Personal essays
Mostly, you don’t need to be first
Lines
I was stuck in a long line of cars trying to get out of a supermarket parking lot.
The cars were backed up because the road we were trying to merge on to was crowded with holiday shoppers from near by stores and every row of the parking lot contained cars trying to get into the access road I was on.
Who do you let in?
Who lets you in.
Fortunately I and everyone around me stayed calm and inched forward when we could and let others in. It took twenty minutes for me to travel the length of a football field to the main road and another five minutes to get to the next backup.
A fifteen minute ride home took me more than an hour.
No one honked their horn.
No one shook their fist or flipped the bird at other drivers.
Everyone I could see waved gratefully at any driver who let them in ahead of them.
The woman who walked beside her elderly mother with a cane mouthed “Thank you” at me for holding back and letting them walk slowly in front of me. I would have anyway but I wasn’t going anywhere.
It isn’t always this way. While I was waiting in traffic I got a text from a friend who had just landed and was in a crowded plane that had arrived at the gate.
“Everyone needs to be first,” he wrote, “and that results in no one moving.”
That might have been the deepest thought anyone has shared with me.
The Sermon
Sunday I tuned in for my friend Mark’s Christmas sermon. I’m not religious in any way but Mark finds a way of taking readings from the Bible and tying them to current concerns.
He told the story of Mary coming to Joseph to tell him she was pregnant and the baby wasn’t his.
In using those words Mark gets us to forget for a moment that we know this story and how it turns out. We picture a couple where the woman comes to the man and says, “I’m pregnant and the baby isn’t yours.”
So Joseph has some decisions to make.
He could have decided to have things handled in the usual way. At the time, it seems, that would have involved having Mary stoned to death. Joseph said, “no, I’m not going to do that.” But he still needed a minute to think.
I don’t know what Joseph had to eat that day but apparently that night he had a dream where he was visited -
Now it couldn’t have been by the ghost of Christmas past because Christmas hadn’t been invented yet. Unless this baby is born it’s not going to happen.
Anyway, in this dream Joseph is told about the baby that Mary is carrying and how it all happened. He was given instructions and told that the baby’s name would be Jesus.
Mark pauses at this point in the story and puts us back in the story.
“Jesus?” he tells us that Joseph says, “I don’t even get to name the baby?”
Joseph had started to accept the whole pregnancy thing but thought that at least he could name it himself and add “son of Joseph” at the end. The neighbors don’t really need to know that it’s not his baby.
Well, it turns out, the neighbors do need to know. In fact, pretty much everyone ends up finding out that Joseph isn’t the father.
In a way, this is kind of like “Wicked” where we consider the story of Dorothy from the perspective of the wicked witch.
Here we are looking at the story of the birth of Jesus from the perspective of Joseph.
I kind of like this story. I mean, I still have questions, but I like it. (I also like that they didn’t split the story into two movies, and there’s no music or dance numbers.)
This is a story of a man who put his wife and her child first. It would have been very different if he’d put himself first.
Decisions
There are times it’s important to be first. In those times, be first.
But recognize when it’s not important.
Stop and realize that you have already won by being on the plane and landing safely. Unless you have a very tight connection - in which case it’s one of those times where you need to be first.
Mostly, I don’t need to be first.
I used to have a friend who always needed to be first.
When Kim and I traveled somewhere with her, she decided she didn’t need to carry her suitcase with her as she snaked through the line waiting to check in. While everyone else did the courteous but inconvenient thing, she dumped her suitcase near the front of the line and retrieved it when she got there.
There are always people like that. People who zoom around traffic in the breakdown lane because, why should they wait.
They don’t see and don’t care that they seldom benefit very much themselves and they often inconvenience everyone else.
Maggie and I were at a light the other day and a truck behind us got impatient and moved into the lane for traffic going the other way. It ran the red light and zoomed on ahead. A couple of minutes later we pulled up to the next light and there was the truck right beside us. It hadn’t gained anything.
When some small number of people need to be first, it results in no one moving.
I think that’s a metaphor for what we are starting to see politically and otherwise in my country.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 248. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe