Older Than Us

The good in us was here before we were.

Sometimes we notice ourselves being kind in a way we recognize.

We make sure a guest has more than enough. We want the people who come to us to feel easy, and welcome, and glad they came. Something in us softens at whatever is small and fragile, a hurt creature, a child, anyone tender enough to need it. That softness did not start with us. It was alive in someone before us, and we were near it long enough that it became ours.

There is more, from another direction. The pull to turn a question over long after everyone else has set it down. The reaching toward what is true, and what is good. The quiet wish, never far from us, to be of some use to people, to help where help is needed. That came from somewhere too. We stood close to it once, and it took.

These are the parts of ourselves we are gladdest about, and not one of them began with us.

It is easy to feel that our best qualities are our own doing. Mostly, though, they were given to us early, by people who lived them in front of us until they became the most natural thing in the world.

To see this clearly is not to feel smaller. It is to feel accompanied.

When we welcome someone now, or stay gentle with something fragile, or sit a long while with a hard question, we are not doing it alone. We are keeping company with everyone it came from.

Our goodness has many hands in it. We are simply the latest to be trusted with it.

In presence,
S. Marie
C U M I C H E