WHEN YOU'RE WEARY

a little sharing of another sharing

Photo by Benjamin Balázs on Unsplash

I attended a party the other day, and near the end a woman I was talking to said, “I gotta go. I’m tired now.” I said, “I’m tired as soon as I get out of bed!” and we both laughed, but a bit ruefully. A lot of us do feel tired these days, and a lot of us feel like riders on a malevolent carnival ride, being jerked about and occasionally made to feel nauseous. Thank God for the opportunity we have to, as one friend of mine calls it, “go out into the world with our begging baskets.” It never takes much to lift my spirits; the challenge is to get up and go outside toward whatever happens, toward another human being to talk to, say, or simply regard. Toward the display of lipsticks at the drug store, toward the row upon row of photography books at the local library, the poetry books, the children’s books. Take a little walk and you might see see children playing and joyfully shouting, or lines of people waiting for ice cream. I love those ice cream lines because the adults look as happy and expectant as the children. Oh, maybe they’re not jumping up and down and spinning in circles with airplane arms, but they ALMOST are.