The scandal of the ordinary
A letter for people who think they already know what showing up means.
Friends, welcome to the first one. If you've been doing the Stand-Up with me for a while, this is the part of the week where we sit down together instead of reporting in together. Grab the coffee. Close the other tabs. This should take you ten minutes.
I want to tell you about a morning two weeks ago.
I was in the car at 6:47am, driving my daughter to school. She was in the back, half-asleep, half-annoyed, not quite ready to be a person yet. I was on my third attempt to get her to eat the granola bar I'd packed, which she was treating as a personal insult. I had a meeting at 8, three emails unanswered, a tab open in my head labeled figure out the shipping question that had been open for four days.
And I pulled up to the red light at the corner of our street.
To my left, across the intersection, there was an older man walking a small dog. Nothing special about either of them — the man was in a blue windbreaker, the dog was the kind of dog that is mostly eyebrows. They were not, in any way that the world would notice, a sign. They were just walking.
But the light stayed red for a long time. Long enough that I watched the man bend down, slowly and with some effort, and pick up what his dog had done. And then — this is the part — he looked at his dog, and he smiled. Not a camera smile. The dog was not performing. No one was watching. He just smiled at his dog, at 6:47 in the morning, on a Tuesday, with a plastic bag in his hand.
And I thought: that is the whole thing.
That is the scandal.
We have, most of us, been raised on a story in which God is far. Up somewhere. Behind a veil. On the other side of a door that prayer knocks on. If we do the practice well enough — show up, pay attention, fast, give — maybe, maybe, God comes a little closer. The movement is always the same: we close distance that the world has opened. We reach upward. God, if we are fortunate, reaches down.
The manifesto you read (or will read, or half-read and promised yourself you'd finish) pushes against that story. It says: the earth is already Godly. Now. Not after we fix it. Not when we've earned it. Already.
I want to be honest: I did not, for a long time, believe that. I wanted it to be true. I suspected it might be. But I had been trained to think of Godliness as an achievement, a horizon, a thing to aim at. If the earth were already Godly, what was I doing here? What was the whole project for?
Here is what I've come to, slowly, because I'm slow: the project is not to make the earth Godly. The project is to notice that it already is, and then to act like someone who has noticed.
Those are very different things.
When the light turned green, I drove through the intersection and I didn't remember the meeting, or the shipping question, or the three emails. I remembered the man with his dog.
And then — because this is how my mind works — I started to feel the little pull of the inner editor: don't be corny. It's a guy with a dog. You're making more of it than it was.
But here's the thing the editor always misses. It wasn't that the moment was profound. It was that I saw it. For three seconds, at a red light, with a seven-year-old eating granola behind me, I saw a man be kind to a dog that nobody else was watching, and I understood — in the way you understand something for the first time even though you already knew it — that the world is full of these. Every intersection. Every Tuesday. Every morning. The earth is crowded with small acts of kindness, most of them unobserved, most of them done not for a camera, not for a credit, but just because that is what the person is.
The scandal is not that God is far. The scandal is that God is close, and we drive past.
I was going to write this letter about practice. About the three questions. About why the Stand-Up works. But I think the Stand-Up only works if you already believe — or are willing to act as if you believe — that the world is worth paying attention to in the first place. Otherwise the three questions become another task. Another box. Another thing to perform on your own life.
The three questions are for the man with the dog. For the chance that you might be the man, or might see the man, or might drive past the man and come home and tell someone about it.
The Stand-Up is not a spiritual practice. It is a seeing practice. It asks you:
What did I do yesterday? — which is really did I see anything yesterday?
What am I doing today? — which is really what will I refuse to miss today?
What are my blockers? — which is really what is in the way of me seeing?
Prayer is not a special language you talk to God in. Prayer is what happens when you start narrating the seeing. "I saw the man with the dog. Thank you for that. I was three seconds from missing it."
I want to give you one practice for this week — just one, because practices compound better when they are small.
This week, once a day, at a red light, stop the inner editor. Find the man with the dog. He will be there. He has been there the whole time. The question is whether you are the person who saw him.
When you see him, you do not need to do anything. You do not need to turn it into a lesson or a Tweet or a line of journaling. You can, if you want, just say — out loud, in the car, alone — "I saw it."
That's the whole practice for the week. I saw it.
If I hear back from even a few of you about what you saw, I will know this letter did its job.
Stand up. Check in. See the man with the dog.
— Y.