I read a lot, and I mean A LOT. I am bookworm and pretty proud of it. For many years, thanks to my undergraduate thesis, my specialty was 20th century African American women’s literature. There’s no “chick” in this “lit” … that’s for sure. Lately, I’ve been reading more good novels, good stories, than good literature, but my long-running book club keeps me challenged all the same. Recently, we read “The Brothers K” by David James Duncan, and there was an excerpt that struck me as terribly profound and applicable to my life with Lilly, at the same time.
On page 429, while discussing the various kinds of problems his brothers face, Kincaid (the narrator) says this: “There are kinds of human problems which really do seem, as our tidy expressions would have it, to ‘come to a head’ and ‘demand to be dealt with.’ But there are also problems, often just as serious, which come to nothing that we can recognize or openly deal with. Some long-lived insidious problems simply slip us off to one side of ourselves. Some gently rob us of just enough energy or faith so that days which once took place on a horizontal plane become an endess series of uphill slogs. And, some — like high water working year after year at the roots of a riverside tree — quietly undercut our trust or our hope, our sense of place, or of humor, our ability to emphathize, or to feel enthused, and we don’t sense impending danger, we don’t feel the damage at all, till one day, to our amazement, we find ourselves crashing to the ground.”
I don’t mean for this to be a morose Monday, but that paragraph really jumped out at me. It explained how I sometimes feel in the face of training failure … especially when things do seem to be going really well and a tiny hope dawns that the end of the uphill slog may be near.
So pardon my literary diversion today, but it seemed apropos.
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