I was doing some gardening the other day and found myself piling up vines of morning glory I was pulling out.  I love morning glory, but they completely took over the last couple years.  I let them go last year because it felt sacrilegious to pull them like common weeds.  This year I had no reservations.  All those seeds from last years crops became tenacious tendrils that snaked their way through every flower bed, bush and even sidewalk cracks.  It was way too much of a good thing.

As I stood over a three foot wide, foot high pile of entwined cast offs, I couldn’t help thinking how strange it seemed to be treating a beloved flower like weeds.  It’s because they had become common.  They were no longer special.

We tend to ignore the common things around us.  It’s natural to be more enthralled with the exotic than the mundane.  In the spring, the robins are everywhere, and while they’re welcome as a sign of warmer weather on the way, we don’t really pay much attention.  I’d much rather see the bold colors of a cardinal in a forsythia bush.

We do it to each other too.  The good looking are popular and often get further in life while the average (common) folks are overlooked.

Aside from looks, we see people everyday whom we ignore.  We have our friends, our circles of influence.  Who cares about strangers, right?  How many of your neighbors’ names do you know? What do you know about people you work with that you aren’t in direct contact with throughout the day, or even those you talk to a lot? I worked where I am now for over a year before learning that two other guys there shared my love of big band music .

Who knows what interesting people surround you? There are whole worlds to discover in your daily life.  You’ve got to poke your head up and look around once in a while.  Put down the phone, turn off the TV, get off the computer or tablet (after you’ve read my post) and go explore!  Take an interest in the common.

P.S.  They’re still really pretty.

Here’s something I wrote several years ago after watching Angela’s Ashes, a film based on the autobiographical book by Frank McCourt.  It was before 2008, before the Great Recession.  I think it applies to many more people now.

First, the excerpt that inspired me, spoken by a school teacher who sees the inequality to which the boys in his class are subject.

“It’s a disgrace that boys like McCourt, Clark and Kennedy have to hew wood and draw water in this so-called free and independent Ireland that keeps a class system foisted on us by the English.  Well, it disgusts me.  We throw our talented children under the dung heap.  If this is the end of school for you, you must get out of this country, boys, and go to America.”

Reaction:

So, where do we go? Where is today’s “Land of Opportunity”?  Where is hope? Perhaps the persistence and propagation of social ills and lack of great men and women of leadership is due to the lost resources of the bright minds, ingenuities and energies of a new generation, squandered by forces that care only of economics and power, and overwhelmed by a rotting corpse we call “old money”, the establishment, the status quo.

Worse yet is the new “consumption” [old word for tuberculosis] , apathy, that erodes not physical health, but compassion, intellect, and any sense of unity as the collective consciousness of a nation lapses into a coma, leaving reality to blow at random like a cold foreboding wind that aches the bones and opens the eyes of those few it touches.

And as their raspy throats cough up their warning cries, their stories fade to silence as the cold wind snakes along the grayest lowlands, never felt by those with sunshades on and fences built around their hilltop estates.