Dear Friends,
It doesn’t really matter if I’m watching soccer or not—the stories from the World Cup seem to find me anyway. I watched parts of games that were on the big television screens throughout the Dallas/Ft Worth and Nashville airports last week as I traveled to see my mother. I also watched people from all over the world stop to catch a glimpse of a game, or a score, while shuffling luggage, coffee, and cellphones. At DFW, people wearing their Mexico jerseys were sunburned and sleeping on each other’s shoulders—a rain delay had folks returning home before the end of the match. Others sang in the bar, lyrics I couldn’t hear, but everyone was smiling and raising toasts.
No matter where I’ve turned these past few weeks, there have been funny stories and videos in the news and on social media about people enjoying American culture, mostly through food. Did you see that the Big Gulp has become the beverage size of choice? Or the videos of people trying barbecue for the first time? I know some of you will laugh and say we are exporting diabetes to unsuspecting visitors, but what a way to go! Here’s hoping that they don’t discover deep fried butter at one of our state fairs.
One soccer fan video exclaimed that the American people were (unexpectedly!) so nice and fun. Other visitors started online fundraising drives to stay in America for another week or two to travel the rest of our country. And still others shared the observation of how well we all get along without the interference of various world leaders. That’s something on which I think we can all agree.
If you had asked me in January if there was any cause for celebration this year, I could not have imagined the combination of space and sport providing some much-needed goodwill and optimism heading into the rest of this year. Just this past week, the New York Times posted a survey where readers listed the 2006 film Idiocracy as the most representative film of where we are at as a country today. The lack of critical thinking and the commentary on our disposable culture made the film seem like a farcical fantasy at the time.
But let me pause here. It can be easy for me to slide back into the miasma of everything that seems to be going wrong right now—from algae in the Reflecting Pool (finally cleared!) to extreme heat across the United States. It takes a sense of optimism to continue finding stories that remind us of our shared humanity. Walking through the airports during my travels, it took but a minute standing off to the side of the pedways, to look around, and to understand that each person I walked by or sat next to has a dream that I don’t know. They have family and friends I’ll never meet. They are happy, or stressed, while traveling. I may be the hero of my own story under the guise of traveling on my own, but I’m really not a hero or alone. I’m traveling with thousands of other people all trying to get somewhere; to someone or to something, just as I am.
Being away from Flagstaff is hard right now. Knowing my husband is dealing with the smoke and ash alone is scary. Nature continues to be humbling. In a bout of optimism, I planted some flowers, including several butterfly bushes and daisies, in hopes of attracting more wildlife. I’m happy to report the butterfly bushes are doing good work already and I am optimistic at this point in the summer that they are the true perennials their nursery tags claim them to be.
Optimism is its own kind of perennial, isn’t it? It can go dormant at times, if not necessarily during exact seasons. Instead of water, optimism just needs a sprinkling of humans doing good things for a little while to remind us that we are not alone. That reminds us we can open social media and see videos of people from Norway doing their “Viking rowing” in the stands of a soccer match. Or to see astronauts in space being kind and funny and in love with a plushie. Or to see people handing out water to those in the most drought-stricken regions.
I am always looking for the “big fix”—the one act that will eradicate hunger in our country, for instance. These past few months have reminded me that it will continue to be the daily interactions in my life that will make a difference. Will watching soccer stories improve my life? In a way, yes. Enough to laugh and experience joy for a few minutes before I leave the house to run to the grocery store, where I’ll smile at a stranger, and then return home to water the garden. On my worst days I have to remind myself that optimism, like all of us, is interconnected and also dependent on my active observation of the world around me. It is easier to see what is broken all around us than it is to see how others are fixing the world by simply existing in it.
