While making breakfast this morning, I was thinking about what to write about. Apple’s latest moral statements came to mind, so did the hypocrisy of murder laws enforced on unborn babies in conjunction with abortion laws, or the President’s spendy campaign to sell the American public on the nation’s new health care law. But those have all be covered, and you can click the links to read excellent commentary on them all. So, what commentary do I leave my readers with?
As I reached for my coffee mug, the answer came to my hands, literally.
The mug I selected for my coffee this morning is a mug I’ve had for years. It has flowers in a fun design and a simple beige color. There isn’t anything about it that is too different from the dozen other mugs I have in my cabinet, except that this mug reads “LIFE IS GOOD” in nicely scripted letters on the front.
Its short, simple message puts me in a good mood every time I see it. Life is good. How easily those three words bring a flood of memories to me, more ordinary memories like the far-away friend who excitedly called to see how my first day of work was or my sister facebooking me to tell me that my mother has lovingly began referring to my sister by my chosen nickname for her, to the more significant life events like a friend’s Ordination to the Catholic Priesthood or the upcoming wedding of a dear friend. Life is good, and it struck this morning how rarely I reflect on that.
I’ve been reading “Reading Lolita in Tehran” by Azar Nafisi this week. It’s a compelling memoir of a literature professor, her six female students, and their hidden journey through forbidden novels in Iran. Nafisi storytelling is captivating as she weaves in details of each girls’ family, character traits she admired in each of her students (whom she affectionately calls ‘her girls’), how the Iranian regime had seized their lives, and how they searched for and at times found peace in an oppressive society.
Though every other page tells of human rights violations and unjust regulations on human lives, Nafisi writes to inspire life within the reader. Such was this anecdote in the book.
Manna had once written about a pair of pink socks for which she was reprimanded by the Muslim Students’ Association. When she complained to a favorite professor, he started teasing her about how she had already ensnared and trapped her man, Nima, and did not need the pink socks to entrap him further.
These students, like the rest of their generation, were different from mine in one fundamental aspect. My generation complained of a loss, a void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exiles in our own country. Yet we had a past to compare with the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was a half articulated desire, something they had never had. It was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry.
I wonder if right now, at this moment, I were to turn to the people sitting next to me in this cafe in a country that is not Iran and talk to them about life in Tehran, how they would react. Would they condemn the tortures, the executions and the extreme acts of aggression? I think they would. But what about the acts of transgression on our ordinary lives, like the desire to wear pink socks?
Life is good. Reading that, contemplating the moments of my own life, and sipping my coffee, I’m inspired to look for and cherish the good in every moment of life. It’s just too good not too!
Funny, the last couple of days I have also been thinking about how good my life is. Thanks be to God.