MidWeek Mini: Other Lives

Henry and I have been taking more frequent walks over the past week or so. To the library or around the streets and blocks to the south of us, deeper into town. One night I smelled somebody's spaghetti and meatballs from a kitchen window. Sometimes I see an arrival home from work, hear the car radio shut off as a commute ends. Yesterday a couple with white hair was sitting on a porch swing as I walked by. On the weekends, lots of people mow lawns and work on cars.

In every home I pass, men and women and children are carving out a life, chipping away what's unimportant and polishing the things that matter most to them. All I see is a front yard, a porch or garden or clothesline, a car in the driveway. It's just the threshold of a whole world.

Somehow neighbors have a different effect on me than my friends and acquaintances. With people I know, there's always a level of comparison. But as I walk through my town, instead of feeling like I have to measure up - though some houses I pass put my own shaggy gardens and peeling paint to shame - I feel freed from comparison. Seeing real houses where real other people really live and eat and sleep and quarrel and laugh and make plans and pay bills, draws me into the collective story that we all share. It doesn't matter if the house is shabby or immaculately groomed. It's the center of somebody's world, the place where somebody wakes up and starts each new day, the place where dreams are born.

By the time I push the stroller back into the driveway, I think of my own life a little differently. When the sun rises into my bedroom window, it's rising in hundreds of others too. When I'm cooking dinner, dozens of other ovens are also heating up. The weeds in my garden are spreading seeds across the neighborhood, making weeding work for gardeners blocks away. The story of my days is just one among a million stories, all crossing one another in tiny intersections that I may never see.

Perhaps this is obvious for you. But sometimes I get embarrassingly wrapped up in my own life. Thankfully, all it takes to gain a little perspective is a walk across town.