I.64 — The Wider Hand

Tending does not stop at the edge of the people you can see today. The same open hand reaches toward a dog waiting by a door, a stretch of ground walked over daily, a piece of work built carefully enough to outlast the one who built it, a person not yet born who will inherit whatever is left standing or left ruined.

None of this needs a program attached to it, or a cause given a name. It only needs the looking to widen the way it already widened from yourself to a stranger, from a stranger to a quarrel, from a quarrel to a whole table of near ones. The same faculty, aimed further out.

It shows up small, and small is enough. A tree planted with no plan to see it grown. A path kept clear for whoever walks it next, known or unknown. A room left a little better than it was found, for no one who will ever trace it back to a particular hand. None of these asks to be noticed. That is closer to the point than anything grander would be.

Try one today, small and unwitnessed. Notice, afterward, that the hand reached further than the room and came back unchanged, only a little more open than before.