About a Grocery Store

My mantra is two words on a fading yellow notecard. 

Truth: I’ve lost the card. 

Or, Truth: I’ve lost the motivation to go look for the card. I’m pretty sure I know where the card’s decided to hide out. It’s likely in a bag of various papers once considered important enough to be pinned to my bulletin board, but when an office re-do happened three years ago, the “important” papers were jumbled in a paper bag and marked for the to-do list that’s never become urgent enough to actually do. That ripped brown paper bag? My mantra likely lurks there. But do I need to locate the notecard? It’s just two words. Easily memorized. Easily repeated.

Important | Urgent. 

That’s it. Three words, if you read it aloud as written: “Important over urgent.” 

Written, my mantra looks like a math equation. Important divided by the urgent. Math equations do what my second favorite mantra commands: “Simplify, simplify.”

I do not know who to thank for my Important | Urgent mantra. When I wrote it—oh the vibrant yellow of the notecard then—I neglected to attribute the author. Long after the card’s been bleached by the sun’s daily trawl through my office, do you think I stand a chance at remembering the attribution?

Simplify, simplify. That mantra is of course attributed to the illustrious Mr. Henry David Thoreau. “Simplify” came from my early twenties when I taught Transcendentalism to high school juniors waking starry-eyed to possibilities their lives dangled before them. The juniors already had fodder to simplify. Only seventeen years old and yet their days snarled with four honors classes, three AP classes, lunch table drama, cheerleading tryouts, lacrosse practices, theater clubs, confirmation classes, football games, graduation parties, prom dress shopping, college essays, National Honors Society applications, lifeguarding, dance recitals. “Simplify” spoke to them. It broke through noise and gave them something to consider through the Transcendentalism final.

My juniors gave me something to consider. One girl—Kelly—blond, freckled, cheery, and anxious to squeak by with a B in the Honors course—gave me a year-end gift I’ve saved two decades following: a bumper sticker with “Simplify, simplify” and Thoreau’s face.

Thank you, blond and freckled Kelly, for the gift. Thank you, bearded and introspective Henry David, for the gift. I’ve needed to repeat “simplify” for twenty years. I need it in the decades dangling ahead of me.

Simplify, simplify. 

My day today: reheat yesterday’s coffee in microwave, prod myself on a run (revise that: a shuffle), shower, half-dry my hair, write a blog post, hit Target with shopping list, mash browned bananas into a loaf of bread, write new website copy, microwave second round of coffee, zoom work meetings, throw snacks at hungry kids getting off busses (maybe warm banana bread?), boil spaghetti noodles like a short-order cook (offer buttered noodles, red-sauce noodles, pesto noodles), rock climbing class, yoga class, late dinner, basket of laundry, prep coffeemaker for tomorrow morning’s automatic brew.

My average day demands an aspirational mantra like “simplify,” but how quickly the syllables of that word do what oft-repeated syllables sometimes do. They become sounds bumping into each other in my head. Simplifysimplify. 

Okay. But. How?

The answer is on a notecard I hope to unearth from a disregarded paper bag.

Important | Urgent

Let’s put Important | Urgent to the Simplify test: 

A dinner of spaghetti noodles with butter, red-sauce, or pesto? Urgent, not important. Simplify. Cut to one sauce option. Let tastebuds suffer; carbs will suffice.

Banana bread? Important, not urgent. The bananas have an urgency of imminent demise, but what’s important is that my children feel the warmth of my love hugged in a butter-stained napkin as soon as they step over the threshold from school into home. To simplify, I cross pesto (urgent) off the list and circle the banana bread (important), timing the warm loaf for the school bus arrival.

I gave you the surface list of the day. Should I analyze my mantra’s efficacy on the deeper parts of what’s Important | Urgent in my day? 

Also in my day today: an argument with my husband over selecting a landscaper, my rag-bag feelings of neglect when my family members chose to spend time on electronic devices rather than talking to me, and the stop-me-in-my-tracks joy felt hearing a verse from Psalms in my airpods on my morning run.  

Simplify, simplify, simplify. I could have argued for an hour this morning about the landscaper, and that could have led to a second hour (or day or month or year) of rabbit trail arguments. The tyranny of the urgent. Landscaping is not actually important. Not in this moment. Not on this day. Maybe not even this week. We can cut the grass. The paving stones can crumble for another season.

Important | Urgent is stopping when I’m supposed to be running. I stop to listen as I cross a bridge and the morning sunshine explores a desire to warm the sidewalk for the long day ahead. Important is slowing down to treasure the words of Psalm 37:28-29:

For the Lord loves the just
    and will not forsake his faithful ones.

Wrongdoers will be completely destroyed;
    the offspring of the wicked will perish.

The righteous will inherit the land
    and dwell in it for ever.

Can I add something to the deeper list of my Important | Urgent items of the day? It’s not my item personally, but it’s a burden I share, thanks to national news reports that for three days have been covering a grocery store in Buffalo, NY. 

This past weekend, a teenage boy walked into a grocery store in Buffalo NY with a weapon. He confused the urgent with the important. There were urgent things happening all around the boy with a gun—maybe Ruth was bagging a tomato for her salad. Roberta may have just placed the box of macaroni and cheese in her cart. Maybe Aaron was turning the wrong way between bakery and deli, just trying to find the canned tuna on his wife’s assigned list. Out in the parking lot, Heyward may have been clicking his seat belt in, or clicking out, starting or ending his shopping trip. Pearl maybe had just selected a bag of gala apples for a pie she’d bake next weekend. Celestine was perhaps sneaking a peek inside the cover of US Weekly. Katherine maybe took an extra moment to reach for the last skim milk at the very back of the shelf. Margus? Might have been picking up charcoal for the good weather and backyard picnics to come. Maybe Andre was finished, juggling three plastic grocery bags while returning his cart. Geraldine sent her fiancé to one aisle for paper towels while she went down the next aisle for cereal and instead found a boy with a gun and an urgent intent to destroy.

Important and urgent can go all topsy turvy. An average day’s stop at a grocery store—an urgent, not important stop—can be made important if someone really wants it to be so. We must simplify to the important truths that have held steadfast through all the important over urgent: “The Lord loves the just and will not forsake his faithful ones.” No number of urgent bullets can change what is important. Those 10 lives, embodied in hands holding shopping lists and feet propelling carts, were so very important.

I pray for Important over Urgent to prevail. I stop in my tracks in the middle of a bridge. The bridge is so high, I am running above tree tops. May’s newest green leaves wave on sycamores next to my shoelaces. A road thin as ribbon unspools below me. At the end of the road, a stoplight blinks from green to yellow to red next to a BP gas station. I am above it all. Urgency demands I keep running. Instead I simplify and stop because important words of Psalm 34 invade my ears: Love, justice, faithfulness, promise.

When life feels too big and too much and too urgent—and it can often feel that way—my mantras do what mantras do. They repeat. They recenter. They remind. Important over Urgent. Simplify, simplify, simplify. What does my mantra look like today? What is important is this: banana bread, a fresh hug of love from the oven, waiting for my children when they step over the threshold of home.

No. Simplify, simplify.

My mantra today looks like my empty hands which didn’t make banana bread because I simplified from what was urgent (soften the butter, preheat the oven, mash the bananas) to what was important. My mantra today looks like just simple old me, holding empty arms and hands stretched wide, waiting to wrap my children with fresh, warm love when they step over the threshold of home.