The Angel of Perspective

Many of these entries are posted from a coffee shop called The Blackbird, which lies right in the heart of downtown Valparaiso, less than a block from the courthouse square. It's a bustling little place, domestic, unpretentious and homey. The tables are always full. It sells baked goods--muffins and scones and cookies and bagels--and of course coffee. Everything from the chicken soup to the cinnamon scones is made on-site. The dishes are washed by hand. All in all, it's quite 9-volt nomadic, a vision of the more local and down-to-earth future that we as a world are slowly drifting toward, as toward a forgotten continent. Ordering coffee? Here it's brewed into pump-thermoses. The customer gets a mug or a carry-cup, and heads over to the thermoses, as if to a town water-pump. Oh, and if one of the thermoses is getting low on coffee, could you maybe let one of the staff know? More Italian. More Hazelnut. More Kona blend. More Blackbird blend. More decaf. Otherwise, well, the staff is too busy to always be checking, so if no one warns them it's getting low, it's likely that, before they brew any fresh, that particular thermos will run completely out.

Well so there I was on Thursday morning last week, when a customer a little ways ahead of me in line ordered coffee. Mug in hand, he pressed at the button on the thermos containing the coffee of his choice--only to find that the thermos was empty. As it happened, he was perfectly cheerful about it. He simply let the cashier know, chose a different flavor, and as he pumped the button on his second choice, said to the customer behind him: "Well, if that's the worst thing that happens to me today, I'll be doing pretty darn good."

So that's the first part of the story. Then this Sunday morning at Sunnyside, when I got up out of bed, it felt unusually cold. Pretty much right away I knew what had to be wrong. I made my way downstairs into the basement in my slippers, cordless in hand. After locating the handy-dandy sticker on the side of the furnace "Emergency service? Call 464-HEAT." I punched up the number on my phone and left a message.

Twenty minutes later I got a call back. The voice was cheerful, phlegmatic, and in retrospect I guess it sounded a little familiar, but it wasn't till the repairman showed up at my door, tool box in hand, that I realized...

It was my fellow Blackbirder, the philosopher of coffee. He recognized me too.

"Hey you go to the Blackbird?" he asked.

"Yeah, and this is like not getting my Kona blend."

"Aw, it's a little worse than that, isn't it"?

I appreciated his sympathy, as well as his sense for ranking the severity of troubles, as well his familiarity as a spirit of cheer, all three of which helped reconcile me to the occasion; which is to say, the minor outrage of a cold Sunday waking and even (eventually) the two hundred dollar repair bill. 

Let's call him the angel of perspective.

The point for the aspiring 9-volt Nomad here is this: say you're presented with a difficulty in your circumstances or with a challenge in your pursuit of plain living: Let's say the garden-mud is all caked to your shoes and you forget and track it into the house. Or say you're at home on a cold day and feeling bulky in your wool sweater and you're eyeing the thermostat and just really wishing you could go against your energy-saving conscience and crank it way the heck up. Or say it's October and you're in the Northern hemisphere and the leaves are falling and your neighbor has a new leaf blower and you want one too, because raking with a rake stinks and who cares about the carbon or the consumption or the noise? In such moments, it helps to picture your own angel of perspective (whoever that may be) and remember what such messengers like to say:

"Heck if that's the worst thing that happens to me today, I'll be doing pretty darned good."

So my furnace went out today and had to be repaired. So what? I could have fallen down the stairs instead and broken my arm. Or I could have argued bitterly with a friend. Or I could have said something stupid to someone I admire, and lost his respect. Or heck my favorite coffee house could have caught fire and burned down. Furthermore, as far as material comfort and convenience goes, the 9-volt angel of perspective encourages me not to forget that I lead a life full of privilege; that the vast majority of the other seven billion human beings on the planet have way less than I do, and the vast majority of human beings in history have lived on far, far less. Even if I don't buy the leaf blower.

Then what happens to these complaints--about furnaces, a little garden-mud on the living room floor, a personal lack of leaf-blowers, etc.? Well, in the bright light of a wider perspective, they tend pretty quickly to melt away. Really they do. 

A coda: this week I intend to keep the Philippines in my prayers, and keep at least a few of the images I've seen of the typhoon and its aftermath in mind, as a sobering force. What's this or that annoyance that I will suffer today, compared to that immense sum of loss? Why not hold my tongue and choose to be content?

HB

Until November 16th!