I’ve been very tired lately.

Not that I’ve been doing a lot. I’ve just been feeling a lot. Feeling can be exhausting. Still, I can’t imagine living without feeling as my north star.

I’m not sure why exactly, but the recollection of an e. e. cummings poem came to me this morning.  Fifteen years ago, a man gave me a card, hand-printed with Cummings’ lines. Perhaps it stood as a promise which was never fulfilled. Undeniably, the sentiment really resonated with me.

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the World….

As I’m writing down my thoughts now, my dog is at the vet’s getting a cracked tooth pulled. I’m conscious of how hollow coming home after errands today seemed when I couldn’t see her snout peak through the back door as I opened it.

My bestie has been in town.  She’s moving back after over a decade living in California. While she joined me for a socially distanced dinner (We tore into a couple fine midwestern cobbs of corn from opposite ends of my table.), we listened to favorite tunes from our high school years, courtesy of Spotify. Damn if she doesn’t know every word to every Joni Mitchell song ever recorded.

Lately, I’ve shed a few tears over TV news segments; words exchanged with the family of Ahmaud Arbery or the mothers of military men killed in Afghanistan, reportedly by Taliban fighters with financial support from Russia.

I often find tiny gestures or quirks in character or style endearing beyond words. Even when I do not personally know someone, I feel incredible kinship when they express loss and grief, deep feelings. Under unimaginable circumstances, under unexpected scrutiny, they often exude a grace that’s hard for me to even fathom.

Buoyant or devasted. The range of feelings is wide. I think that having a human life requires us to feel or — or we’re doing  something wrong.

There are so many things I don’t like about this country’s current leadership. There are things I don’t like about policies or the inequitable distribution of wealth and power, the focus on spinning messages instead of delivering truth.

But what upsets me the most is the absence of feeling, of empathy and compassion.  I can’t imagine efforts by many politicians to take away health insurance coverage during a pandemic when forty million people have lost their jobs.

Just when I was afraid that feeling had become so unfashionable, so beyond the comfortable reporting of trends and analytics, convinced that human feeling was destined to go the way of the mini-skirt and suspenders, I saw a commercial which featured a short video segment of two toddlers hugging on a street in NYC.  I think one of the fathers recorded the scene last September.

The short clip of Maxwell and Finnegan went viral last fall although I saw it for the first time only recently. When the video was taken, the pair was around two years-old. I believe that they were in some sort of music class together.

One child is black, and one is white. Both are precious!

When they see each other on a city sidewalk, then run towards each other with unrestrained delight and unconditional love, we can all succumb to the wonder of childhood. Our natural state is joy and most people instinctually move in the direction of friendship.

I didn’t see their appearance on the Ellen Show, but I understand these toddlers and their parents made the celebrity rounds. Seeing the sequence of their friendship folded into a commercial recently came at the perfect time.

The image of them running towards each other and sharing a heart-felt embrace embodies a kind of hope so many of us tired souls are longing for.

Understanding that “feeling is first” is no small thing.