A Bockward View on Life

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Béa Henri

chuchotements des étoile

And that’s when I realized a truth that should have been blindingly obvious from the start: The measure of a community isn’t how it treats insiders, but rather how it treats outsiders. It is easy to be kind to your friends and allies. And when you experience that kindness, it can turn a small-town community into something like a security blanket. This is where you belong. But when you experience cruelty, a small town can be something else entirely. It can make you feel trapped and uneasy, as if there is no place to rest, as if your home isn’t truly your home.

What is your experience like if you’re the only Black or brown person in a sea of white? What is your experience if your household is a blue island in a red ocean, or a red island in a blue ocean? How much grace is extended to you when you fall or stumble? How much tolerance do you experience when you disagree? That is the measure of a place, not its love for its favorite daughters and sons.

One thing I’ve tried to say to groups over the years, groups of all ages, is that writing things down — whatever you’re writing down, even if you’re writing something sad or hard — usually, you feel better after you do it. Somehow you’re given a sense of, OK, this mood, this sorrow I’m feeling, this trouble I’m in — I’ve given it shape. It’s got a shape on the page now. So I can stand back; I can look at it. I can think about it a little differently — what do I do now?

My mother’s face as she stood in our small kitchen, her dumbfounded surprise that I wanted to go to college in the first place, that I wanted a completely different life from hers and my father’s. But that wasn’t really it. What I wanted more than that was what happened inside me when I read books like Siddhartha, the feeling that real life might just be inside us, not out there on our patchy lawns or in our cars or offices or job sites or malls or bars or dead-end streets or city sidewalks, but inside us, where the dreams of others merged with our own so that we were all bigger than before and no one was just one. There was no other anywhere.