Small Miracles - Mar 21 2021

 

Small Miracles

Mar 21 2021

Water

at the turn of a tap.

The thermostat

as simple as touch.

Floor-to-ceiling glass

made from coarse brown sand

walling me off from the world.

And just imagine

no electricity

painless dentistry

or modern plumbing,

the basic flush

as mysterious to me

as Schrodinger's cat.

The many small miracles

of daily life

we take thoughtlessly for granted.

Miracles

that are hardly miraculous,

bestowed not by gods, and their fickle passions

but by generations of clever men

on whose shoulders we stand;

our inheritance

deserved or not.

And how small acts of gratitude

can fill us with wonder.

Nose pressed up against the glass

looking out.

From a bright warm room

into the cold and dark.

Intentional acts of gratitude make us happier. I suppose this poem is just such an exercise.

The trouble is, instead of gratitude, we simply take things for granted. We habituate too quickly and easily, even to the revolutionary new. Think about your smartphone, which so quickly transformed from an envied technological wonder to an everyday – and suddenly essential -- appliance. We lack the historical perspective to appreciate our good fortune and comfortable lives, and we fail to consider the complexity, specialization, and interdependent systems that make daily life in a big city possible. Just picture an average supermarket: fully stocked, everything we want and need right there – fresh and prepared, canned and packaged, frozen and bulk, as always. Except, of course, it was almost never so! Or a simple wall socket: who ever thinks about the generators, transformers, and high tension wires upstream, or the complicated controllers that 24/7 keep power generation and consumption in perfect instantaneous balance? Electricity, the beating heart of civilization as we know it, just there to plug into.

We don't even appreciate our own good health. At least not until we lose it. For example, the simple act of urination seems unremarkable; in fact, often a bother to have to get up and go. But after having your kidneys fail, how transcendent would it feel after a successful transplant to be finally untethered from the dialysis machine and able to watch that powerful stream of beautiful golden liquid flowing freely? (Yes, I actually do briefly reflect on this every time I pee! It's an exercise in empathy, as well as gratitude. And you don't have to be a nephrologist to do it.)

A simple flush toilet is a great example of what's been called “the delusion of explanatory depth”. Explanatory depth is the certainty that you know how everyday things work. The delusion becomes apparent when you actually try to sit down and explain, and are forced to realize your ignorance about the basic things we take for granted. And just as I don't know how a toilet really works, neither do I have any idea how sand gets transformed into glass; or have ever imagined what it would have been like to live in a closed structure completely impervious to light.

Put someone from a century ago in a time machine and whisk him to the present and what we regard as mundane would to him seem miraculous. Words like “wonder” suggest an ecstatic spiritual or religious experience. But there is also wonder in the everyday if you slow down, step back, and take the longer view.