One Small Misery

— Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Director

While my friend Mike stood at the counter to order his coffee last week, I sat at our table and looked out the window. From where I sat, City Hall took up the view.

Ours is hardly a city by many counts. Its center is two streets, State and Main. It’s home to only 8,000 people.  In that context, this particular city hall makes an impression.  It’s got its own listing in Archipedia, describing its “central triple-arched entrance carrying twin pedimented pavilions that flank a tall central Italian clock tower with corbels and arcaded belfry.”  

There's a 150-seat chamber theater in this city hall, with a 40-year-old acting company in residence.  There’s a youth center and a senior center in the building.  Like most city halls, people also get married there, register their dogs there, and pay their taxes there.  Its sweeping front steps are a favorite resting spot for all walks of people.  One night during the pandemic shutdown, my partner and I met our nephews there for a picnic.  When it started to rain, we just scooted up a few steps and kept visiting under that “triple arched entrance.”

Many of us here have a memories like that. City Hall grounds us in home.

While Mike ordered coffee and I stared out the window, I thought of the millions of people who have seen beloved buildings like this one bombed to rubble, entombing everyone inside. I imagined that clock tower coming down, the arches collapsing, trapping the guy who’d just paid his water bill, the clerks, the actors, the kid playing drums at the youth center, the old men playing chess down the hall.

Almost every day, these days, this sort of thought interrupts me.  I poke at the orange coals in the wood stove and think of homes set on fire by war and invasion, smoking roof beams too hot to search through for survivors.

I stand in the stream of my morning shower and imagine no water at all.   I lock the front door at night before I go to bed and imagine armed men swarming our front porch. As I flick the lock I think, what good would it do?

It's not fear that drives my imagination though; it’s seeing, it’s feeling, it’s not looking away.

My heart breaks at least once a day. I ache for the world. I ache for suffering and loss in my own circles. My chest is tight with tears and grief.

But I’ve learned to not be afraid of grief. It can’t harm me and so I can keep not turning away.  And because I’m not turning away, because I am seeing the misery, I can, as theologian and physician Albert Schweitzer is reported to have said, “do something to bring some small portion of misery to an end.”  

Tristan Harris, a co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, echoes those words when he says, “We can’t just sit in the problem; we have to ask on a daily basis, what would it take for this to go well, and how can my actions today be part of that?”  

Harris  says each answer to that question offers a vision of hope.

When Mike came back to the table with his coffee, I told him what I’d been thinking about City Hall. He looked across the street for a few seconds, sat down, took a breath, and nodded.  I don’t remember what we said then. I remember the moment as solemn. 

And then we got busy, Mike and I, asking ourselves what we could do in the circle we share to bring some portion of the misery in it to an end. We asked ourselves what it would mean for things to go well.   We asked how our actions could play a part. We came up with good answers, plans, and commitments.

As we talked, my coffee grew cold and my heart got light.  What I was feeling was hope. Hope grew from sitting in the light of that kind, committed and thoughtful man; and hope grew from the two of us getting busy.

My friend Danielle said once to me, “everything that happens, happens everywhere.” I think about that a lot.  I don’t understand, exactly, what it means.  It may mean that all life is connected, that my imaginings are really thin echoes of others’ experiences. 

It also may mean that when I do something to bring some small portion of misery, any misery, to an end, I join a collective, insistent driving toward peace.