Rushing off to work, an unedited stream-of-consciousness entry:
Ani Difranco sings “We try to keep our eye on the big picture, but the picture just keeps getting bigger”
For me, it seems, the big picture just keeps getting smaller.
I hiked to the top of a hill today and sat for a good long time in the fall breeze, the sun warming my back, lost in clich
é reflection as I looked out over the hills, Mt.Tam’s ridgeline in the distance. In doing so, I noticed once again my characteristic way of automatically absorbing tiny details that many seem able to filter out in order to manage their data input and see that big picture. With a glance, I see not a ridge of trees as one, but a ridge of individual trees. Even from miles away, I noticed one leaning to one side. And with this fertile imagination, I began to wonder what that very tree looks like up close, and who has sat beneath
that tree. I felt that in some way, I had made a connection to that specific tree, and the people walking under it on Mt. Tam would never know that the tree above them had been so scrutinized by someone sitting on a hill miles away. I noticed a crushed can down in the valley below me, lodged under a rock. Again, my mind was off and running: Who had left it there? Were they happy or sad? And they would never know I was thinking about the can they had left behind. I saw a little black beetle walking through the grass, and thought, if I weren’t sitting here, that beetle would never have been considered by human beings. If I weren’t so detail-oriented and cerebral about all this, that beetle would never be part of my life story. So you see, it can be exhausting having these thoughts run through your mind involuntarily all day long.
Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t change that about me. I think my life is richer for it, and I delight in the details. I think when you see the small (tiny) picture, the big picture is right there in sharp focus. I think when I notice that someone owns five pairs of black shoes that are virtually identical (but not quite), I think it tells me the story of their life. I get more out of seeing the placement of a rocking chair on someone’s deck in the elements than hearing about the “big picture”, because to me
that’s the picture.
That’s the story.
That’s what speaks to my soul. Someone traveling around the country with a stash of small wrapped gifts to be ready for a birthday at any moment
speaks to me. I am drawn to these details, and I am inexplicably drawn to specific faces in the crowd when I see a tiny detail that finds me like an arrow. It could be the way they hold their cup that makes me love or understand something about them instantaneously. I was at an outdoor restaurant in Luxembourg once, and saw a solo dining man’s chair slip off the edge of a patio tile into the planter behind him. He tipped backward, and left with a flushed face soon afterward. Most diners didn’t seem to notice him, but I haven’t seemed able to forget. I can’t remember what we ate or any other face in that restaurant, but I sure remember him, and he is very much part of my story, and that fall is part of his story. And he doesn’t even know.
So why
that detail? Why
that face? Every detail has a story. Every ant in the parade of ants across the lawn has a unique experience, carries a different piece of a different story (a picnic, a thrown apple core, a half eaten hoagie in a garbage can) on its back. Why
that piece? Can I ever see all the pieces? I don’t have room in my head. In a finite life, why am I sitting on a hill looking at that
one specific tree in a hundred thousand on that ridge?
Walking back down the trail, I see lighter paths, perhaps deer trails, cut in meandering snakes across the rolling hills. Way in the distance I notice a small purple-clad figure, another hiker, moving along one of them, oblivious to me (and oblivious to his being immortalized in my blog). I could choose to branch off onto one of these other paths, select one out of the dozens of similar paths, and make it part of my unique history, a nuance specific to my life. And sometimes I do this and it becomes a tiny detail that reveals the story of me. But why
that path? I am plagued by the thought of the infinite possibilities of where I could place my focus and change my life. The big picture seems, to me, reduced to the size of an ant. In the end, I am choosing to let the details find me as they always have and stay a bit longer examining the ones that wiggle their way into my soul and become my story. They can't all be contemplated. Between that one tree and the crushed can and the little black beetle and a purple-clad hiker and one face in the millions of faces in the crowd, in the end we have to just pick the story we want to tell.
