Limits and minivans

It’s been a hardscrabble week, in terms of plunking out pieces to a difficult essay. I’m writing about a rather weird, barren stretch in my journey. My main idea involves showing how over a few years I interacted with a homeless family. And, as usual for me, the writing brings up what I learned through failure.

Even setting it out as “my interactions with a homeless family” hints at problems in me. I journaled back then about meeting this homeless couple with their two kids. I was so proud. I planned to take on their burdens, to conquer poverty and perversion in my own little sphere. It really gets me reading the ways I described—not just with this couple but with my husband, kids, relatives, and so on—my belief that I could “hold up those God has put beside me.” My journal is replete with these statements; here’s one regarding my hubby: “I can be Tim’s foundation and safety belt system, if I’m plugged in to the right power source.”

I guess I’m mostly amused. Maybe each of us this side of forty (nearing that 50 mark and looking at becoming compost) gets a fuller picture of the idealism from their 30s and before and smiles. Not that anything’s wrong with idealism, with longing to set things right. I wouldn’t want to give the impression I’ve given up.

No. In fact, I think I’m seeing now that my blind spots then included the thought I wouldn’t or shouldn’t have to expend much energy righting the world’s wrongs, once I set up the system that would put everything on track. I phased through various possibilities in hopes each one might be THE method for me: prayer, my writing, political activism, to name a few. Surely I would hit on something wonderful to make things on earth better, then I’d receive accolades and retire to a cabin along the river in the sun.

My systems always, sadly, involved looking at others who weren’t part of my system and who might look down their noses at my methods, and seeing the flaws in their methods, the limits in their plans. I was usually to some degree right in my assessments, but I wasn’t fair, because I failed to understand we all face our limitations. We all end up with flaws on our canvasses. I sorely lacked grace.

Here’s an example. In this draft of my essay I write about a floody morning in 1996 that forced me to exercise on a different route from my normal routine: “A sign warns me off my running path. High Water. I have to jog home through neighborhoods, past businesswomen swearing softly over coffee thermoses while herding backpack-laden children into minivans.”

Do you get how I despised them? I didn’t even realize. I could see in career women the limitation, the flaw, of separating themselves from their family during the heart of every workweek.

Maybe I was right. So what? A woman driving her minivan past the school to her workplace could be longing just as much as I for rightness, for goodness. She might be wanting to save the world, too.

Even the homeless woman I got to know (yes, even she) set about in her own way to find justice on the planet, to set things right. She spent her energy closer to the vest, because life for her did carry a weight of flaws. But I never found a way to fix everything for her, or even to set my helpful methods on autopilot while I sat home relaxing. I still struggle in thinking about her, long after my limitations have separated me from being her friend. I’ll continue spending energy my life through, I imagine, seeing just how small my role is in setting right the world, in helping such limited souls as me.