Celebrating Our Frailties

When we write our little blogs, most of us probably have no idea what passing phrase might stick out to others in some meaningful way.

Yesterday, I was shocked to read Life's Laundry, and it wasn't because it was risqué, titillating, provocative, or particularly probing. She somewhat casually mentioned how her husband thought up the melody of a song that he was commissioned to write: "it came to him clearly last night right before he drifted off to sleep."

How that could happen to anyone is totally beyond my comprehension. I believe that a similar thing happened to JK Rowlings who began, if I recall this correctly, to envision the Harry Potter series while sitting in a train station. This poor blogger's brain doesn't work like that ... when it works at all, that is. Even when I do get an idea for a post, like this one, it's pretty ill-formed, and I don't really know what I'm going to write when my hands first touch the keys. Even now, I'm not sure what I'm going to say next.

Yes, I am! I want to speak in praise of our differences, our unique gifts and talents. While I find it astounding that someone could compose music in his head, he might find it hard to fathom how I could design a web page, or how you could knit a bonnet or run a marathon or paint a picture. Those people who can do the things that we cannot do enrich our lives. I can't paint, but I can be enraptured by a painting. I can't play an instrument or make music, but I can become entranced by the harmonies of others.

We need to celebrate not only our talents but our shortcomings as well, for it is the tension between those two forces that causes us to need each other and, therefore, to build human relationships. I reflected on this a little bit last week as Cuppa and I drove into town, and she struggled mightily with streets and directions, trying so very hard to remember places and routes in the event that she might sometime have to drive herself. That's easy for me, but those dadblasted dance steps are incredibly difficult and foreign to me. She picks up dance after dance in a trice while I struggle mightily to learn just one routine. And so, we have become a team, each helping the other along life's pathways, the innate abilities of each supporting the weaknesses in the other. We're not even conscious of it most of the time.

That's why there are a quadrillion different occupations out there: something for everyone. Each job fulfills a need. We are all needed, and we are all in need of the services and support of others in many ways. It's the unique abilities of ourselves and others that, in part at least, draw us together, and that is why we must celebrate ourselves — even our frailties and imperfections.