When I worked in restaurants, being “in the weeds” meant you were up to your eyeballs in orders, trying to make sense of everything and get the food out, and kindly don’t talk to me right now unless you are here to help. When I was writing for the Coast Guard, it meant something different.
If you were in a meeting and someone said you were “in the weeds,” it meant you were too far down into the finer details to see the big picture. You needed to zoom out.
Last night, watching the sun and blue sky battling against a weekend’s worth of gray clouds, or this morning, skateboarding around the Oxford Conservation Park and cemetery, “in the weeds” means looking from a different perspective. It is looking at the sky from the terrestrial perspective of being in the weeds. And it shifts things.
It is a way of being grounded, balancing lofty with land. There are times when it is helpful to look closer.
There is a non-profit organization called “The Moth,” which is dedicated to storytelling; to helping people tell their stories, “live, onstage, and without notes.” If we know each other’s stories, we become human to one another. I’m just beginning a book they put together called “Occasional Magic: True Stories About Defying the Impossible.” It’s a collection of stories told on stage, collected around a theme, some by famous people, some by people you’ll meet along the way. As for the title, it:
comes from a story told by Vietnam veteran Larry Kerr. It’s about his intense love for a young woman named Omie, whom he describes as “smart, meltingly lovely, and strong, with a fierce belief in the possibility of occasional magic.”
Occasional magic refers to those moments of beauty, wonder, and clarity, often stumbled upon, where we suddenly see a piece of truth about our life.
(from the introduction by Catherine Burns)
What if we took the time to get to know people’s stories? Like each of us, stories can be everyday, they can be epic, they can be heartbreaking, they can be uplifting, they can be tragic, they can be miraculous, they can be filled with hope, they can be funny, or some combination of each of those and more. There are more stories than people. And in taking the time to get to know them, we recognize ourselves in each other.
Maybe, on Memorial Day, we can wrap our minds and hearts around the stories of the men and women who have died while serving our country. We can remember them not as numbers or statistics, or even names, but as individuals, with stories and connections; with families, dreams, hometowns, friends; and think about the thread that they are, woven into the tapestry that is our collective story. Each thread is a story, each story a person.
These are stories to remember. And if you remember their stories, tell them.
“Sharing tales of those we’ve lost is how we keep from really losing them.”
Mitch Albom
Today, as I think about being in the weeds, I think about shifting my perspective, being grounded, being connected, seeing into the heart of something too easily overlooked. I think about people and their stories, and remembering them.
