The sky was pink, but the sun had not yet risen above the skyline, when I pulled into the temporary parking lot at the airport on a humid, July morning. I almost didn’t see the baby bunny dart in front of my car. But she was quick, and I was slow, and so she lived to disappear into a patch of scraggly weeds lining the chain link fence that separated the parking lot from the adjacent construction project. I got out of my car, grabbed my suitcase, and looked around. What was a baby rabbit doing here, mere yards from a five-lane terminal-drive at one of the world’s busiest airports? Sometimes God’s creatures find themselves in less than ideal situations…
* * * *
I was probably eight or nine-years old, drying dishes for my mother one evening after dinner. Out of the blue I asked, “What will happen if I live in a slum when I grow up?” This had been worrying me—that much I remember.
Today the word “slum” is probably out of vogue, but in the late 1960’s “slum” was the word for an impoverished, hopeless neighborhood characterized, in my mind, by lack of vegetation and great expanses of concrete. My family lived in the county seat of an agricultural county, 60 miles southwest of Chicago. There were no slums in our small town. But when my parents took my brothers and me into the city, to visit Chinatown or the Museum of Science and Industry (a couple of our favorites), we would drive past those sad housing projects. I would gaze out the car window and instinctively know I didn’t want to live there.
Consequently, I was very worried that upon reaching adulthood, I might live in a slum. Finally I couldn’t tolerate my anxiety any longer. “What will happened if I live in a slum?”
Looking back, I might have expected my mother to answer, “You won’t live in a slum! What a crazy idea!” And, indeed, for many reasons my life’s trajectory was highly unlikely to lead to a slum. But that was not my mother’s answer. Without missing a beat she replied, “If you find yourself living in a slum, you will be very unhappy. But you are smart, so you will figure out a way and do what it takes to move somewhere else. You won’t tolerate it, and so you won’t live there, at least not for long.”
I was also probably eight or nine-years old when my father, in some unremembered context, remarked: “At any given moment, you are doing what you most want to do.”
I protested. “When I’m weeding for Mom, I do NOT want to be weeding! I do not MOST want to be weeding! I HATE weeding!” (This was true. Of all my chores, weeding was the worst. My mother did not have a garden, but she expected the ground under her yews along the foundation of the house to free of weeds. Crawling under those prickly shrubs, with the clouds of mosquitoes, was torture, as far as I was concerned.)
“Then don’t weed,” he answered.
Shocked that I had to point out something so obvious to my very intelligent father, I exclaimed, “If I don’t weed, I will get in trouble!”
“Well, then,” he calmly replied, folding back another page of his newspaper, “I guess you want to weed more than you want to get in trouble. So you are doing what you most want to do at that moment.”
* * * *
Agency. My parents taught me that I had agency.
Like the baby rabbit in the airport parking lot, I would find myself in less than ideal situations in life. Those situations might be the consequences of decisions I made, or they might be simple bad luck. But the situation was beside the point; the key was my choices and actions.
My mother didn’t dissolve my anxiety by reassuring me that I would never live in a slum. Instead, she eased my worry by assuring me that I could deal with bad situations using my brain, my determination, and my hard work. She also planted the idea that unhappy, unfortunate situations did not need to be accepted with resignation. I could work to change them.
My father illuminated the concept of agency with the reality of trade-offs. In some of life’s situations, my choices might very well be between “bad and worse” (e.g., weeding or getting in trouble). What was crucial, particularly when in the midst of drudgery, or unpleasantness, or difficulty, was to ask myself, “What if I stop this drudgery, leave this unpleasantness, or abandon this difficulty?” As a hypothetical, if I found myself clearing through the wreckage of my home after a tornado destroyed it, surely that wouldn’t be the thing I most wanted to do. Of course not. But in that moment, what if I stopped clearing through the wreckage? Well, then I wouldn’t (maybe) find my children’s baby books; or the mess would still be there tomorrow; or looters might come and take the few remaining valuables. Therefore, in that moment, I might most want to keep clearing. Or…maybe not. Maybe I would most want to stop and go get a hamburger. Quit for the night. Go back to the hotel and try to sleep. My father didn’t say I would always make the best choice, or the right choice, or even that there would be a singular correct choice—only that I had a choice.
I had agency, if I would only realize it.
