Appreciations

When I was 16 years old, I spent a year in Nagasaki, Japan as a Rotary Club exchange student. Four different families opened their homes to me and took care of me as if I was their own son. Looking back, I can’t believe my American parents let me go half-way around the world and stay with total strangers—strangers who had been mortal enemies of this country just 25 years previously. (Thank you Mom and Dad for letting me go. I had no idea what a big deal it is for a parent to let their children go off into the world until many years later when I myself was a parent watching my daughter go off—and she was only going to college a few hundred miles away.)

Looking back, I remember so many moments of kindness—from my host families, teachers, friends and also from complete strangers. Everyone helping me find my way in a culture that was so different from anything I had ever encountered. I had never been out of the United States, and at first I couldn’t even really believe that people didn’t understand English. I mean, of course I knew they spoke Japanese, but to my naïve American ears, English was not one language among many, but was language itself. The year in another culture opened me to the possibility and the wonder of difference. Many of my assumptions about the way life is are just one choice among many alternatives.

In 1969, when I went, westerners were still a rarity away from the city center of Nagasaki, a prosperous and hilly city of 400,000 residents. In the outskirts of the city, away from the Western-style affluence of the downtown, little children would startle at my blond hair and strange appearance and would run fearfully to their mothers calling ‘Henna gaijin! Henna gaijin!’ (weird foreigner). Their mothers would shush them and look embarrassed. I would smile and do my best to look non-threatening. (OK, this didn’t happen all the time, but even having a few young children run screaming to their mothers at the sight of you is an impressive and memorable memory.)

But what caught my mind this morning about Japan is the New Year’s Day celebration I remember from my time there. New Year’s Eve was not a big deal, it was New Year’s Day that was the real event. We dressed in our fancy kimonos and went together to the main Shinto Shrine of the city where thousands were gathered to celebrate the coming of the New Year. We ate delicious food, wished for good fortune in the coming years and remembered our ancestors—those who had come before us and made our lives possible. And then, every time for the next few days and weeks when you saw someone for the first time, you made a big deal out of your first meeting of the New Year. A new beginning.

So as the New Year bears down on us to end this weird and dangerous year, I’m thinking with gratitude of those many people who sheltered and protected me, a vulnerable and competent man-child far from home. And all of us who are here at this unsettled time have made it this far because of the kindness of so many people—most of whom we will never know.

Perhaps these next few days are a good time to remember all the acts of kindness and support that have helped us get to this point—especially the ones who have been there for us over these past twelve unprecedented months. The old friends and acquaintances we have taken socially distanced walks with, the family we have zoomed with or met with as safely as we could, and the new people who have virtually and otherwise come into our lives. And also the myriad people who have grown our food and driven it to the supermarket and worked in the supermarket on eight-hour shifts while we have run in and run out to lower our chances of infection. And the nurses and doctors and attendants. The fire fighters, the essential workers who have shouldered the risk for us all.

We are supported by a web of life that covers the whole earth. As we consider this reality of interdependence it feels appropriate to send our thanks out to everyone we know and everyone we don’t know, in appreciation of their role in our ongoing life of wonder, weirdness and difficulty.