01/03/2022
Visit St. Pete With Us!
We spent a few weekends in St Petersburg, FL throughout Feb. Come see it with us!
There's A Pebble In His Shoe
February has been a month of discovery for our household.
Justice’s long-awaited 23andMe results came back, revealing an even murkier family history than we’d first anticipated. A well-intentioned birthday gift has quickly turned into a full-blown genealogy quest.
As Justice spent his afternoons trawling through Brooklyn census data from the 1940s, I wrote across from him at our kitchen table with our jacaranda tree’s reflection peering over my shoulder onto my screen.
I watched him dart between his thinning yellow legal pad and his laptop with a furrowed brow, taking quick swigs of his can of sparkling water, completely unaware that dinner awaits.
On the weekends, we’ve been taking trips to St Pete. The 90-minute drive provides a lot of time to chat, think and judge fellow drivers’ choice of bumper stickers (my personal favourite was a bright yellow one that said “MILF: Man, I love frogs” with a picture of a frog on it).
Most of the time we dissect the ancestry details he’s discovered for the week, one particular conversation struck me. As we were flying up I-75 listening to The New Basement Tapes Justice casually mentioned “I don’t know what any of my biological grandfathers look like.” Little did my husband know the thought he sparked in me.
I can see my Poppy in my Dad and his brothers and sisters. I can see my Opa in my Mum, my uncle and aunty, and even myself sometimes. It’s an odd thing to realize you’ve always had something that another person has never had.
My Poppy and Opa came from extremely different upbringings. Ron Elliott was a Sunbury local who raised 6 kids and was a pillar in his community. Janos Bokori was a Hungarian immigrant who moved to Australia in the 1950s, leaving behind his country to marry a German woman, settle down in Sunbury and raise 3 kids.
Yet despite the entirely different origins of these men, they had a common ground; my siblings and I.
When I think of humanity in this objective kind of way, I feel the weight of a lot of suffering. Suddenly, something like the war in Ukraine doesn’t feel so far away and foreign. It feels like it’s just a few links away from home.
Regardless of whether or not this is a comforting thought, we are all connected, even before the internet made it seamless.
We’re human. We may grow up differently, but at the end of the day, we often crave the same things. Safety, love, a hot dinner.
Thinking like this makes it easier for me to be compassionate. I stop seeing the guy driving aggressively behind me as some dickhead evangelical Trump fanatic and instead consider the fact that maybe he’s had a hard life. I’m no expert at it, trust me, but I do find when I soften my gaze to those around me suddenly things are quite simple.
There’s an episode of Ed, Edd & Eddy that Justice and I reference a lot. Ed has uncharacteristic bouts of rage throughout the entire episode. The slightest thing sets him off. By the end of the episode, we come to find out he has had a pebble stuck in his shoe, once it’s out he’s back to normal.
Justice and I have come to find ourselves shrugging off hostility around us, quietly quipping “well, someone’s got a pebble in their shoe.”
If you’re faced with hostility this month, I encourage you to consider that you’re witnessing someone with a pebble in their shoe. Yeah, they may very well be behaving like an arse, but times are tough enough, treating people with compassion is the bravest thing we can do.
Food For Thought
"Awareness is the greatest agent for change."
— Eckhart Tolle
"The challenge is not to be perfect - it is to be whole."
— Jane Fonda
"Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you."
— Anne Lamott