As the days dwindle down...

 We're down to the last few days of 2020. It's been a strange year. The good news is it won't take a lot to create major improvements next year compared to this one almost past. A significant one will occur on January 20, but you knew that. Meanwhile, we're trying to sort out whether and how to balance the philosophy that notes that "less bad is not the same as good," with a perspective that reminds us "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."

a hazy shade of Winter bringing a new dawn

Photo by J. Harrington

As we were driving home from finishing a couple of errands, a song from our past, more than a little fitting for this time of year and our recent weather, popped up on our Jeep's playlist. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel started singing "A Hazy Shade of Winter" as we pulled onto Northbound I-35. The opening lines complemented, almost perfectly, the mood and state of mind we felt as we headed home.

Time, time, time
See what’s become of me
While I looked around for my possibilities
I was so hard to please
But look around
Leaves are brown
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter

If you're not familiar with the song, you can listen to Simon and Garfunkel here and scan the rest of the lyrics here. All in all, we can't, at least at the (pensive) moment, think of a better way to start to really close out 2020. In a few months we will again be enjoying a Springtime with new growth and fresh starts in abundance. I intend to leave behind in the old year my tendency to be so hard to please. I'm learning that it gets in the way of enjoying what can be enjoyed and makes me too much like someone I've grown to despise over the past four years.

Of History and Hope

By Miller Williams

We have memorized America,

how it was born and who we have been and where.

In ceremonies and silence we say the words,

telling the stories, singing the old songs.

We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.

The great and all the anonymous dead are there.

We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.

The rich taste of it is on our tongues.

But where are we going to be, and why, and who?

The disenfranchised dead want to know.

We mean to be the people we meant to be,

to keep on going where we meant to go.

But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how

except in the minds of those who will call it Now?

The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?

With waving hands—oh, rarely in a row—

and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.

Who were many people coming together

cannot become one people falling apart.

Who dreamed for every child an even chance

cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.

Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head

cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.

Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child

cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.

We know what we have done and what we have said,

and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,

believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become—

just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.

All this in the hands of children, eyes already set

on a land we never can visit—it isn’t there yet—

but looking through their eyes, we can see

what our long gift to them may come to be.

If we can truly remember, they will not forget.

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