After my flop with volunteering on the Continental Divide Trail I started working on a committee that tries to expand recreational trails in town. Since I've benefited from other people's work on such trails many times in my life, maybe it is high time I contributed something. Yes, that is a bit of a guilt trip, but for some reason it doesn't matter in this case.
Everybody likes the old Chinese proverb of 'lighting one candle rather than cursing the darkness.' Can you think of a better application than a recreational trail in an American city? To me, trails are one of the few things that make life in a city worth living. Kunstler refers to the American landscape as "The Geography of Nowhere," due to our noisy automobile-sewers, big-box parking lots, nation-wide uniformity, etc.
It was a bizarre experience to attend the first meeting at a county-annex building in a strip mall. These days, county governments are bigger than the Federal Government during the Jefferson administration. It's been years since I've been in an office building like that: acoustic ceiling tiles, ghoulish fluorescent lights, cubicles. The poor devils who worked there looked so bored and miserable.
What tenacious optimism and follow-through the people on my committee have! They understand a hundred acronyms. They are good at the "game." My own ability at such things is quite limited, but it probably helps their morale and the committee's clout to have more people show up.
The Organization. Oh dear, it was all coming back to me now. There are only a couple people who really matter at any meeting; the rest are just audience. So what was the harm in letting my imagination run away? Instead of resisting feeling miserable about being in an Organization again, why not wallow in it? Think of it as noble and beautiful: the Suffering Servant of the book of Isaiah, or the voluntary suffering as portrayed in a Renaissance Pieta.
I'm glad I played along with this reverie, because it paid off a couple weeks later. Next time.
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