The Dreads

A brief study

Sometimes I wake up and even before I look at my phone or stretch my legs, I get The Dreads. We’ve all had them at some point. And they’re mostly amorphous when they appear. Not prompted by a specific event on the calendar, not yet attuned to the world’s ongoing mayhem, but just below the level of all of these. An electrical current mixed with a tinge of torpor. Not depression. Not acute anxiety. Just The Dreads. There’s a nighttime equivalent that has its own flavor (racing mind, the thought, “why did I say that?” and oddly specific food cravings) But for the purpose of this, I am focused on the morning and The Dreads.

A study of The Dreads has shown me a few things. One, I am likely carrying a burden that is not mine to carry, and two, I have lost confidence in my capacity to enjoy the day. The first can be tricky to address, because we are all so connected and we want to do our part to make a difference. But what is ours to tend is likely a fairly small plot of land. If, for example, we are mindful of where we spend/what we support, make a point of smiling at strangers, and employ our abilities to be in service through well-chosen work, that is probably a reasonable capacity. Few of us are going to walk in the shoes of someone like Martin Luther King Jr. Mostly we are going to muddle through lives that are far more private and affect a much smaller circle. And, in truth, we have no idea who we affect and how.

I am struck by how many of my most memorable and meaningful moments arrived in a way that was so small as to be nearly nonexistent. Did I dream it? Like the time I was at the farmer’s market some years ago––a hot day in July—and was wearing some sort of long diaphanous scarf, as I tend to do. A girl––I’m guessing five years old––took the two ends the fabric in her hands and started to twirl. And I twirled. And we danced this make-shift ballet in between the rows of corn and tomatoes and piled up apricots and no one else even seemed to notice. And when it was done, we curtsied to each other, which was, it turned out, the unspoken but agreed upon protocol for the occasion. I walked on, she rejoined her parents who were a few feet away and that was that.

This is how we hold the world up for each other. It’s small. Sometimes we don’t even know each other’s names. And I think we all have countless events like this. Different details, but same delight. We cannot plan such an event, because it is the opposite of planned. It’s arriving in a moment as ourselves and answering it.

Another time, I was standing in the garden of my family home in the Berkeley hills. We lived way at the top of a peak and it was, in some ways, a bit isolated, even though there were neighbors. And I was a teen-ager and therefore felt inherently alone. One day, looking out over the green hillside, and apparently inspired, I tilted my head back and sang out, as loud as I could, “The hills are alive….” and from somewhere in the lush beyond, someone I could not see sang back, “with the sound of music.” I don’t know how to describe the satisfaction that came with that answering voice.

May we be each other’s answering voices, and may we wake to the possibility that we do not know who we will answer or how. Or, for that matter, who will answer us. But hold, somehow, the possibility of chorus. Of overlapping song.