E.B. White puts words on the tension we feel everyday: I arise in the morning, torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
That is clearly the healthy tension in which we all live and move and have our being. Between our obligation to those who gave us these undeserved inheritances and those to whom we shall pass it on in the generations to come. Grandaddy had a useful term to describe the first phase: Beholden.
“Beholden” means to be obligated, especially in gratitude. To be indebted to someone. We tend to think of this in negative terms. We cherish our independence. We’d rather not owe anyone anything, or be indebted to someone. But, when rightly understood, there’s also a positive side to that term. When we understand that life itself is a gift, and when we grasp the debts of gratitude we owe to all those who created and recreated us — formed and reformed us into who we are becoming — then we know in our bones that we are always beholden. And that’s when we live more freely by grace rather than by the illusion of our own merits.
The farmer/poet Wendell Berry, puts the paradox in these words: The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
The world and the cosmos and history and future are all good gifts around us. We are part and parcel of all this, and we can never escape. And at the other end of the equation, we actively strive for ways to save the creation from destruction so that another generation of our grandchildren can enjoy the dawn or see a hawk soar or stumble over the stardust. Terry Tempest Williams helps us see the big picture like this: The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with clasped hands that we might act with restraint, leaving room for the life that is destined to come.
Everyday is Earth Day for us, and we are merely the middle people. Midwives, mid-husbands [practicing good husbandry] or single parents giving birth to the world that is coming to life among us and within us. So it’s hard to plan your day when you can’t decide whether to enjoy the world left to us by our ancestors or improve it for the generations yet to be born.