Funny thing has been happening recently in the library. We have a routine, my son and I, he gets to pick three books (we almost always leave with four). Two of them are construction and one of them is “something different.” In essence, he rereads several of the digger books he has already checked out—because there are only so many books about excavators, dump trucks, and front loaders in the children’s juvenile section.
Then that other book is the wild card where we learn something new. It’s a good rhythm. Speaking of rhythm, I have been checking out fiction again for myself. I’m always reading. Always. But I noticed that I was reading to learn (love it) and not making space for the frivolousness of reading for joy (I didn’t say this was Earth shattering).
I texted my sister-in-law for book recommendations (which she exceeds at) and here is the interesting thing that has been happening, every time I went to go get a book off the list another book would jump off the shelf, like Liz Bolte Taylor’s Stoke of Insight or Glennon Doyle’s Untamed.
Then when I was looking for Once There Were Wolves, I saw a book I hadn’t seen for a decade: This I Believe. I was standing there holding my son’s hand and I could feel the cold floor and the metallic smell of the hallways where I taught at Cheltenham High School. I remembered that I would hand out this assignment in the Spring, the season I am typing in now, and I would get back the most wonderful stories.
The thing that was amazing about this assignment, for me, was that it wasn’t a list or a litany. It’s about one thing that is emblematic of all things like:
I believe that everyone deserves flowers on their grave.
The simplest way to say it is this: I believe in my mother.
I believe in Sunday BBQ.
I believe in black coffee.
I believe..and then the short essays go on from there.
It’s easy to state a belief, or throw it, or use it as a blanket over everything. It is another thing to look at what is in your daily life, in your small details, in your unseen that wraps itself around everything that you would live or die for.
That’s another thing—we often say what we would die for. But what would we live for? What are we willing to re-pattern for? What belief is so integral that we would live for it and leave space in the Universe for others to get a chance to do the same?
For me, I believe in leaving space for the miraculous in the mundane.
How about you?
Learn more about This I Believe here.