Saying Yes To What Matters

Dove Lake, Cradle Mtn. National Park, Tasmania

just another crowded beach

This is the first day of serious rain we’ve had since leaving Portland, and it has given me the excuse to slow down and think after a month of readying the house for our leaving, celebrating the holidays with people we love and are missing now, and arriving in our new home in New Zealand where we had friends to catch up with and old haunts to revisit before packing again to leave to teach in Australia. We have another few days in Tasmania to say goodbye to new friends, both human and marsupial, to walk on yet another beach (we’ve lost count of the waterside walks we’ve taken on our travels), and to get ready for the next six months living in Auckland and traveling around New Zealand.

I am sitting in a stranger’s house in a country town I hadn’t heard of five days ago, in a part of Australia many Australians mean to get to but often don’t.  I am here because four years ago a class organizer read an article about me in an Australian magazine and decided to ask me to teach a workshop for her group. And we had such a great time, I came back this year and did it again.

But of course that’s the linear (so inevitably partial) reason I’m sitting at this hand-hewn table listening to the honking conversation of the resident geese in Deloraine, Tasmania. It’s because long ago I learned to say yes, please, when interesting opportunities came knocking, because even longer ago I learned that we only get this one fragile, precious life which I could either fill with fear and regret or love and new experiences.

Now, I’m not talking about bungee jumping off of skyscrapers or jumping out of airplanes. I was lucky enough to have had a near-death experience when I was a teenager, so I don’t need to pay someone else to understand that fine line between existing and not. I’m talking about chances to see a vista filled with trees that grow nowhere else and enlivened by animals who haven’t spread themselves very far from where they started (marsupials and monotremes, anyone?). I’m talking about having conversations with people who’ve made their way in places and cultures different from mine, and coming to understand them a little more through the art they make, the cities they build, and the way they construct their societies. The longer and more numerous these conversations, the more obvious it becomes that our differences are thin edifices teetering on the shared and deep history of our common humanity. Yes, they glimpse wallabies rather than squirrels scurrying around their landscape and bask in the southern sun while we freeze under a blanket of unexpected snow, but we all have similar hopes and dreams for ourselves and our families.

Do the buildings reflect this town's values about the relative importance of communication and incarceration?

Which makes it hard to write the date, the day before our disciplined, intelligent, moral president and his scandal-free administration leaves office.  Here in a small corner of an island floating noticeably near the Antarctic, I’m not able to attend the march in Washington to add my feet to others walking to remind everyone that our democracy, like our lives, is fragile and precious and will survive only if we learn what is worth saying yes to. I will think about my friends and family who are marching, but I will spend the day in an art museum, reminding myself that when we say yes to our biggest best selves we are capable of great beauty and understanding. Because I believe that we are capable of that, my vote, which I am willing to work to make count, will continue to be yes. Yes to taking care of each other, yes to widening the circle, yes to taking care of our corner of the world, yes to understanding that the decisions we make in this corner of the world affect people most of us will never meet, no matter how widely we travel.  I vote no to fear, because I know history and where that leads; because I know history and do not want to live with regret.