Word for today: Trivial At the Physical therapist there are a group of retired people who participate in the wellness program with me, they seem to know each other well and for several of them the 11am grouping is more social than physical wellness. They ask about each other, talk politics, share stories. One of the gentlemen who comes most every time I’m there always brings a new trivia list to try and stump people while they are busy exercising. It’s kind of like a little jog around the park for your brain, the questions are fairly hard- or at least I think so. He swings from sports to politics to geography to entertainment and while I’m better at guessing things than most, he clearly is putting in a lot of time outside of wellness to challenge people. Everyone needs a mission and purpose in life, his seems to be trivia development. Yesterday while I was doing some painful stretching of my calf muscles he come over and asked me a few from his list. I got maybe 2 of three right and suddenly found myself wishing my jeopardy champion friend Marci were there, I was sure she’d have known the last question. (What is it that a cruciverbalist does?) As we were doing the Q&A, I remembered at some point that I was doing something painful a moment ago and suddenly with my brain distracted I’d forgotten to notice the pain. It’s focus was pulled away by something trivial, but it worked. It kept my mind occupied in a somewhat more positive way than cursing the discomfort. The pain was still there, it did not alleviate it, it just redirected my brain to do something else. I did not endure the discomfort emotionally because my emotional brain was busy elsewhere. The pain receptors still logged in, it’s just that no one was listening. Thinking abut this, I realized I spend a lot of time on trivial matters in my day, things that are not essential, but that make me feel as if I’ve accomplished something. There are times when the larger issues of life seem overwhelming and I have no idea how to begin to chip away at all the challenges they represent. Rather than focus on the complex problems and their potential solutions, I instead spend a lot of time making social plans, playing a game or reading current events news. I admit it, I dwell in the trivial in order to distract myself from the painful reality that some things may in fact be out of my control to manage. Certain problems are permanent in nature. Others are so complex that I have no idea how to contribute to their resolution and so instead I distract myself from their focus by pretending the trivial things of life is somehow more important. I see people chit chat about trivia on Facebook all of the time. We would prefer to focus on celebrity gossip than on the government shutdown because one we can simply gaze at like a lion in a cage, the other we feel threatened by like a lion on the Serengeti. It’s much less stressful to judge twerking than it is to wonder how we resolve the problems of the mentally ill or how the affordable healthcare act is fundamentally changing the face of healthcare both positively and negatively at the same time. We feel helpless to change the narrative of some very important global issues. Poverty never seems to go away, lost cats and dogs are heartbreaking. Children who are suffering around the world from malnutrition, poor living conditions- how do we engage in those issues based upon our views of the world? Those are lifelong problems. We will not solve them in the quantity of days we have before us. Taken as a whole they feel like a tidal wave of humanity at our doorstep. I can certainly understand how we prefer to work the New York times crossword instead. I do not know the answers to life’s big questions. Like I said, I spend as much time in trivia land as anyone, probably more. Even Jesus admitted that the poor will always be with us, and if the Son of God cannot solve that problem, what could I possibly do to change anything? See how that works? I’m not even in the problem yet and I’ve recused myself from it’s clutches. It is so easy to be a sympathetic observer. And yet it’s not the calling. To engage in big issues one must be bravely optimistic. Maybe that sentence alone absolves many of action. I’m not sure I’m that person, but I also know that I don’t want to leave this earth having done nothing toward the distressing problems that face us all. Small actions toward a greater good are not trivial, they are like water that flows by a rock, subtly eroding it over time. While I can’t honestly say I know how to have a significant impact at this time, I can look around me and do something local. In fact when I was at church yesterday I noticed a sign that said the food pantry is almost out of things to give to hungry families. While I cannot give them millions of dollars to restock shelves, I know if I go downstairs right now and open my cabinets, there are at least three or four bags of non perishables I can share. It will not be much, but it wears on the rock of poverty as it passes by with the stream of other gifts from people in the local community. Many drops a large ocean makes. It is not trivial, it is a gift toward the greater good. I can do that. In fact, I’ll do it right now.
Posted on: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 13:13:49 +0000
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