How a 15-minute library visit helps you embrace the energy of uncertainty
Worldly cares and concerns drop away, curiosity and joy spring forward
It’s going to be a hot day. This I know because I made the mistake of looking at the weather app on my iPhone. My other mistake? Looking at my favorite news aggregator for the latest on, the state of gas prices nationwide, inflation at the grocery stores. And I checked on Facebook messenger the latest in a conversation with a collector/repairer of tension pole lamps.
It’s too much information as Dr. Julia DiGangi repeatedly tells me in her videos in her Energy365. This constant need for information saps my power, my leadership ability and my creativity. I become a needy member of the masses, a nobody. Every time I check my phone for the time, the temperature, the latest text message or voicemail, my ability to be the next Plath, next Charlotte Bronte or even Jane Austen vanishes like words in my live caption box. Poof! Gone for ever.
However, I did two things this morning to regain my ability to lead. I unleashed my curiosity, I untethered the most powerful machine I own: my brain. I let it loose in body’s back yard. Just let it go to sniff and investigate and wonder.
I read for 15 minutes as I am supposed to do for speech comprehension therapy. 15 minutes a day with my favorite book. I picked up a free battered copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, teamed it up with the audiobook shelved in the Libby app. I went to town and back with what might well become my chapter in this book. It’s all about Christmas, one of the coldest holidays in Christian history, read during what promises to be a really hot day.
What a delight, perhaps better than a custard bought at Giles’s custard as I did after meeting up with a writing group at the Wauwatosa Public Library.
So for 15 minutes, I savored the smell of a fir tree found at local city lot, I felt the brash bristle of tree branches against my cheek, gripped my brother’s hand with a mixture of terror, bravado and tension, waiting for the tree seller to throw the largest tree in the lot against me and my brother.
“Me and my brother — we’re not too little together.”
She pulled Neeley forward. The man looked at them — a thin girl of ten with starveling hollows in her cheeks but with the chin still baby round. He looked at the little boy with his fair hair and round blue eyes—Neely Nolan, all innocence and trust.
“Two ain’t fair,”yelped Punky.
“Shut your lousy trap,” advised the man with her all power in that hour. “These here kids is got nerve. Stand back, the rest of your. these kids is goin’ to have a show at this tree.”
The others made a wavering lane.
I’ll stop there, return to DiGangi’s latest lesson the energy of uncertainty. She talked about meeting leaders during the height of COVID. Nobody knew anything, theories and explanations about what was happening flew across the Internet with the energy of a thousand of comets. The leaders became the ones who said, “I don’t know what’s going on.” They said it repeatedly. The ‘starvlings’ to borrow A Tree Author Betsy Smith’s word became those who kept repeating what they read online. They lost power every time they repeat hearsay.
DiGangi talked about the uncertainty that surrounded Y2K when the United States plunged in the uncertainty that surrounded what would happen when the calendar rolled around to the year 2000. Americans didn’t put their heads down in portable computers otherwise known as iPhones. They didn’t constantly check to see what the weather would be on January 1. They didn’t refresh their phone browsers to see what world politicians were doing in the face of the dreaded new year, 2000.
That new year came and went without fanfare or even a hitch. Not too much different from the uncertainty that Francie Nolan and her brother faced with the Christmas tree that a Christmas tree vendor prepared to lob at them.
The Nolan siblings had no way of knowing at that moment whether the enormous tree, the size of a city park statue, would knock them down, hurt, make them the source of laughter, derision and mockery.
They faced that uncertainty, aplomb and naturally, closed eyes, gripping each other for dear life.
So that’s what 15 minutes of reading “A Tree” Grows did for me today on a day with 90 plus temperatures promised for this afternoon. What I don’t know today I face with curiosity. Already I’ve studied 15 vintage wood-engraving tools for their markings. I wonder what Renaud means, the provenance of an adorable little tool with a name that starts with a V and ends with this tiny engraving of pipe. I daydream about how the French, Swiss engravers used these old tools to make advertising and newspaper engravings. I wonder how they ended up in a now-closed Waukegan, Ill. print museum.
I resisted the temptation to go online to learn more about these tools. I resisted with all my might the temptation to message Facebook friends or even to email a Makerspace friend with a passion for wood engraving tools.
Instead, I’ll head to the library later for 15 minutes. Talk to the librarian at the information desk, get some ideas what books readily available might hold some clues to these tools I know own. If I feel it’s too hot, I’ll make that same discovery by phone. Failing that, I’ll wait till tomorrow night to meet that Makerspace friend to share my $15 purchase real time.
So I’m reclaiming my leadership right here and now. I won’t focus on mistakes made earlier today. I won’t dwell on the uncertainty that high temperatures might hold. I won’t even waste a nano second on my lunch and dinner plans.
No, now for now. Leadership awaits for me the moment I park my car in the free spots at Milwaukee Public Library. Let the clock start ticking and see what treasures I can borrow and what conversations I can I have in 15 minutes.
Who would have thought that day dreamer me could save the world? I’m already pinching myself. I’m so grateful.
Tell me what library books you’re grateful to have today.
