What are we doing right now to help people’s living work?…

The living question is, What are we doing right now to help people’s living work?

Living is working everywhere, all the time, but there are degrees. How are people to be told when they have not experienced a different degree? And yet they have. We all have experienced a sunset, a meeting where our contribution was central and important, a time when we mattered.

When was the last time something you did mattered?

Talk about bicycles, proms, first kisses: specifics, triggers.

An off-hand remark that changed everything: trying to get a man to remember specific stories I told him one of mine, and that triggered one in him that was not at all the same, even had a different theme for him. How does the mind work to do that? Yet we both felt we communicated, we were somehow more whole, more alive after the two stories.

Yesterday as I was walking from my home to my office, in my back yard I saw a turtle—its shell was 9 or 10 inches across and flat and armored looking. What a thing to find another form of life you didn’t know existed, living in your same space. Kind of like Rod Serling, a Twilight Zone in which we met.

Yesterday I had hot chocolate with another lawyer, just to get acquainted, and we had a marvelous conversation, very little of it about legal subjects. Animated. About reading books, and children who are not like either of their parents, who are more interested in next weekend’s party despite all the order and life planning advice parents try to give them.

Specifics. Microcosm. Last week…. Yesterday…. Our wedding anniversary….

Then, when they are hooked, reel. Real. Work. Living working.

:- Doug.

Published in: Conversations | on June 23rd, 2009 | No Comments »

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