Live. Live. Live.

I don't know how many Zoom webinars and seminars and meetings I have zoned in and out of in the last five months. Far, far too many. Yesterday, I found myself watching the disembodied face of a man I have never met, on yet another Zoom webinar, when I suddenly had to clutch at falling tears before they hit my keyboard.

He's a parent here at the school. We had invited him to share with our students how he's moving forward through this time. A student asked him, "What three words would you want students to hold onto, going into this school year?" 

He had been gently authentic for an hour already, which made me eager to hear his answer, but this is the moment that landed like a pebble in a still pond: He paused, then raised his (somewhat battered) water bottle and pointed to one of the many stickers. "You can't read this from there," he said, "but Oscar Wilde, an English playwright, said that 'To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people simply exist.'" He paused again and then softly, softly said, "My three words are Live. Live. Live. We must make sure we keep really living." 

We must. I've moved to a new country and started a new job. Even so, the last few months feel like I've been wandering through shadows lit mostly by the blue glow of my many screens, haunted by an endless and endlessly grim news feed. Time to rise, shake off the electronic anodyne effect, and live, live, live.

I'm starting this blog with a challenge to myself: To find a meaningful word for living each day. Just one. It doesn't need to be happy or positive or angry or haunted, just living. Today's word is Live.

Le Chaim. To Life.

By the way, turns out the Oscar Wilde quote is part of a longer, 1891 essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism. It's a fascinating read that makes the compelling point that it's fundamentally immoral for those who have private property to "be generous" and alleviate the suffering of those who are kept poor by the nature of capitalism and the very existence of private property. Some parallels to the current conversation around race and privilege. Here's the immediate context:

"An enormously wealthy merchant may be – often is – at every moment of his life at the mercy of things that are not under his control. If the wind blows an extra point or so, or the weather suddenly changes, or some trivial thing happens, his ship may go down, his speculations may go wrong, and he finds himself a poor man, with his social position quite gone. Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance. With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."