Two Girls With Chalk
On staying present when the world is on fire
This morning I woke to news that the United States and Israel had launched joint strikes on Iran overnight. The supreme leader is dead. Girls at a school in southern Iran are buried under rubble. The region is on fire.
The mind reaches instinctively for despair. Or contempt. These are reflexes. I know them well. Maybe you do too.
I remember a similar morning in 2003, at the start of the Iraq invasion. I was living in Budapest, and I called my mother. It was an ordinary conversation, the kind you have just to hear someone’s voice. At the end of the call I couldn’t help it. I brought up the fact that our country had invaded another country without casus belli, without legal or moral justification for war.
My mother heard me out. Then she said: “Well honey, nobody likes war, but we have to trust the president.”
I didn’t know what to do with that. I still don’t, entirely. The love between us was real. The shared reality was not. That gap, between people who love each other and cannot find common ground about what is actually happening, is one of the loneliest places I know.
That was twenty-three years ago. The gap hasn’t closed. It has company now.
A Course in Miracles offers a line I return to in moments like this: I do not understand the meaning of anything I see.
This is not resignation. It is not indifference. It is the one honest position available when the mind is working itself to exhaustion trying to make sense of what cannot be made sense of.
What do you do with a morning like this?
The mind means well. It is always scanning for threats, always preparing its judgments, always trying to locate the danger and respond. But the activity of the mind, especially in times like this, is exhausting.
Then there is a knock at the door.
A small child. One of the girls from next door. She wants to know if I would like to come outside.
It has been raining for weeks. Today is sunny. I can smell freshly cut grass. Somewhere nearby, a neighbor’s new puppy is causing a commotion.
I go outside.
The two sisters, seven and nine, have a bucket of fat chalk in every color. They are drawing on the white concrete: balloons, ice cream cones, hearts, a tree, a dragon. The colors are extraordinary.
They don’t need me to do anything. They don’t need me to perform enthusiasm or offer opinions on the dragon. They simply want my presence. I sit in a chair and feel the warmth of the sun on my face and smell the freshly cut grass and watch them draw.
All across the world right now, children are drawing with chalk. All across the world there are ordinary pleasures, small and immediate, that exist beyond the reach of the mind’s activity. The war is real. The chalk is also real. The mind wants to choose between them. The heart can hold both.
This is not escape. It is not pretending the rubble isn’t there.
It is knowing that presence is not a reward for when the world gets better. It is what’s right here right now, underneath the noise, waiting for attention to land.
I don’t know what is outside your window this morning. But something is.
The girls draw. The sun is warm. I do not understand the meaning of anything I see.
And for this moment, that is enough.