Yet they connect to produce a nourishing, life-sustaining, psychological soup. These seemingly random moments emerge from events never intended to affect our lives and that couldn’t yield much on their own-fragments of an overheard conversation, a scene from a TV show, a classified ad, a chance meeting with someone at a checkout counter. Yet at any moment, some seemingly random encounter can link into our network of experiences to produce or to promise a result we could never have planned or expected. Most of us experience life as a dynamic, chaotic flow. Along the way, I also learned that I’d be expected to exercise a level of consumption (of purchased goods and paid-for services) to match my knowledge, income, and social status.īut I gradually came to understand that lives that appear to follow that expected trajectory have actually been assembled from a small measure of reaping and a large, continuously growing collection of gleanings. The society in which I grew up taught me that a good life requires a relatively smooth linear passage from the seeds of a stable, two-parent childhood and some level of formal, institutional learning (“education,” and the more, the better) to the harvest of long-term, secure-but-challenging employment that includes health insurance and the promise of a fat retirement account. The institutions we’ve been conditioned to trust and believe in seem to be crumbling, losing credibility, and changing at a such a breath-sucking pace we can’t keep up. To cite a common cliché, we live in disruptive times. Toss those gleanings into a savory broth with a handful of fresh herbs and a cup or two of lentils, and they often add up to a tasty soup or stir-fry. We gather the handful of young green beans that popped forth from a few still-green plants. We glean those two onions whose necks didn’t seal (so they won’t keep). For the gardener, we glean by collecting those tomatoes and peppers that lie among the blackened wreckage of the first killing frost.
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