stories of people.

Meet me where I am. I spent the evening wandering, walking further than my tired feet wanted to go. I came home and put on a long, flowy skirt, because the wind was blowing and it was warm and blooming and spring. And I walked some more.

I had chip-dinner, which is a real and valid thing. It involves walking to the corner store and buying a bag of chips, fully knowing that I will eat most or all of it for dinner tonight. I walked in the door and felt guilty that my splurge-y, single lady dinner wasn’t vegetables! or fruit! or whole grains! I eat all those things all the time and sometimes, sometimes I need chip-dinner.

All of the stories in my head tonight are stories of guilt. I’m not sure why. They are stories of people I saw on the street today, but they are cut through with my own emotion. Those people have stories that exist in the world, but I only know them through the lens of me.

The man this morning, clearly mentally ill, who kept wandering off the sidewalk and into traffic. The man with the small grocery cart, sitting on a bench, a weathered white beard down to his belt, smoking a stub of a cigarette. The other man who dropped his cigarette and picked it up, put it right back in his mouth. The man in the wheelchair, still and stark, head hanging low. The woman on the bicycle and the car that honked at her even though she had the right of way. That other woman who left the doctor’s office after me, and I held the door for her. She put her sunglasses on as she walked through. I see these people in the context of suffering, brokenness, loss. Why?

I have tried for a full hour to write something simple and easy. A golden nugget of wisdom. I keep trying to write myself there, but instead I seem only able to write myself deeper into the ache of the world and my own guilt over it. I see everyone in the light of my having so much, so much more than so many people.

So maybe the lesson of my day, the wandering, the beautiful spring wind, the suffering people, is to just sit with it. The world can be beautiful and full of suffering. My life can be good but, like any life, tenuous. I can open my mind to that.