bearing burdens

some thoughts from Christmas break.

bearing burdens, big Egg boxes and Home Depot and Amazon.com, long and narrow umbrella shapes and shoe shaped and yes, egg shaped. Christmas in a box, from the have-muches in California and Wisconsin and Maine to the have-lesses in Kentucky, and they are full of Barbie dolls and pocket knives and Axe body wash and everything that makes Christmas nice.

so many boxes! huge boxes weight 12 pounds and wee little boxes make my back crack. you bend down to heft up this ginormo box and it's like picking up an empty milk carton and feeling it fly up in the air because you used too many muscles. and then when you balance three of these feather boxes, everyone is so super impressed with your massive muscles. but you aren't using muscles at all. and then when you are bent all over double with a tiny shoe box full of bullets or gravel or whatever the hell they put in it, people are probably thinking (if they bothered to think about it) that you should at least be carrying three or four shoeboxes because they don't know that your box is full of bullets!

So life. We all watch each other carry around our crap. Sometimes it is very large, sometimes it is very small. We judge each other's crap, and we judge how much crap other people can carry gracefully. But we don't know how heavy it is. We don't know if the Big Crap that she has is a box of gravel or a box of feather pillows. We don't know if that shoebox has shoes or wrenches. So we judge people and how strong they are or how fast they move based on the size of the burden that they're carrying, but really, we don't know how heavy the burden is. It's wisest not to waste time judging other people's burdens at all, I think.