Thomas Fiffer looks at the value of honoring our instincts, inclinations, and possibilities.
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One of my childhood memories is of the wooden magazine stand beside the couch in my parents’ living room. It held in its compartments National Geographic, U.S. News and World Report, Saturday Review with Norman Rockwell covers, and other now-defunct treasures. The New Yorker, however, always went straight to the coffee table.
And after each issue of The New Yorker was read, my mother removed the cover, tossed the innards, and added the cover to the years deep piles shelved in our basement.
One Sunday, a friend of my parents’, a syndicated cartoonist named Morrie Brickman, who created the comic strip The Small Society, showed up at our house.
“Elaine, do you still have all those New Yorker covers in your basement?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, thank goodness. I’m completely out of ideas. I need to spend a few hours down there.”
And so Morrie buried himself up to his eyeballs in my mother’s New Yorker archive to refill his creative well.
My mother did not have a particular reason for saving New Yorker covers. Still, she did it.
Religiously.
When I served on the House Committee of The Yale Club of New York City, I heard the chef tell a story.
There was a club member who came in for lunch once or twice during the week. Some weeks he might come three, even four times. Other weeks, he might not show up at all.
This member always ordered the same thing for lunch: baked chicken on a bed of rice with mixed greens on the side.
A simple lunch. But baked chicken was not on the lunch menu at the Yale Club.
Or the dinner menu.
Still, the chef instructed his staff to bake a chicken every weekday morning, boil some rice, and set aside the greens in case the member in question came for lunch.
Baking all those chickens required extra effort from the club’s kitchen staff, effort they may have considered wasted. And they had to find a use for the chicken if the member didn’t come for lunch. But they did it anyway.
They did it because … you never know.
♦◊♦
Sometimes, we hesitate to do things because we’re not sure of their purpose or how they will play out.
Or we fear our effort will be unreciprocated and therefore wasted.
We put off responding to or reconnecting with an old friend.
We walk past a bar or restaurant every day but don’t go in.
We hold onto a work of art we’ve created and never try to get it exhibited or published.
We fantasize about a vacation but never plan it.
We think to ourselves, I can’t; it’s just too crazy.
We allow countless opportunities to pass us by.
♦◊♦
My appeal today is to go ahead and do some of these things, all of these things, even if you are unsure of why you are doing them or exactly what will happen. Follow your feelings. Give it a try. Let it fly.
Because … you never know.
Originally published on Tom Aplomb.
Photo courtesy of author
