It’s a beautiful essay, an inspiration, I suppose. And a corrective. Sorry for continuing to bang on this, but so much of the discourse from “inspirational” figures is centered on making a huge impact and changing the world. Any gift or talent you have, they say, is wasted if you don’t put yourself out there.
Now, of course, big action and boldness is a part of serving God and others. Of course. But in the insistence that the only natural or even correct way of living this is out must be to go big and bold and set the world on fire in a framework enabled by mass communication and mobility, the fundamental way we are all called to live – before anything else – is either forgotten or worse, demeaned as cowardice.
It shouldn’t be.
I filled in the expected details and sent the obituary to the newspaper, but I knew it wasn’t right. It captured nothing of the life he lived. What I returned to in the days after he passed, as the ladies from church covered the table in casseroles and Grandma slept in a bed alone for the first time since she was 19, was the sheer audacity of a quiet life…
…
When the notable figures of our day pass away, they wind up on our screens, short clips documenting their achievements, talking heads discussing their influence. The quiet lives, though, pass on soundlessly in the background. And yet those are the lives in our skin, guiding us from breakfast to bed. They’re the lives that have made us, that keep the world turning.
They’re taking out the trash before we notice and walking up the road to see if the mail’s come. They’re showing us how to lay out the biscuit dough at just the right thickness. They took our sons up on the tractor on spring afternoons. They helped the neighbor with the busted sink. They jumped in the river to pull an 18-month-old out. They caught the man who’d been pinned by the forklift, his back broken, and held him as he died. They slipped money into their nephew’s pocket when he hadn’t a penny to his name but was too ashamed to admit it. They did the laundry. They swept the floor. They played in the yard like a kid. They ate a pack of saltines and climbed into bed night after night until there were no more nights, only all the people left behind who’d carry on living because making a little life on a piece of land off Fruitland Road is about the holiest thing we can think of.
All around us are these lives — heads down and arms open — that ignore the siren call of flashy American individualism, of bright lights and center stage. I’m fine right here is the response from the edge of the room, and that contentment is downright subversive. How could you want only that? the world demands. There’s more to have, always more. ..
…“You done good,” I said because that’s how he would’ve said it, but also because that’s how I meant it. He’d done so much good, even if it couldn’t be listed on official records or captured in the stat sheet of an obituary. The good of his life was ever-rippling water, quiet and steady, and my boys and I would long be swept up in it.
Thank you for this. It resonates on so many levels. Even for this farm raised Midwesterner. Blessings
Thank you for posting this. I’ve been following you for years. Your writings always speak to my heart in simple language.
A Southern version of St. Therese’s Little Way. Perfect.
Beautiful.