Halfway Home
Order and Purpose are my lifelines. I collect, sort, and fold sheets, separating the twins from the fulls, the percales from the flannels, before returning them, neatly ordered, to the formerly disorganized linen closet. The most difficult aspect of consulting on social impact issues, deeply human topics, is intimately witnessing injustice and deferred potential and not being in a position to address it. After decades of such experiences, I've developed an emotional callous, something I realized during a particularly poignant meeting earlier this week that was as inspiring as it was discouraging. I tackle the towels next, having already vetted and cleaned the refrigerator. My elderly, dying father is downstairs sleeping, as he has increasingly started to do to the point of only being awake a few hours, if that, every day. His primarily self-imposed decline, the result of decades of alcohol abuse, hasn't been unexpected, only the timing. If you want to torture a designer, expose them to a seemingly solvable problem, and then deny them the appropriate leverage and means to address it. Whether climate change or an aging parent's self-destructive behaviors, the angst is the same. I turn my attention to the den upstairs next, sorting through papers and an inexplicable over abundance of office supplies like staples and paper clips. In this case, order is a kind a purpose, lacking anything else that I can do, except comfort and witness and check, "Dad, you all good?" and think about what I might do next and next and next. Outside "Green Pastures," my father's melodramatic moniker for this old farmhouse near where my grandmother grew up, the fields are covered in snow.
