Encountering the World Which Encounters You

I take walks around my city neighborhood every day, and I am starting to see the correlation between home owners (or renters) who make an effort to beautify their yard and porch and human beings who make an effort to beautify themselves.

I live in a kind of borderland between a “good” neighborhood and a “bad” neighborhood. It’s gritty (to use a word a local friend uses). There’s a lot of trash around sometimes. People don’t always curb their dogs. Someone has a toilet commode out as kind of bizarre yard art. A few houses are boarded up or condemned. When you make crack house jokes in my neighborhood, you’re not really making a joke because there are crack houses — or were, which are now boarded up.

But we have a cute park nearby. A little less nearby is an even more charming park with a pond, and everyone knows you don’t go there at night but it’s adorable in the daytime.

I look for the flowers and the small altars that my neighbors have put out to show that they care about beauty, that they have pride of ownership, that they have a few extra bucks to put into adding a spot of color to our shared environment. I hold nothing against those who don’t have the time or money to garden: some people show their self-respect by sweeping up especially carefully around their bit of sidewalk, making sure the lids are neatly on the garbage cans, dusting the window sills. When you walk the same streets every day with a beagle who needs to sniff every square inch, you notice the little things. You notice how the little details about someone’s home exterior communicate so much.

It is the same with our personal exteriors. Care taken with the appearance communicates a consideration for the people around us with whom we will be coming into contact. Adding the belt, shining the shoes, trimming the nose hair, applying a bright coat of lipstick, smoothing on a pair of pantyhose — these are not irritating little necessities imposed on us by an oppressive culture. They are the equivalent of hanging a fuschia plant on the porch, or putting a blooming geranium in the window, trimming the lawn so that rats don’t have a place to hide in the overgrown weeds, sweeping up the candy wrappers that got loose when the sanitation workers dumped the trash into their truck.

[A couple blocks away from Casa de PeaceBang.]

We tend to buy the old argument that taking care with one’s appearance and fussing with what we’re going to wear and how we’re going to cut our hair is vain and selfish. I disagree. OF course there are vain people who are obsessed with their appearance. There are also vain people who are obsessed with their prayer lives. Think about this: the time and attention it takes any of us be well-groomed and nicely put together is time spent preparing to encounter the world. Sitting before a mirror or choosing clothes and accessories carefully can be an act of conscious engagement, something we do out of a sense of grateful obligation and desire to being a clean and respectable property on the block, if you will.

The next time you get a rush of joy from the pretty scarf around your neck or get excited about your awesome new shoes, don’t be embarrassed. It’s not at all shallow or silly to be happy about contributing a bit of beauty to the neighborhood.