In a word, a slice of perspective (Mary Schmich)
I recently read the column "In a word, a slice of perspective" for school, and am to put some of my thoughts up here for the world to see. So here they are.Oh.
And here's a copy of the column:
(It's kind of long)
In
a word, a slice of perspective
May
21, 2008|By Mary Schmich
Words sometimes land in your mind like birds
on a wire. They flutter in, sit there, flutter off, come back, distract you at
inconvenient hours.
That bird of a word for me lately is
"portion."
I hear the word sometimes when I'm thinking about my friends and
family, other times when I'm confronted by the news.
A cyclone hits Myanmar and the death count
rises as inexorably as the sun. Bodies wash onto the riverbanks. Corpses rot in
the mud.
What a small portion those human beings got.
Then an earthquake hits China and the death
count rises as inexorably as the moon.
"What do I have left in the world?"
asked a Chinese man quoted in a story by Evan Osnos, the Tribune's China
correspondent. The man had lost his wife, his son, his home. "I have
nothing," he said. "I have nothing."
Nothing but life itself. His portion, swiftly
and terribly reduced, was still bigger than what was allotted to the dead.
Until I started inexplicably obsessing on the
word, hearing it like a mantra, thinking, out of the blue on many days,
"So this is my portion," I had never thought specifically about what
"portion" meant.
I knew it meant 10 potato chips, seven
Triscuits and never quite enough ice cream. I knew it meant a part of a whole,
as in a rhubarb pie.
Until I Googled "portion," though, I
didn't know it meant a dowry, the money a woman brings to her husband through
marriage. I had never heard of Bible portions and Torah portions.
Most significantly, I didn't know
"portion" means fortune, fate. I have recently learned that the Greek
word "moira" signifies both fate and portion.
The word "portion," as it has been
chirping in my brain, is some combination of its definitions: allotment and
lot, quantity and destiny.
We learn as children that portions are limited
and that people get different amounts of things.
"He got more!" is one of childhood's
great laments.
"More" was my first word.
From the beginning of life, we chafe at the
boundaries of enough. We grow up trying to correct the inequities of the
servings we have been given.
If we fully grow up, we also try to correct
the inequities of the servings given to others. We don't have to look as far as
China and Myanmar to notice how unevenly life distributes its bounty.
A few days ago I was talking to a man involved in building a
mixed-income community on the site of an old Chicago housing project.
"I used to think life should be
fair," he said.
Now, after years of working with people who
have a lot and those who don't, he has concluded that life simply isn't fair.
You can do your best to reapportion the goodies, but there will always be
people who get the granite countertops and the ones short on food.
Families are further proof that life portions
out luck in random ways.
I think especially of my youngest sister, who
is mentally disabled, who on an average day literally trembles with medicine
and the fluctuations of a troubled mind. Her portion is so much smaller than
mine that I want to rage against her unfair share as if it were my own. Her
limited portion reminds me how capriciously big mine is. But the other day when
I was musing on this notion to myself, she started talking about other mentally
ill people she knows, ones abandoned by their families.
"Compared to them," she said,
"I have a lot."
She does. So many of us do. There's always
somebody with more, with a bigger slice of brains and beauty, a bigger scoop of
fame and money, a heftier helping of love and time. But in this world of
cyclones and earthquakes, a lot of us have potato chips to spare.
Kind of hits home doesn't it? Makes you think?
I think the author wants us to feel this way, she wants us to feel moved, but most of all she wants us to feel thankful. I think the author wrote this so when you read it you feel at peace with how the world just is. So many of us spend our time worrying about helping others who aren't as blessed as us. And although that isn't bad at all (in fact you should do more of it!), we need to accept the fact that we live in an imperfect world. She says,"life simply isn't fair". And everyone isn't the same as everyone else. And that is okay. So we just need to be thankful for what we do have.
I also think the author wants us to take something away from this. And a lot of it coincides with what I already said about being grateful. She wants us to read this and remember that we should be grateful and that "in this world of cyclones and earthquakes, a lot of us have potato chips to spare". So that the next time you are out and really really want something but can't afford it, you remember all you do have. And the next time you see someone who needs something more than you do, you remember all you already have and give it to them.
That's why this column was written, for this purpose. So that the next time you are out there in one of those situations, you remember this. And you act on it. Imagine, if 100 people read this article, felt convicted about how much they were helping, and then gave to 5 strangers in the next month, that's already 500 more people helped than usual. Multiply that by 10 - 5,000 people helped. The purpose of this column is big. It's so that we recognize in order to "fully grow up, we [need to] try to correct the inequities of the servings given to others".
The author expresses this purpose throughout the column with the writing techniques she uses. She uses anaphora by repeating things to connect with the reader (when she explains what she thought a portion was). She also uses short sentences or fragments when trying to draw attention to a point that she's making (at the end, "She does. So many of us do."). Lastly, she makes several references to events, and includes several proper nouns (Mayanmar, China, Triscuits, the Bible).
This column is relevant in our world today. It highlights some of the real world problems we hear about and we deal with. This column was written to point them out, to bring them to the light so that we can fix them and deal with them. And part of that dealing with them is accepting that it happened and life isn't fair. It's realizing "There's always somebody with more, with a bigger slice of brains and beauty, a bigger scoop of fame and money, a heftier helping of love and time." It's realizing that if we can, we should reach out to those others. The people in Haiti after their earthquake, the families who lost loved ones on a Malaysia flight, the citizens of Japan that lost everything during its tsunami, the starving children in Africa. This is why this column was written. To remind us of these people.
