things I think

Way back over the weekend (which now feels like it was about a month ago), the phrase "brighten the corner where you are" popped into my head. Because I have a lot of random half-remembered cultural/pop-cultural references (in part, because of my demographically-weird family: my maternal grandmother was born in 1897, married in 1917 or thereabouts, and my parents were small children during WWII), I often wind up having to look stuff up that I might have heard years ago and only half remember.

Here's a version of it. It's one of those old "Southern Gospel" songs:



The relevant lines are these:

"Do not wait until some deed of greatness you may do,
Do not wait to shed your light afar;
To the many duties ever near you now be true,
Brighten the corner where you are."

(Though the rest of the song - which is more specifically about guiding people to Jesus, though he is not actually NAMED, merely referred to as The Morning Star - is probably also relevant, I am not good at all at what is called evangelizing. I mean, I guess my life can kind of be an example but I've never been good at inviting people to church unless they explicitly say something like "Hey, does this town have a Disciples church? It's what I grew up in...")

But anyway. When I'm in a "strong" mood, I can go, yes, that's true: all we can do are small things but we can do those small things with great love, and anyway, if everyone made an effort to brighten the corner where they were, there would be an awful lot of bright corners.

But on days that aren't so good - like yesterday, for reasons both hyperlocal and more global - I look at the world and go "no matter how hard I try to brighten my corner, the ugliness of the world keeps encroaching." I mean, you can put up pony blindbag figures and posters of pretty scenes from the National Parks and kind notes from students in your office, but that's not going to totally insulate you from feeling impostor syndrome over a task you feel not-quite-up-to (my agony with the Sci Oly tests) or from being frustrated at a student who is struggling, who doesn't want to put in effort to get better, but who regularly sends you long complaining e-mails and you must figure out a gracious way to fundamentally say "put on your grown-up pants, here is the office you need to go to to fix this, stop complaining at me because I have no power in this situation"

Or, more globally: well, I don't need to talk about what happened in Florida yesterday because people wiser and more-informed than I have already talked about it at length (as well as people more foolish and less-informed than I).

But these days I do often find it hard not to feel considerable despair - yes, I can brighten the corner where I am, but what good can that possibly do? The frustrating thing is that people of goodwill, people whose motives are fundamentally good, can work as hard as they can, and still, one person who has chosen to go over to evil can ruin so many lives - there are now seventeen families that are forever altered, and countless more (the families of the wounded, or even just the kids who witnessed it) that are forever changed.

I dunno. As I've said before (quoting something Luther is alleged to have said) "God help me but I cannot do otherwise" and I will continue to sigh heavily and then choose my words carefully as I write a nicer version of the "put on your grown-up pants" e-mail to a student who isn't taking enough initiative in their life. Or I will continue to listen compassionately to a student who comes in for help, but then also starts talking about some specific problem they have in their life - not to make me feel sorry for them or because they think I can do something to fix it, but because they just need to tell someone about it. Or I will continue to do stuff I don't want to do but that needs to be done and which I am the logical person to do.

But it gets harder and harder to have any faith that what I'm doing is having any fundamental good impact on the world; it's like spitting into the ocean.

I don't know. As I said before: this week has felt monumentally long. It's been like Sisyphus pushing that boulder up the hill. The ONE consolation I have for today? When I get home at the end of the day I don't need to go back out - I can wash my hair and put in the laundry and put my feet up and cook a proper dinner and maybe even knit a little bit.

But yeah, back to a certain feeling of discouragement and impotence about bettering the world.