty of the rock belonged to the outdoor gardens and to the open sky. That felt right. It included me, protestant that I am.

            These days as the rockets fall, hurled out of the hatred and fear spawned by the cruelties of centuries, I wish there were fewer fences and more open doors. I wish that the necessary doors (and they are always necessary to keep out insects and unwanted animals and the wind and the rain and . . . . ) could be openings into welcome and understanding. I wish that we could stop dividing complex issues and multiple needs into either/or, good/bad. Even as I recognize that evil does exist and must be dealt with, I wish that we could find enough humility to listen better and to recognize our common human yearnings for love and security. I don’t know how to end a political/religious conflict that is already bathed in the blood of thousands. At least in my neighborhood, I want to learn a gentler language and leave a door open wide enough so that the possibility of community can be glimpsed on both sides.

Containing Annoyance

On By ednafroeseIn Choices, Easter, hope, spiritualityLeave a comment

            On any continuum of fury, annoyance sits near the gentler end. Annoyance is our response to some slight loss of control or disappointed expectation: the two hours assigned to an important task were wasted because of missing parts and a malfunctioning tool; a craft project meant to delight a small child disintegrated into tangled threads; a short errand became an ordeal thanks to elusive parking spots and a badly signed detour. We can all add our own examples. I daresay a thousand gizmos and a million advertisements have offered to hold back the tsunamis of annoyance in our lives.

 Odd that I so readily connect annoyance to things rather than people. Really, it’s other people who disappoint and frustrate us more and oftener than poorly designed things. Yet my tolerance for people who annoy me is considerably greater than for things that annoy me. Nothing flares my temper quite like the vacuum cleaner that will not suck, or the pill bottle that refuses to be opened.

 Lately, that un-openable bottle has come to stand for what will turn into an obsession if I do not contain it sensibly. Contain – the word sums up the problem.   

            It’s an ancient one: humanoids have always fashioned containers for carrying and storing food, tools, treasures. There is no doing without containers. The more we have and make, the more we need containers. From hollow stones and woven baskets to carved bowls and on toward metal chests with ropes, we have contained our way to our current avalanche of plastics and paper, unfortunately made worse by the pandemic’s take-out meals and online shopping.

 But it is not environmental considerations that I want to think about right now, even though those considerations should move us way past annoyance all the way to rage over our garbage-strewn planet.

 No, what troubles me is my own garbage-strewn mind, for I keep letting small vexations prompt unreasonable anger.

photo of a bowl of oatmeal topped with a generous helping of fresh blueberries.

            Take blueberries, for instance. I love them. Their mating with yogurt and granola (or oatmeal) for breakfast is made in heaven. But blueberries will not grow in my garden. Believe me, I’ve tried. And wild blueberries don’t appear in the environs of Saskatoon, either. Hence my need to buy – which means containers. Once upon a time, frozen blueberries could be purchased in lightweight plastic bags, simply sealed. All it took was a scissors to snip off the top ¼ inch and some device to tie the bag thereafter. No problem.

            Then someone, intent on claiming as much shelf space as possible, invented stand-up bags. Sturdy bastards they are, as they were meant to be. Now my arthritic hands are supposed to tear off the top strip, then somehow grasp the minimally remaining edge to force open the zipper—yes, these “bags” come with their own zipper requiring more manufacturing. Having achieved my breakfast, I am expected to re-zip the stiff bag so that it stays shut and doesn’t spill the rest of the berries on the way back to the freezer compartment where it claims space beyond reason.

 Similar bags now contain flour, rolled oats, and all manner of staple goods. I frequently imagine a vengeful kind of afterlife in which the designers and makers of those damned stand-up bags are forced to measure—accurately!—flour and starch and rice for an eternity. It’s awkward to pour anything from those bags and even more difficult to scoop out from without spilling.  

photos of stand-up bags on the shelf

I now avoid frustration by cutting the bags open below the zipper; I can then cleanly transfer the contents to a glass canister or some other stable, non-disposable container. Frozen berries are put into small Ziploc freezer bags which are plastic and do have their own zippers, but at least they’re reusable multiple times over, and their zippers are easier to manage.  

            Am I becoming a crusty senior citizen, whose tolerance for small physical demands is decreasing? Perhaps.

            Another shift in grocery packaging likewise stoked annoyance. Decades ago, we discovered a small bulk food store that sold a wide selection of basic baking and cooking ingredients for reasonable prices. The local owners bought goods in bulk and sold them in small or medium bags that were completely see-through, entirely flexible, and durable. We bought all manner of nuts and flours and pastas and spices there. The bags were tied with tiny strips of sticky paper that were easy to undo; thereafter I re-closed them with whatever baggie ties we already had. It was simple. The bags were small enough and flexible enough that they claimed no more space in the cupboard or freezer than was their due. I have washed and reused the bags for decades; they’re almost everlasting.

Then the beloved bulk food store changed its packaging to brittle, cheap, mostly unrecyclable rigid containers. They sat nicely on the shelves, yes, and I could see the contents, but they were beastly to open and worse to reclose and claimed the same greedy space whether they were full and almost empty. We have not been back to the store again.

It did not improve my mood to see grocery stores shut down their bulk food sections when the pandemic began and likewise stock their shelves with those miserable square plastic abominations. I still vividly recall the day that I failed to resnap the lid of a newly opened container of sunflower seeds, precisely as required; I spilled the entire contents into the fridge and onto the floor.  

 The unfortunate conjunction of changes in packaging and loss of dexterity due to arthritis has turned me into a curmudgeon. Call it a refusal to acknowledge the aging process, if you must. Or a failure to manage frustration, which could be blamed on COVID loneliness. I’m less inclined to fret about the sources of my irritation than about a way out of the downward spiral.

            These words are being written in Lent, the season of conscious awareness of life and death that precedes Easter, the most important holiday for Christians.

photo of two small begonia plants, just barely leafing out.

I have been watching in wonder as my seemingly dry, lifeless begonia tubers are now eagerly responding to warmth and light with the first intricate leaves. They will yet produce flower buds which will open into the brilliant colors begonias are known for. Those dry tubers contained life and the promise of beauty.

As so many symbols of Easter do. The shell of the egg, whether painted or no, contains (or did contain) that which nourishes life. Indeed, if I wish to return to the realm of the inorganic, I think of decorative boxes containing chocolates which sometimes contain delectable fillings, pretty baskets containing eggs that contain desired somethings. The most powerful symbol of all, the empty tomb, speaks to the transformation of death into new life. Life cannot be contained; it will burst forth, it will begin anew.

            I have moved from the ridiculous (ridiculously trivial, that is) to the sublime. Can I contain both in one posting? Why not? If I can remember to focus on the “contained” rather than the containers, and then, whenever possible, choose that which offers life rather than more inanimate garbage, annoyances should lose some of their power to annoy. I could also choose to advocate for better containers, but that is another project.               

We Need a New Word

On By ednafroeseIn Choices, Conversation, hope, Love, peace, possibility, Protest, reform, Words2 Comments

Words are slippery.

They mean what they mean, yes, but they mean always within a context, and contexts change.

            As a child of the Protestant Reformation, a descendant of Mennonites (a radical branch of that Protestant Reformation), and a wordsmith, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our political language. What on earth happened to protest since the 1500s? Why could I be proud of my religious heritage, yet so much on edge and unhappy now?

The verb “protest” has become more noun than verb. One doesn’t pro-tést these days – one joins a pró-test, and that changes more than just pronunciation and grammatical function.

Photo of my book shelf with the English Oxford Dictionary prominently displayed. The second photo is the opened dictionary with a magnifying glass highlighting "protest."

 So: protest as a verb. It differs from object and from disagree. To disagree means, according to Oxford Dictionary, to “hold a different opinion.” In other words, you and I don’t think the same way about some idea or some thing or some action: cement is a better surface for an urban driveway than asphalt. There are good reasons on either side of that disagreement (cost, labor, endurance) but moral implications are absent.   

To object means, again according to Oxford, to express or feel opposition or disapproval or reluctance. That’s stronger than to disagree because emotion is involved. Whatever happens in the discussion, the one who is objecting feels hurt or offended or even appalled. That would be the distinction that my editing self would make. When my late father used to introduce me to his acquaintances as the “baby of the family,” never mind that I was already an adult with children of my own, I objected strenuously. It felt belittling to me, although I’m willing to concede now that he meant it as affection. We disagreed on the meaning of “baby” and I objected to his application of it.  

But to protest is to bring in not only emotion but moral judgment. Here I’m reaching back in time to try to recover the meaning of the word before it became a noun that means an official demonstration against government or some other powerful institution or leader. That’s the primary meaning now. Even in that noun form, perhaps especially in that form, the word carries the weight of moral judgment. A protest (noun) occurs because enough people judge some action morally wrong. It’s deemed unjust, unfair.

 If we’re talking about unfairness or injustice, it follows that the protester is in a position of less power than the person or institution against which the protest has been made. The protestor may be a direct recipient of the unjust action or maybe not. Many protests have been launched on behalf of those who had no voice or influence. The common thread is the moral judgment. This or that action is just wrong; it violates a law or some accepted standard of behaviour.

 There is something else about the verb “protest” that we seem, as a nation, to have forgotten entirely: it is intended to persuade. The very fact that the objection raised is morally justified assumes that the one who protests and the one against whom the protest is made share (or should share) a common ethical standard. The concept of injustice makes no sense without an accepted definition of justice.  Martin Luther, who inadvertently began the Protestant Reformation, appealed to the standard of the Bible and the tenets of Christianity when he protested against several actions of Roman Catholic clergy. His initial intention was first open discussion, then persuasion, based on a common faith.  

(Generally speaking, it is, of course, possible that the objection has been made in bad faith and is not morally justified; equally possible is that those whose behaviour has been objectionable do not have any ethical standards to which one can appeal. Neither case invalidates the protest’s initial purpose of persuasion. I insist that the ideal not be forgotten.) 

            By this point, given the current political climate, all sorts of righteous stances are doubtless being claimed by my readers, not to mention fervent disagreements with my definition of “protest.”

 So I will retreat temporarily into a simple illustration taken from my teaching years. A student was unhappy with an assigned grade; she felt certain that I had marked her paper unfairly because I was prejudiced against her. That is a moral problem. While some subjectivity is always a factor in marking essays, outright unfairness is unacceptable, not only to students but also to university administrators and department heads.   

As long as my student expressed her opinion courteously and presented evidence for her accusation, she was completely within her rights and could hope to be persuasive. My role was either to offer a reasonable explanation of the grade or to acknowledge her point and re-evaluate the paper (and/or ask a colleague to evaluate it). Either way, we should have been able to end the discussion with our dignity intact. Indeed, it could have been the beginning of an improved relationship.  

 However, if she had insulted me as a person and added threats of character assassination or even worse, she would have crossed a line between protest and blackmail—“you do this or I will ruin you.”  That is not yet physical violence, but it is violence. Her protest would have given up the moral high ground and become intimidation, thus turning the interaction into a power struggle, which leaves no one’s dignity intact, and makes an improved relationship very difficult, indeed. 

 When Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gandhi before him, insisted that any and all protests should remain non-violent, in language and in action, they were aiming at persuasion, which seeks to make clear what the relevant moral principles are and appeals to both a common humanity and a common acceptance of those moral principles. This is not to say that protests against long-standing evils such as slavery are easy. By no means. Many, perhaps most, slave-owners saw the protest marches as intolerable uppity behaviour by those whom God had made to be their slaves. As long as the marchers refused to turn their protest into rebellion, they kept the moral high ground and underlined the principle of a common humanity, something the slave owners had consistently denied. 

            I indicated earlier that I was a descendant of Mennonites, first known as Anabaptists, who refused to bear arms and developed a strong code of pacifism. Other groups like the Quakers have also chosen non-violence. That does not rule out protest. To speak up against unfairness and injustice, even oppression, is a moral obligation, especially if the speaking up is not for oneself but for those who cannot speak up.

But the way of peace refuses violence in all its forms, and seeks reconciliation. That is the ideal. I cannot speak for Quakers but I know that Mennonites have not always avoided violence, either on the national stage or in their own families. The teaching remains, though, challenging us to seek actively to make peace.

 I confess that I am congenitally disposed to avoid even legitimate protest. I will write letters to my elected representatives (not very often), but I do not march or carry signs. My preference is to “guard each man’s dignity and save each man’s pride,” to quote from a 1970’s Christian worship song.  Other cultures value the “saving of face” which is simply a different metaphor for the kind of agreement that allows for gracious exits from the conflict.

            Is that always possible? I don’t know. Some situations do present themselves as inherently impossible, yet I have read many inspiring stories of people who have suffered much rather than use violence and have ultimately brought about lasting change. Stephan A. Schwartz argues that social changes attempted through revolution and violence generally do not last as long as those social changes created through non-violent means. He lists several examples, including universal education, abolition of slavery in countries such as Britain, universal health care. Remember the old saying, “a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still”?

As Stephen Berg wrote in “Deer in the Mist,” “insisting on angels drives angels away.” Or as I heard in a sermon many decades ago, the way of spiritual grace is always a matter of “gift,” not “grasp.”

Everything real, happens first,
out of sight, in the far away furnaces of courage
which are fueled, not by passion, but love. (Stephen Berg)

Photo of a single clematis vine climbing up a wall with seemingly nothing to cling to. There is one lovely mauve flower.

A Story in Five Rings

On By ednafroeseIn Choices, family, friendship, Gratitude, identity, Love, marriage, memories, StoriesLeave a comment

            No, this is not a story about the Olympics. It’s a love story, an ordinary one. Many couples could tell it, I guess, except that no two love stories are exactly the same.    

Photo of a Valentine's Day bouquet with a mixture of mostly pink flowers but some red and one yellow. Flowers are mostly mums.

            Western love stories have typically followed familiar plots: 1) two kindred spirits fall in love, face and overcome obstacles, marry and “live happily ever after”; 2) follows plot 1, but adds more obstacles after the wedding, which a) may be overcome and lead to a renewal of the happy ending, or b) may not be overcome and lead to an unhappy divorce, or to affairs, or to divorce and then remarriage for an eventual “happily ever after” ending; 3) either version 1 or 2a is continued into old age with even more obstacles to be overcome. In all variations, some major drama is needed to make the story novel-worthy or memoir-worthy. Add WW2 or clashing cultures (see Romeo and Juliet) or national borders or cancer or Alzheimer’s or a pandemic or death or . . . .

 But this story is made of plain stuff-of-life events—the kind that cause no gasps and raise no eyebrows. Yet I would insist that no lasting relationship is ordinary to the ones who live it. For them, the story in five rings (or three or four or many) is a jewel of great worth.  

The first ring – May 3, 1968  

Photo of a ring box with my black diamond ring.

            It was an early birthday gift, given just before I left for a summer job in another province. That was our first experience of letter-writing instead of dates. Our years-long “ordinary” friendship had only months ago deepened into romantic love. No dramatic “falling in love,” no electric glance across the room from a stranger, just increasing warmth in the familiarity of being comfortable together.  

Promise rings hadn’t been officially invented yet, although high school rings were often exchanged (we had not done that). Nothing was actually promised over that black diamond ring, not that I recall. Nevertheless, I quickly discovered why lovers give one another rings, besides to make their commitment more public. A ring is always there, always beautiful. Always a silent affirmation: we love and are loved. That is always a miracle.  

It’s been decades now since I’ve worn it. The thin gold band proved too delicate to tolerate the chores of a household and garden, and the black diamond itself, with its tiny gold clasps, too likely to get caught in sweaters or in fine baby hair. Still, it has not lost its worth as a symbol of our beginning love, even after its place of honor on my left hand was taken by a symbol of much deeper commitment.

The second ring and the third: April 15, 1970 and August 28, 1970.

First photo is of a ring box with our wedding bands (my wedding band together with my engagement ring). Second photo includes a tiny wedding picture, two wine glasses and the ring box with our wedding rings.

            My engagement ring and my wedding ring were welded together within weeks of our wedding day, after I had caught my hand in a heavy door as I rushed to my university class, and bent both rings badly. I could have taken that as an omen. I didn’t.  

 The engagement ring had been slipped on my finger several days after a long evening spent in a 1958 Chev, parked in a favorite spot by the river. We talked about our future. Both of us were going to be university students in fall, each living on a shoestring budget. No doubt we remember the evening differently: at what point did our half-spoken dream change into a definite plan to share our shoestrings? I couldn’t say.  

Surely it was foolish to become engaged in the middle of exams at the end of my third year of university. I still smile when I remember sitting in some stifling exam room, tension palpable everywhere, and staring in astonishment at the diamond ring on my finger. It’s a wonder I could focus on the exam at all.  

 We began our life together on one scholarship plus one student loan, in a furnished basement suite. We were so confident in our love, so sure that we knew exactly what we were doing and that we were mature enough to face whatever difficulties came. Oh, yes, we did say that. We had no illusions that life “happily ever after” was going to be simple or certain. Of course, there would be tough times. I know now that we had not grasped at all what “tough” would feel like or how long it might hang around.  

That’s a good thing, actually. Love is known best in the midst of loving, not in the fear of what might be. Strength is found in the doing and recognized later in the remembering.   

With this ring, I thee wed

            We exchanged wedding bands in a small church service in the summer of 1970. I was so very happy and proud. We loved and were loved.

Over the years we had to learn to straighten bent conversations and adjust attitudes as we got our rings straightened and strengthened when work or accident tested the gold. No marriage escapes stresses. Those “tough times” we’d been so confident we could handle? They came in guises we hadn’t anticipated. There were some very dark days, when we seemed to be functioning in separate spheres, partly because we were each adapting to new roles on the basis of different family backgrounds.

It is not easy to shift from being single independent adults to being parents of our own children (though they brought us so much joy). Nor was it easy for me to become more responsible for my parents—a change that called for considerably more maturity and self-awareness than I had. A return to graduate studies added more stress and demands on my time. Were we to do it all again, we would make some other choices and seek out more support.  

The fourth ring: August 28, 1995       

Photo of both our left hands with focus on our wedding bands.

Twenty-five years after our wedding, we went shopping together for new wedding bands. My husband’s ring had worn too thin through years of hard work to tolerate any more straightening; mine also needed repair. It was not only the rings that needed repair. We had traveled a rough road, and it was time to re-evaluate who we were together, and to renew our commitment to love and be loved. Our new wedding rings were simpler, also much wider and stronger, appropriate for our resolve to walk on together in however many years we were granted.

 We have now passed the fifty-year mark of our marriage. It came in the middle of the first pandemic year and right after major cancer surgery for me. Tough times? Yes, indeed. Good times? Absolutely.  

Birthday ring, May 24, 2021

Photo of my hand, next to an aloe vera plant. Focus is on the silver ring on my right hand.

            Although it was a so-called special birthday, the number being somehow significant, I hadn’t expected anything particular. We had had no celebratory parties in the pandemic years. It was enough to have an occasional lovely dinner for two in our house or in the backyard, grateful for our health and for being together. As for gifts? We have what we need, really. Why add more stuff?

 So the ring was a total surprise, yet the longer I wear it, the more meaningful it becomes. It’s silver, not gold, a softer metal, easier to shape I’m told, and comfortable on my arthritic hands. It was made by a local silversmith, who creates jewelry in her spare time. In the years since my husband took up the hobby of making chain maille jewelry, we have learned to appreciate the work and community of local artisans. It is an honor for me to wear this ring.  

In the midst of recent “tough times,” it matters more than ever that commitment has lasted, that the circle of love is there. I’ve heard love defined as an act of the will as much as a feeling; a policy decision as well as a relationship. I agree.  

Love is an act of the will, a policy decision, a long commitment in the same direction.

The story of five rings has an ordinary plot—first dates, engagement, marriage, jobs, children, grandchildren, retirement. Its moments of joy and glory, like those at the Olympics, are made possible through hard work and self-discipline, evident in thousands of ordinary small actions. It’s a story that has been told in some form or another in millions of families, I am sure. Yet every story matters to the ones who live it.

Happy Valentine’s Day to my friend and lover of almost 52 years!

First photo is of a fancy heart-shaped box of chocolates; second photo is of a Valentine's Day bouquet with tiny white mums, green-centered red daisies and green mums plus sparkly red hearts.

Love is known best in the midst of loving, not in the fear of what might be. Strength is found in the doing and recognized later in the remembering.   

The Privilege of Paying Taxes

On By ednafroeseIn Choices, Gratitude, politics, taxesLeave a comment
Photo of bridge with dramatic span, and cars crossing the bridge. Mountains in the background.

            He was a former refugee, having arrived in Canada after years in a refugee camp. Now he, with his family, was settled in Regina, speaking English with increasing confidence, earning money at a steady job, and planning to begin his own business in the future. I heard him interviewed on CBC Radio’s Morning Edition about two years ago, and remember still the joy and pride in his voice as he expressed gratitude for being welcomed in Canada and assisted by government agencies. He said—and his words startled me—“I can pay taxes now. That makes me feel good.”

            “I can pay taxes.” When do we ever hear that, especially with such a lilt of happiness?

            It helps to imagine probable circumstances. Whether it was civil war or drug lords or religious fanaticism that made life untenable, he had fled, leaving behind his home, his culture, his extended family, his small business, his connections, his religious community, his language, and his ability to earn money. I am myself a daughter of refugees who came to Canada in the 1920s. I have heard stories of hardships, fear, and loss before, yet I was still moved to hear his gratitude for safety and new opportunities.  

            What makes such a transition from destitution to hope possible? That is worth thinking about.  

            These days we’re hearing about unfathomable losses in the wake of flooding and mud slides, overwhelmed water treatment plants, bridges washed out, farms destroyed. For sure, there are many kind people helping in small and big ways, sharing their homes, bringing in feed for the cattle, driving their boats through the streets to rescue the stranded. However, what will make eventual recovery possible is massive funding and other assistance from governments. Military personnel have come in to help with rescues and begin reconstruction. What individuals cannot do alone can be done by organizations created to take care of the needs of the many. And guess what? Those organizations have been established by governments at various levels and are funded by tax money, of one sort or another, as well as generous personal or corporate giving.

            Just when human beings understood that cooperation would improve survival rates, I’m not sure. As far back as we have any evidence, humans have lived in community and have shared resources and skills and energy. Hundreds of years before unions and insurance companies, craft guilds were formed to establish prices for goods, to look after the widows and children of craftsmen who died, and to set standards of excellence. Someone had to administer the funds and someone else had to make sure that there was no corruption. That was in the days when governments (monarchs, actually) funded their appropriation wars with the “spoils of war,” and rewarded their chief warriors with expropriated land and captured women. Feudal landowners took their share of the crops and in exchange made sure that their knights protected the serfs from marauding bands. It was a quid pro quo society where might made right.

            We need not go into the long history of democracy during which, bit by bit, one law after another, some nation states gradually moved toward a society in which laws gained ascendency over the whims of monarchs, and more people got a say in what those laws regulated. Experience over centuries made it clear that a “free” market functions best where ownership of property is enshrined in law, and contracts made can be enforced without resorting to private armies and intimidation. And bit by bit, regulated taxes replaced government seizure of resources as a revenue base.

            Are current democratic governments without fault? Absolutely not. Any human institution on the face of the earth is imperfect and, as we would say today, vulnerable to hacking. Nevertheless, without government institutions (which we hold accountable in every election and through various oversight bodies), we would have no social safety nets, no universal health care system (for all its flaws), no regulated pension plans, no national or provincial parks. Our roads and bridges and railway lines and electrical systems and water treatment plants are either built by government or regulated by government.

photo of bridge taken from within a car traveling on it.
Photo of Parks Canada sign announcing the entrance to Pacific Rim National Park.

            So by all means, let’s pay our taxes. Go ahead and examine tax laws. Ask questions of your representatives in your provincial legislature and in the federal parliament. Check out what your local city council members or your reeves of rural municipalities are doing. No one is above temptation, and it’s often too easy to waste public funds. Those who manage public purses should be accountable to the people on whose behalf they are managing those purses. On the other hand, without public money to begin with, they can do no good for us all.

Let’s pay our taxes cheerfully.

            Let’s pay our taxes and do so cheerfully and willingly. We might disagree among ourselves about what exactly should be managed by the private sector and what should be controlled by public institutions. That will always be an ongoing discussion, and indeed, should be an ongoing discussion.

            However, can we please put an end to the popular assumption that paying taxes is a great evil to be avoided at all costs, including our personal integrity? What might happen to our public discourse if we could actually change attitudes here? What if every child heard their parents say with gratitude, “we can pay taxes!” For the alternative is not being able to earn an adequate living.

            Actually, there is yet another alternative, and it’s the one that has left so many people suspicious and bitter. That’s earning enough money to pay an accountant to find enough loopholes and tax shelters (as if taxes are a terrible storm that would destroy everything) to avoid paying taxes and thus living off the “largesse” of those who have fewer options. The truth is that no matter how much money you earn, or how hard you work to earn it, you can earn it because the laws of the land, enforced by governments, have made it possible, safely and predictably, to exchange property and goods and services for a profit.

            I wish that I knew the name of the refugee whom I heard years ago exulting over the privilege of paying taxes. I would like to thank him for his practical perspective and his gratitude for all that he had received. May his business prosper and may his children receive many opportunities to follow their father’s model of graciousness.

What We Can Choose – Part Two

On By ednafroeseIn Choices, Conversation, friendship, identity, reflection, spirituality2 Comments
Photo of a trail leading to a rickety wooden bridge over a creek in the forest.

            This reflection will not be obvious. It considers not the what, but the how and the why and the what happens next. Those are often not obvious at all, partly because our culture has cast the language of choice in the individual mode. I am convinced that that can be misleading. There is no such thing as an entirely “personal” choice.

Shelves of packages of candies, taken in a London Drugs store.

Let’s start with the trivial: which candy I choose to spend my dimes on (oops, not dimes—dollars!) can hardly matter in the grand scheme of human endeavour. The world seems indifferent to such a choice, even to whether I choose candy at all or potato chips (much more likely – I dislike candy). Yet as soon as we back away from a single bag of candy, the scene changes.

Store owners stock only those candies that sell; the more often I and others opt for lemon drops, the more likely it is that stores will stock them. That then determines what factories produce, and if making lemon drops has deleterious effects on the health of factory workers, then my utterly trivial choice matters. The more candy I eat, the more likely it is that the sugar overdose will affect my health, beginning with my teeth. My health, as it happens, is important to more people than just me.

I could also talk about what I choose to do with the now empty wrapper. Does it end up in the ditch at the roadside? or on the sidewalk beside a park? Out of what was that wrapper made? What was its overall cost?  

Even in the most trivial choices, I am in the midst of a whole web of connections with other human beings.

Shelves of different breakfast cereals, also taken in London Drugs.

Consider another seemingly simple choice: what shall I have for breakfast? Someday, archaeologists will draw conclusions about our culture based on packaging debris that survives beneath the rubble of centuries. Be it Frosted Flakes, or granola, or bacon and eggs, or smoothies with startling ingredients, every selection affects which business grows and which does not, which animals and plants are grown and which are not, which divisions of our health care institutions are overworked and which are not, which tracts of land are cared for adequately and which are not (see Michael Pollen’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma).

 The how and why of all our small choices together reveal our tastes, our values, even the causes for which we’ll be prepared to march in the streets. All of those choices have been created in the crucible of our multiple contexts, some of which have been given (perhaps most) and some of which we have chosen, each choice determining to some degree what follows.

Some choices are made without thought, the variables having been sorted out long ago: I need no conscious decision to walk by the candy store without pausing; I will, however, linger by the camping supply store and linger even longer by the book store window.

 Other choices are far more difficult. Why did I leave one church and eventually settle on a different one? Indeed, why have I chosen to continue to identify myself as Christian? (The initial identification as such was hardly a genuine choice, not where I grew up.) To answer those questions would require long stories, which call for a different venue than this blog.

The point I want to make here is that the choice was not personal except in the sense that I was the one who had to make it. In the end, my choice to leave a church I’d been part of for decades was the result of the influence of people (and some books) who invited me into different perspectives and other people who made it increasingly difficult to remain. No doubt my choice likewise affected others. Just how many or how much, I don’t know beyond the fact that some friendships ended.  

 Since we cannot know all the intricate ways in which our smallest choices might affect so many other people, the least we can do is to remain aware that our choices are both personal and not personal. That is, we do have to choose, many, many times a day even; I am the person whose foot pushes down on the brake or the accelerator—no one else does that for me. At the same time, every choice I make is not only the result of all the overlapping circumstances of my life but will then also affect later choices of mine and of others. Every effect becomes itself a cause.

 In our current climate of anxiety over the pandemic and dire political and climatic circumstances, perhaps two principles could and should be kept in mind. One is that sooner or later our choices (even the trivial ones) will enter the territory of values; they will become moral choices. As C.S. Lewis once insisted, all of our decisions, both trivial and momentous, will make us more of a certain kind of person, and who we become matters a great deal.

“I’ve been considering the phrase ‘all my relations for some time now. . . . It points to the truth that we are all related, that we are all connected, that we all belong to each other. . . . ALL my relations. That means every person, just as it means every rock, mineral, blade of grass, and creature. We live because everything else does.”

Richard Wagamese

 The other principle is connected to the previous one: the well-being of others should come first. That is such a huge statement that it has already filled libraries with books as philosophers and theologians and thinkers of all kinds have struggled to work out the relationship between our instinctive—and necessary—care for ourselves and our equally necessary care for others.

If we look out only for Number One, the society around us is likely to become, or least seem, more hostile. When unchecked selfishness is pursued in high office, the entire country becomes a less liveable place. Jesus once said, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” and also “those who would save their own souls must first give them away.” Other religions base their rules of conduct on the same principle, albeit worded in slightly different ways.

 If religious reasoning is not your preference, then scientific analysis will lead you to a similar conclusion. It turns out that human infants do not thrive without love (nor, for that matter, do adults), and societies in which altruistic behaviour is encouraged offer better and more satisfying living conditions.

Robert Frost’s famous poem “Two ways diverged in a yellow wood” concludes with “I took the one less travelled by / and that has made all the difference.” Generations of school children absorbed the lesson that we should be brave individuals and choose to be non-conformists. I would argue that had the narrator chosen the more travelled road, it would still have made all the difference. Choices do that.

A mountain trail, but it's narrow and half over-grown. Only a small sign beside it reassures the hiker that this is an actual trail through the forest.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

Robert Frost

What We Can Choose – an exercise in the obvious

On By ednafroeseIn Choices, Conversation, gifts, Gratitude, identity, politics, possibility, spirituality, StoriesLeave a comment

        

Landscape with ocean and mountains very much in the background. In the foreground is a high bluff with dry grasses, one lone small crooked tree and a wooden fence that angles from the bottom left-hand corner to the middle of the right hand. The photo is a combination of wide vistas and a fence that draws a clear boundary between dried-up lawn and wild grasses.

To begin at the beginning—and I said this would be obvious—we did not choose to be born. Or to be born as a human being. However you view the world that you know, whatever framework of meaning you might use to contemplate your momentous birth, you were most definitely not the one who decided that you would be a human and not a tadpole or a poodle or a grizzly bear.

It follows that you also did not decide what hormones would be dominant in the microscopic wiggly something that was your first shape. So one of the first pieces of your identity, which usually determines the kind of name you get, was not your choice. Okay, changing names is an option; even changing gender is now possible. What is not possible to change is what you came into the world with in the first place.

 Ditto for your parents and your surroundings. You did not choose the year of your birth or the location. You did not choose the economic situation of your mother (or her relationship to your father), the color of your skin, your genetic make-up, your biological relatives, your first language, the culture in which you practiced that language, your first notions of spirituality. None of those momentous determiners out of which come so much of what makes you who you are were chosen by you. Not one.  

 So we cannot logically claim credit for any of those momentous determiners of our identity. Nor can we blame ourselves or anyone else, for what was not ever chosen, by us or them.  

 Am I belabouring the obvious here? Yes, I am. Because too many discussions—in our public squares, in our courts, in our governments, in our living rooms—ignore the obvious. Should a child born in a refugee camp or in city slums be despised for being poor? No. She did not choose poverty. Should the child with millions in her bank account before she can count to ten be respected for that very fact? No. She did not choose it or earn it. Should the dark-skinned individual be blamed for her skin? Or be made into a curiosity because of her kinky hair? No, absolutely not.  

 Let me be specific and personal. I do not deserve praise or blame for being a woman or being light-skinned or even for being born into a family and culture that valued hard work and education. Whatever advantages were granted to me simply because of where and when I was born were indeed mine to use or not to use, but I need to remember two facts. One is that not everyone comes into the world with similar choices available; two is that I actually had considerably less choice in many ways than I once imagined. I could not, for example, as a teenager in a small Mennonite town, have chosen to become Muslim—that was not within the range of possibility for me until I was in my thirties or forties probably, once I had actually met Muslims and learned something about Islam.

 We tend to treat religion and sometimes politics as well as if those stances can be freely chosen from a wide spectrum of offerings. Not so. It would, for example, have been actually impossible for someone living in Shakespeare’s time to become an atheist. The very concept had not yet taken shape. One could be Catholic or Protestant—that choice had become available, probably within Shakespeare’s living memory. Mostly, though, one was what one had been born to.  

 To imagine that it is readily possible to choose from many religions is a modern idea not often sufficiently qualified by the fact that our initial worldview, through which we view all subsequent options, is given to us before we are old enough to choose anything. I would argue that “choosing” our political views is equally contingent upon the culture in which we have first learned to think politically and the political surroundings to which we have been subsequently exposed. Surely that fact should temper any impulses we might have to label the “other” party as the enemy or to see ourselves as supremely righteous and clever for belonging to “our” party. Not that changing a political stance is impossible, nor that converting to another faith is impossible. Clearly not. As Viktor Frankl wrote, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.” Nevertheless, an acknowledgement of contingencies that shape habitual responses could help to defuse tense conversations.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.

Victor Frankl

 Popular metaphors regarding the philosophically fraught business of choosing include the well-used image of “playing the hand that we were dealt.” When playing poker or bridge or even solitaire, our ability to choose is severely limited, not only by the cards that are actually in our hand for each round of play but also by the rules of the game. Moreover, how we play our cards will depend on who else is sitting around the table (are they highly competitive, poor losers, cheaters, family members, strangers?) and what the stakes might be (are we playing for peanuts, or laughs, or hundred dollar bills?).

 Theoretical speculation and playful metaphors aside, may I ask as politely as I can, what is going on in the current intensity of political and racial language, all amid an insistence on “freedom of choice”? As if everyone has available all manner of choices.  

Let me try to illustrate: it is highly unlikely that I will choose my response to a police officer on my front step from an infinite list of options because the very fact that I have a front step on which the officer can stand already rules out quite a few possibilities, such as an immediate fear of eviction. The additional fact that it is highly likely the officer will have the same color of skin as I do rules out more possibilities. I will still probably feel real fear, but it will be fear that someone I love has been hurt in an accident, not fear that I’m about to be arrested for something I may or may not have done. In other words, I enter a particular event out of my own context, shaped by various givens, and by the experiences I have lived through before that moment, only some of which I could have chosen.   

  I belong to the Boomer generation; that means that my economic opportunities will have been different than those of my parents and different again from those of my children, and of my grandchildren. My parents were immigrants, so it’s no surprise that I learned the virtues of hard work and education. Then again, my parents were Mennonite and I was a girl, which means that the value of hard work applied but the value of education would have been tempered by certain assumptions about women’s place in the world. Could I have, as a teen, decided I was going to be Christian missionary? Yes, definitely. That option was endorsed by pretty well everyone I knew. Could I have decided to become a politician and hope to become premier of the province? Not in my wildest dreams. Could such options have opened up for me later in my adult years? Possibly, but with great difficulty.

 Buried beneath the obvious limits set by culture and religion and language and economic opportunity is the shaping of the individual personality which unfolds in a mysterious symbiotic process of givens and choices, each of which exercises influence on future choices and even on the terms in which memories are recalled. Psychologists have studied these variables since psychology became a recognized science. Long before that, though, parents have agonized over causes and effects ever since Adam and Eve somehow ended up with a devout and biddable shepherd and a jealous gardener turned murderer.

In other words, we do all have choices to make, important choices, which we make within a range of possibilities, choices for which we are responsible. I’m not arguing for complete determinism, just pointing out the inevitable limits of free will – limits that should curb our judgmental impulses and intemperate rhetoric.

Photo of forest on Vancouver Island but the trees are low except for one scrubby evergreen bent by prevailing winds to a 45 degree angle. In lower right hand corner is a path.

The good news, as I see it, is that if we choose to, we can expand our range of possibilities. While it’s true that we were all gifted with the worldview through which we first tried to make sense of who we were, we can choose to widen that worldview, just by letting ourselves hear other stories. I can dismiss as nonsense your belief that houses should be always immaculate, for instance, or I can ask to hear your story about how that belief came to be yours. In the process of telling and listening, both of us could adjust our perspectives.

  I admit that our capacity to absorb new information is limited. It is not possible to know everything and to hear everyone’s story with sympathetic mind. The first action is limited by the sheer abundance of stuff to know, and the second is limited by one’s emotional and imaginative capacity, which has not been developed equally in all children. Nevertheless, each story I listen to with as open a mind as I can manage will exercise my imaginative faculties and enlarge my perspective.

 Then perhaps I can learn to defer judgment or animosity until I have heard more of the story. That’s a choice that becomes ever more available as I practice it.     

To be continued.  . . . .      

Later afternoon sun on the ocean in the background. Foreground is the author staring through the trees at the ocean, leaning against a bench.