Other than that, how did you like the play?

taken from: http://annak.smugmug.com/gallery/5691633_NZqfy#350962380_7LL2bI was talking to my mom today and she said something really funny.

Until very recently my parents had three pets. The cat and the older dog both had to be put down unexpectedly in the last month. Now the young dog has a blood disease, and is going to have to be put down soon. So thats really painful. Losing a pet is one thing. Losing all three, randomly, one at a time, within a short time span, is awful.

Things in my life have been difficult lately, too, though in a very different way. But weve talked about that. You keep going, and you try to enjoy the world.

We chatted about our plans for the next days, etc, and she quipped, “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?”, which made me laugh. Sometimes its hard to really enjoy even the nice things in daily life, because of bigger issues.

I googled the phrase to find an image to illustrate, and found that a lot of people like it as a title. The image here is from a series of camping trip pictures with the same title. I’m glad I wasn’t on that trip!

Sometimes daily appreciation for the good – or bad – gets overwhelmed by the context. I think that happens in both personal and professional ways. It’s easy for people who know you a little, interact with you a little, to draw certain conclusions. I know I do that. Sometimes life is just like that… you’re going along with your personal stuff and someone walks up and asks (more or less directly):

“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?”

‘course the nature of it is that sometimes I do that without knowing I’m doing it. So it goes. In the same google search I found a blog by a very smart government employee. The post on the front of the blog right now is about new media efforts in government:

Changing the paradigm from producing products to producing conversations is never an easy transition…. . Interestingly, many planners forget this step and that, paraphrasing the Cheshire Cat, “if you don’t know where you want to go, you will probably end up someplace else.” But the direction must be light. We work with creative people and we have to let them be creative in their own ways. We must also recognize that MOST of the creativity available to us is outside our own organization.

I’m sure he’s right. But sometimes we explain the world so beautifully that there is no way to develop action off of the inspiration…. Sometimes work and planning get abstracted. I wonder how much all of this new media writing will actually influence things.

Author: Robert Bettmann

Founder of Day Eight, and the DC Arts Writing Fellowship.