People. They're not all terrible.
Well, well, well. Here we are. That happened fast, didn’t it. Everything, I mean. At once. A lot that felt, suddenly, like we were a toddler at a surf beach being surprised by a wave coming in from behind while we were busy watching a seagull.
It’s been a big year. It’s been a big year and it’s not even half way through it yet. There have been moments, too, in this year, that have left us shocked at ourselves, shocked at the way things turn out sometimes, when the wave of something big swallows you up from behind. It is easy, when the wave comes, to think that there is nothing but the wave. That the wave is the whole story and there was nothing before or after or during it that happened at all. It is easy to think that all of the terrible things that are swallowing you up are, in fact, a little bit who you are.
You are not the terrible things. Well actually you might be. I don’t know you. Some of you are. If you have a Cabinet position, perhaps email me and we’ll sort it out. But look, the point is: we live in a society. Sometimes that’s confusing or confronting because it involves living alongside people who do or say despicable things but most of the time it’s the reason life is lovely. Public Service Announcement: people are not always the worst.
There is a nice man who lives near me who goes out every morning and gets his newspaper. The person who delivers it at 5am piffs it unceremoniously out the window of a moving car and it often thwacks itself in between two branches of a tree in front of the nice man’s house. The nice man comes out and gets his paper out of the tree as though he is picking an apple every morning and he shuffles back inside. The other morning, I saw him wander out, notice a large crow in the branches of the tree near the newspaper, see that he may disturb the crow, bow to it ever so slightly, wait to see how it felt about things, and then gently remove the paper under the watchful eye of the crow. That man, whatever else he might have done in life, bowed reverently at a crow.
Those people who put shallow bowls out for animals in the summertime are not terrible.
The person who talks the shy kid out from under the table is a wonder to behold.
The person who writes the best notes, the best text messages, the best letters: cling on to that person.
The person who has a skill you can watch and the watching of the skill is itself a meditative experience? What a joy that is. I’ve said this before but my grandfather could peel fruit in one long, thin, even snake that he could sit on the table next to the nude fruit so that it looked like the fruit had just stepped out of the shower and was about to get dressed into its skin again. Every time I see someone peel an apple I think: pssht. Miss you gramps.
Ever seen two old people dance? Like, a proper dance with steps? There’s something about the elegance of the steps and the slightly jaunty fragility of the movement that makes it feel like you’re watching history and poetry at once.
Another thing that’s lovely about society - about all of us being together in the world - is that you can be walking through a park, for instance (I know, I know) and you can be chatting to the person you’re there with, and another person can be chatting to who they’re there with, and both of you can keep chatting but you can both go: nod. Four different lives, two different conversations, passing each other, engaging however briefly, and moving on.
People calling out to each other from balconies, strangers singing songs together, doing a funny accent to lighten a moment in a video in a way that makes everybody suddenly empathise. People writing perfectly told stories or intelligent explanations of things you never realised you had even misunderstood. The person who listens like nobody you know. Your favourite person, too. That person.
Public Service Announcement: we aren’t what’s happening to us. We’re the man talking to the crow in the newspaper tree, bowing slightly, regardless of whatever news is about to greet him on the front page.
This was originally published in The Big Issue, which is really bending over backwards for its vendors at the moment. Go and check them out. They’re wonderful.