Here-and-Now Humility

There are ideas that shout. Here-and-Now Humility is not one of them. It waits quietly until the day you need it.

Strip it to the floor and you find an old instruction: look carefully, judge slowly, act decently. The new name exists because the old instruction keeps being forgotten.

At the cremation ground, every speech is honest and every ambition sounds smaller. Then the bus takes everyone back to the city, and by Tuesday the lesson is negotiable again.

In the end, life asks only whether we were awake while it happened. Print it on a card if you like. Better: print it on a habit.