moving slow in the snow

 

Getting started slowly this morning. There’s a smattering of snow on the ground in Western Michigan. I am looking forward to the next season here.

I have been realizing how many people I know have spent their entire lives here in Holland. This is their reality even if they have traveled and been educated elsewhere. I’m afraid when this fact combines with the poor education so many people receive the result is a shockingly narrow (and often puritanical) way of seeing life.

It’s helpful to remember this occasionally. I think I have largely conquered my own despair at not being understood by locals. But I have to keep remembering to keep my own passion in check. It is perceived as anxiety or anger more often than I am actually angry or anxious. Mostly I lose patience with people or am stunned at their lack of information and perspective.

I know this sounds insufferable.

I look for ways to treat people  as civilly as I can and when asked to help, be as constructive as I can within the narrow limits of living in a small town, even (unfortunately) a small town with a college.

Having said that, I am pretty happy with my own life.

I have scheduled less hard organ music for the next two weeks so that I can concentrate on learning my part of the organ duet, “Rhapsody” by Naji Hakim. My friend Rhonda Edgington has asked me to learn it and perform it with her on an Advent recital this year. I want to play well since I get fewer and fewer requests like this.

1. Giving a Wife Her Front-Yard Grave, No Matter What – NYTimes.com

Kind of a love story. I liked it.

2. The father of self-help – Salon.com

Dale Carnegie was kind of weirdo. Cool.

3. The Devil You Know: Why Readers Love ‘The Screwtape Letters’ : The New Yorker

I have mixed feelings about C. S. Lewis having read a bunch of his stuff. But I do like The Screwtape Letters.

 

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