Pushing the grocery cart loaded with weekend essentials, I race for the shortest checkout line. I am pretty sure this means I will be standing there for a long time. (It took me a few decades, but I finally figured out that the shortest checkout line is the line everybody else has abandoned because it is too slow.) As I’m waiting for my turn to unload the various items in my cart, I recognize the person in front of me. After exchanging initial greetings, she asks me how I am. I say I’m hanging in there and she replies, “well, at least you’re vertical. That’s good.”
Mmm… I wonder if that is how I feel about life. Don’t misunderstand, I am grateful for being alive. When I was first diagnosed with cancer, I felt unsure I would survive a year and here I sit reflecting at my computer eight and a half years later. But is being vertical good enough? I reflect frequently that every day that passes moves me one day closer to my physical death. I wonder, how am I doing with the time I have been given, each one a tender drop of moisture in the vastness of the ocean? Do I pay attention to it? Is the drop nurturance offered to a parched world? Or does it seem insignificant against the backdrop of such an immense body of water? I desire that my life represents kindness, compassion, and my relationship with God. It sits in sharp contrast to the jarring, clanging noise of today’s environment of hatred, aggression, and destruction. So, does it even matter that I long to live a life that is more than vertical?
Last Saturday when I went to feed the hungry and homeless, one woman smiled shyly and said, “I hoped you were coming today.” I have offered meals to this person for months and for much of the time, she has refused. In the beginning, she looked at me with wariness, and the deep fatigue of someone who resides on the streets. Life had taught her that people will harm you if given a chance. But today, there is a Mona Lisa smile on her worn and weathered face and she says thank you. That drop of water drenched my soul. But that drop of water did not happen without all the others, the times she averted her eyes from me and shook her head no. Those drops of water are intrinsically tied to this day of the quiet thank you.
Yes, I want to live a life that is more than vertical. I want to live a life of meaning. But sometimes we need to value those moments that do not appear to be meaningful. For every drop in the ocean matters sometime. Those moments are all connected to each other. Just as we are. One to the other. And to the world.
