Snail Surplus? Might be Duck Deficiency.

On being present to difficulties. Sometimes I just listen.

many years ago i did a long-standing public experiment called “creative approaches to what you have been thinking of”

i sat in union square in new york city in good weather for years with two chairs and a table and a big sign that read “creative approaches to what you have been thinking of” and a smaller sign on the table that read “pay what you’d like or take what you need.”

i spoke with thousands of people out there talking about whatever they wanted to bring up - big or small, personal or professional, mundane or outlandishly strange. my intention was to never give advice but to offer creative ways of looking at the situation as they described it. to ask questions and wonder with them about it differently. people paid in money - bills, coins and checks. people paid in art, hugs, gum and mints, or words. and some people took money from that little mason jar as well. but only what they needed - not what they wanted. and they had to do the creative approach part first.

this is a story from then.

There are inscrutable positions that we find ourselves in. Rocks. Hard places. Swords of Damocles hanging over us…and then it falls.

There is this Shangri-La we hope to live in sans difficulties, sans sorrow with abundant happiness.

While I certainly agree with the Shakespeare quote:

“Nothing is either good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.”

That doesn’t mean things will be easy or happy for that matter. It doesn’t mean they won’t be either, though.

So where does that leave us?

Life is not for happiness. Nor is it for sorrow. Life is not meant for solely for ease nor for struggle alone. Neither of those need to be enshrined or enthroned though many do consider them thirst quenching destinations that somehow redemptive all by themselves. I’m not convinced by those arguments despite their prevalance. But life has these things, ease and struggle, in them and to be present to them when they arise is to be alive and participating fully in the action of life.

In the artist section of Union Square there were a regular cast of characters who showed up every day selling their wares. Many scrape a living out of it.

R was the estranged wife of one of these men. I had seen her around and she had said hello before and we had briefly chatted before our encounter that day. But on that particular day she sat down to talk. She took four wadded up dollar bills and opened them up and then folded them together before she sat down.

I insisted that she didn’t need to pay for anything until I did something. But she insisted back.

R had been married to this man, the vendor, for a few years but three years previous she had a stroke which left her not able to work. She was on disability since then and had a small inheritance she used to stay afloat. R spoke with that sort of a slushy lisp that comes from a stroke and she apologized for it in a very endearing way. Of course there were no apologies needed but she was self-conscious about it. I only mention it at all because I would want you to try to hear her in her own voice the best I can render it on the digital page. After her stroke her husband started getting upset that she wouldn’t (but obviously couldn’t) do the things around the house any longer – laundry, cleaning, cooking.

He encouraged her to move in with her sister. She did that and he started seeing someone else very quickly.

She shared that she was staying married because her husband, a veteran, will start getting a pension in a few years. R went on to say that the whole thing has been painful because all her friends know about this and she always feels embarrassed that she is staying in this relationship for a pension – which she would need but also because she knows how angry it makes her husband that she is going to get his pension. She also said that it is “Very strange for a Jewish girl from Brooklyn to have found solace in Jesus.” But she said about how her Judaism and Jesus have together given her much solace.

But she asked me…

“What do you think I should do?”

What do you say? This story is heartbreaking and terrible and R is totally sympathetic. I asked her if she had ever considered connecting with a new circle of friends who didn’t know her husband. Maybe connecting over shared interests?

R said that she hadn’t made new friends in years.

“I have a routine. I talk to who I talk to and I go where I always go.”

And I could feel the grooves that she had worn into the sidewalks from her apartment to her various destinations.

I asked her about movies or a ceramics class or playing an instrument. Something that interested her where she might meet other people. Here I was just listening to this woman. I think that she valued just that alone – the listening, the asking. She smiled in a reminiscent way and said

“Do you know that I have always wanted to be in play? It doesn’t have to big or on Broadway or anything like that. But plays have weird people in them sometimes and I am a weird person.”

I said that I didn’t know of any plays she could be in but I asked her what she thought about taking an acting class and seeing who she met. She might make new friends. She moved from her slumped position to the front of the seat and wondered aloud

“That could be really fun, right?”

I wrote down a few names of acting schools and I told her to do some research before she spent any money and to talk to someone at the school to see their thoughts.

“Should I look on the computer first?”

That seemed like a good idea and then actually visit the schools and find out about an eight week course or something else.

R sweetly thanked me by kissing my hands and left the table with the same words that many arrive in New York saying:

“Maybe I can be an actor.”

Maybe she could. Maybe she did. This whole talk was beautiful and heartbreaking. As sweet and genuine as R is she was equal parts an odd duck to be sure. I wonder how she fared in her search. I don’t know and the story was not mine to know or track. I was lucky to have intersected for a little while with this bit of humanity in the form of this good woman R. I felt like I couldn’t do much for R except listen and offer what I could where I could but sometimes that is enough. Maybe this was one of those times.

The difficulty that R was experiencing wasn’t assuaged by our talk. But just listening to what she had to say and both of us being present to it allowed, I think, for a new door to open up, for a little while, that may start to change her day to day experience. It wouldn’t necessarily change her difficult situation and I wouldn’t expect that of ninety minutes spent together in a park. But it may allow for her situation not to be the overriding thing in her life by gently adding to the ecology.

In permaculture philosophy it is said that if your garden seemingly has too many snails and slugs your problem is not a snail/slug surplus but a duck deficiency (ducks eat snails and slugs).

All too often the puritanical urge tries to eliminate the slugs and snails of our day to day lives rather than putting something in place that can keep the slugs and snails in balance.

Perhaps an acting class might be the duck to R’s snails. What struggles are you simply present for? What might be the duck you would add so that you have just enough snails?