Imagine embracing the ephemeral as a discipline of not only conceding our mortality as a condition but receiving our mortality as a gift. It is winter’s loss that grants us fall’s fire.
— James K. A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time
EMILY. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?
— Thornton Wilder, Our Town, Act III
Limitations and Locatability
I don’t know if it’s just me, but so far 2025 has felt like taking a 30 mph turn at 60, like a slingshot I never asked for and didn’t see coming. I’ve found it very difficult to make time for writing recently (I can hear a friend jesting, “Your post may be late, but it’s not on time”), or to make space for much that is “meaningful” in general, whatever that means. It’s discouraging to feel so inhibited (emotionally; physically for the limits of the calendar and body and work which demands more than its due; spiritually for lack thereof). And it’s a beautiful thing, really, getting to attend floor hockey practices, taking my kids snowboarding or to Build Days at the Home Depot, to be present (I mean really, really there) in birthday celebrations, and to work hard at a job—even, especially, those less-than-thrilling days—to put food on the table. There are surely millions of little decisions peppered throughout it all that can influence what these rhythms look and feel and flow like, but in a big way, this is life. This is how things go. We must find a way to do it all well, and to accept our limitations.
By “do it all well,” I don’t mean we need to find ways to be more productive and then, countering all research on the subject, somehow happy about our godlike efficiency. No, what I really mean is to grab hold of those things amidst the whirlwind that have lasting human value: Becoming the best husband and father I can; being a true neighbor and friend; learning to be a kinder person when aggressive othering and chest-puffing and playground-bullying are the ways some are trying to make things happen in the world.
I played George Gibbs in Thorton Wilder’s Our Town my freshman year in college, and even then did not realize my life while I lived it. It is so hard; perhaps the hardest thing of all for us to do. Recently rereading the play I was struck by how much, how incredibly much it sounded like Ecclesiastes; struck as well by how incredibly much of the script I’d missed. (But remember: I was a freshman who had just received and been distracted by the glory of a leading role. But remember: There will always be something to distract. We really don’t understand, do we?) And yes, I did read a play for fun.
The first act is a perusal, companioned by the fourth-wall-oblivious Stage Manager, of a town to define the word “ordinary” by: the fictional Grover’s Corners, NH. Small, but not too small; a town drunk or two, but nothing terribly exciting in any sense of the word to speak of. Conversations on the weather dominate friendly relations. Doctors and newspapers and choir practice and baseball find their place in the mundane comings and goings of incredibly average people. But it’s in such places wonder blooms.
There’s a scene at the end of the first act which, though I was in it, did not strike me until my reread for the miracle it was. George and his sister Rebecca are up late looking at the moon when she, of a sudden, recounts a seemingly random and recent memory. Here it is in its small entirety.
REBECCA. I never told you about that letter Jane Crofut got from her minister when she was sick. He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: It said: “Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm, Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America.”
GEORGE. What’s funny about that?
REBECCA. But listen, it’s not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God,—that’s what it said on the envelope.
GEORGE. What do you know!
REBECCA. Yep, and the postman brought it just the same.
GEORGE. What do you know!
That’s it. That’s the whole interaction.
When I played George, the best I could make of this apparent tangent was cute entertainment of a young, sick girl on the part of the minister, and maybe a bit of relational context on the Gibbs. As a workaday father, this little scene slammed like a freight train into my own small entirety—my town, if you will. It hit home.
We never do meet Jane Crofut, but I can only assume she’s just as ordinary as the rest of the bunch, the part of the story of Grover’s Corners we do see. Maybe more so. Perhaps she’s even as ordinary as me; yet in the mind of God, just as locatable by him as by the postman. “Yes, I know where he is,” they might say together. “I send messages there often.”
What do you know.
Happiness
Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!”
“I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”
— Luke 19:39-40
It is often the small, the odd, the overlooked voice which carries the most wisdom. In Our Town, this is proven true more than once by the flitty, hardly-present gossip Mrs. Louella Soames. We write her off easily enough during Act I, but it’s her words we’re left with at the end of Act II after—spoiler alert, and one of a few—George Gibbs marries Emily Webb. (Of course, there really was nothing special about the small, unassuming ceremony.) “Aren’t they a lovely couple?” Soames asks, though no one in particular seems to be listening. “Oh, I’ve never been to such a nice wedding, I’m sure they’ll be happy. I always say: Happiness—that’s the great thing. The important thing is to be happy.”
Is this naïve? Or is this a surprisingly, shockingly wise observation from a tertiary character? The Teacher tells us, after all, “I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” And here’s the kicker: “I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live” (Eccl. 3:10-12). “Happiness—that’s the great thing.” We see in scripture and a visit to Grover’s Corners that this doesn’t come from pursuit of self-interest on any scale but from small and simple acts which tie people and communities together. These are the ingredients of a soil which can sustain life.
I’m put in mind of C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce in which people are always moving in either one or another direction: either becoming less and less able to stand the challenges and the beauties of the company of others, more and more physically isolated in their selfishness and ensuing anxieties (a self-imposed hell), or else more and more enjoined to those they meet along the way as they move toward others and community and heaven. Our Town, I think, is a glimpse of what we might see on the latter path.
People tend to make small decisions in Grover’s Corners. I don’t mean they make insignificant choices, but that the focal point of their paradigm is here, local, small in scope. Communal. Mr. Webb travels for some work but shows an affectionate knowledge of his town and a quiet love stoked, stirred, energized by his family. Another character has a chance to go away to college but stays to work his uncle’s farm. Some stories might paint these as missed opportunities and a wasting away in obscurity. Wilder shows us the opposite is true, that this is where we are, in fact, seen. Here is where the magic happens.
And when is our garden bed. Our “contingency is not a curse,” writes James K. A. Smith in his book How to Inhabit Time. Our limitations are gifts and a focusing of ourselves. They are the context we have to work with and the garden from which we can bring a feast, or not. These limits of mine, my veritably spiritual exhaustion, what can it all teach me? How can I take and stoke them to a happiness—not for myself only, but so others might warm themselves by it? Probably not by trying harder to control my situation, getting faster and louder and colder and squeezing it all to death. Not by putting Tyler first. More likely by finding ways to reconnect with people, love them more, and to remember where and when I am. To remember how deeply contingent and needy and here I am.
It’s worth some thought.
Paying Due Attention
I told you already there were spoilers. Here’s another fair warning, and your last.
Emily (Webb) Gibbs dies.
Our beloved Stage Manager, travelling back through the fourth wall as easily as we forget to notice life, affirms Emily’s desire to live a day over. This, despite warnings from the fellow Dead of Grover’s Corners she’s joined. “No!” says her mother-in-law. “At least choose an unimportant day. Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.”
Important enough.
The days I feel like lead. The days which end much as they began, leaving only a blur of memories between (“losses,” as Christian Wiman calls them in “The Drift of the World”). The days of board games and Legos and making dinner with my wife, of fighting the killing boredom of winter because it’s simply too cold to go outside. Summer days of “finger-pulls” on the swing set or playing catch or stuffing snakes in garden bags so they don’t nest in the siding; Fall walks; trying, failing, trying again to be a more patient daddy. Crying on the inside while she cries on the out. Weddings. Wrestling with God. Three-year-old, six-year-old, nine-year-old belly laughs that become hiccups. Goodnight hugs.
Important enough. Life is important enough.
EMILY. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?
STAGE MANAGER. No— Saints and poets, maybe. They do some.
A bit of honesty: I’ve been wrestling with an emotion that feels quite new to me, or at least new in its intensity. Fear. “My town” is a beautiful place, my marvelous contingency itself contingent on so many others. And Jake Romm was right in his “Absence and Desire”: earthly love is—at least in part—the fear of loss. Or maybe more accurately, earthly love contains the fear of loss. But it is not lost on me that my fear itself can be its own worst enemy. Sometimes the tighter we squeeze things, the slipperier they get. Perhaps, as Smith says, we ought to “shepherd the wind” rather than chase it. My town won’t be my town if I cannot be the kind, fierce-loving, open-handed servant of that small entirety.
“They don’t—understand—do they?” asks Emily of a fellow Dead while George sobs convulsively at her feet—her gravestone. “No dear,” the response. “They don’t understand.”
I dearly want to after reading Wilder’s masterful work, but perhaps I miss the point. Perhaps it is enough to understand that we cannot understand as much as we’d like to or think we do. Maybe we let go a little more, put our own gain aside and quit strangling our gasping towns and words and world so we can notice it all for just a moment.
I wrote a poem after this brush with Our Town that I’d like to share with you soon, but for now, friends, let your contingency and lack of understanding be enough—your lot, and a starting point. On my end, I’ll be stoking this to happiness the best I can in the hopes it might warm another.
I wish you the same warmth, wherever and whenever you are.
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Thanks so much for reading! You honor me with your time.
Again — powerful and poignant. Your thoughts remind me of Ecclesiastes 3:11 “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” Personally, I think that one of the joys of heaven will be to truly see the work of the Painter and to fully know the story that the Author is telling, in which we are His supporting characters.
This is a wonderful and thought-provoking piece, Tyler. “It is important enough.” That made me tear up. How many days will I miss when they’re gone because I didn’t give them their due importance at the time as you pointed out? So good. So much to think about. And Ecclesiastes is my favorite book in Scripture.