I’m one of those people. You know the type.
Tell me I’m loading the dishwasher wrong, and I’m liable to load it even more wrong. Tell me the cluttered refrigerator packed with leftovers is evidence that I’m emotionally unhinged, and I’ll show you unhinged. I’ll find three more margarine tubs, fill them with Sunday’s lasagna, and wedge them behind the milk.
Most of us do not particularly enjoy being improved by other people. Perhaps our resistance is pride. Perhaps the urge to correct everyone else is a little prideful too. Either way, I wonder whether changing someone’s mind is nearly as important as we think it is.
Occasionally, something more dramatic happens. We encounter a person, a book, an idea, or a work of art that does more than change what we think.
It changes how we live.
Wendell Berry lived a life that I have long admired. His writings are remarkable to me. They don’t demand that I change my life. They simply help me believe in something that is wider and longer and higher and deeper than my own circle of life.
Berry, the Kentucky farmer, poet, novelist, and essayist, once described himself as a “bad-weather churchgoer.” He has never struck me as a man particularly interested in appearing religious. He seems more interested in what our beliefs actually require of us once church is over.
Berry’s writing has made me think differently about the land beneath our feet, the towns where we live, and the people we routinely pass without noticing. But if he has only made me think differently, I have probably missed his point. It is one thing to say creation is sacred. It is another thing to take care of a patch of ground.
When I look back across my own life, the people who changed me most were rarely the people who gave me instructions about how I ought to live. I once knew a Marine who helped change me, although it was never his intent.
I was one of many kids who grew up learning about golf and life at Boots Adams Golf Club, where a crew-cut, bespectacled Edward Muir “Tid” Sweet worked in the golf shop. When he had a spare moment, Tid engaged in thousands of spirited putting matches against junior golfers.
He taught me to bear down over a four-foot putt when the match was on the line. He beat me about as often as I beat him. He believed competition deserved your full attention. If you were going to play, then play.
But that is not the most important thing he taught me.
Tid noticed people.
Age did not matter much to him. Neither did status, social standing, pedigree, or whether you were particularly useful to him. Somewhere along the way, watching that former Marine behind the counter at a golf shop, I learned something about looking another person in the eye and recognizing that his life was every bit as real and complicated and important to him as mine was to me.
Tid never sat me down and explained any of this. That is precisely the point. He lived it. There are far too many you’re loading the dishwasher wrong admonitions we forget before the day is over. And then there are a handful of words, gestures, and small kindnesses we carry around for the rest of our lives.
My parents had the biggest impact on my life. But the adults who came alongside me and taught me without any obligation to do so are remarkable. Tid helped me grow up—morph from kid to young man. It happened slowly, almost invisibly, through many ordinary moments. You wake up decades later and realize that some part of who you have become came from living beside people like Tid.
Maybe this is why we are so resistant to people who are determined to change our minds with words or social media posts. Deep down, we understand that words are cheap.
A life is harder to argue with.
Funny how a putting contest between a boy and a Marine can follow you around for the rest of your life.
Which is considerably more impressive than teaching me how to load a dishwasher.
Although, for the record, I am still doing that my way.
