View of the World

I have been reading the most delightful book--Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life--by Amy Krouse Rosenthal.  She has taken each letter of the alphabet and written things from her life associated with that letter.  What has been so fun is to see she has had experiences just like me ---experiences that I felt no one else in the world would have. 

One of her sections is titled "Other People":  It's hard to accept that other people's lives are as full and real and now as yours.  You look at someone and sort of think, against your intellectual knowing better , that they have less complex life, they're able to flit about, their lives aren't clogged with the same kind of pressing deadlines, they don't really have cousins like your cousins, they are free tonight, of course they are free, or if they have plans they can easily break them to be with you. 

                       3/29/1976

Our lives just feel so impossibly big to us; we're breathing versions of that Saul Steinberg poster, where New York is the foreground, prominent and massive and drawn in color-pencil detail, and the other states and Asia and Africa are tiny lumps fading into the horizon." 

It is important to remember that all our Esperanza people--educators, scholars and their families, board members, etc.-- lead complex lives and be respectful of that fact.