Shrug

Taking a walk in autumnal (!) Michigan.

I was in Cleveland, Ohio for the last two weeks of November, and took a three-hour drive to Michigan to visit my friends Jenny and Ken and their two children, Grace and Kate. We had a lot of fun playing with the tent their uncle had just given them -- it's a very light indoor tent and 21-month old Kate kept barreling into the tent, ostensibly through the door. She ended up moving the tent throughout the living room each time she entered it. I got caught up on my princesses with a new puzzle book Grace had -- I'd completely forgotten that Sleeping Beauty is also known as Princess Aurora. Little did I know, that knowledge would come in handy during a Trivial Pursuit game a few days later!

The theme of storage came up both in Ohio and Michigan: Jenny has things in storage since their house has been on the market, and we exchanged some items in her storage container while I was there. In Ohio my sister, brother-in-law, and I helped my Mom get rid of some items. Many of those items turned out to be ours! I'd forgotten that I'd stored things in her attic like childhood awards and crafts. These exercises were very good for me since I'm continuing to reduce what I store here and what I consider taking with me to Argentina. Some things are non-negotiable, like photo albums. Other things, like books, are beginning to seem easily replaceable at a future date, if ever. With other things like childhood items, I've tried to save a representative few.

"We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?" That's a line from Atlas Shrugged, and it really speaks to me about so much of my life. I take far too much far too seriously. Really, if I get rid of too much or too little, in the end it won't really matter. I'm bound to make some mistakes or mis-judgments in this process.

The title of Atlas Shrugged comes from a conversation between two of the protagonists:

D'Anconia: "If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders -- what would you tell him to do?"

Reardon: "I...don't know. What...could he do? What would you tell him?"

D'Anconia: "To shrug."