Baha’i Perspectives

leila September 23rd, 2009

Wakili McNeill from Malcolm X Drummers and Dancers group at the 31st Adams Morgan Day Festival. (Photo Credit: Barbara Krawcowicz)

Maybe it was the graying of the skies, summer impatient to morph into fall.  A lively street festival, Adams Morgan Day, had descended upon my neighborhood on a sunny Sunday in early September– the air thick with smoke from grills sizzling with Jamaican jerk chicken, throbbing with the sound of drums from a Ghanaian dance troupe, as thick crowds of young and old and black and brown and white weaved through stalls selling scarves and jewels, and where local artists displayed their work.  The last day of summer hadn’t yet arrived, but the next morning, shuffling past sleepy cafes on the two-mile trek to work, it wasn’t raining but somehow the air felt damp, and clouds quilted the sky, making all gray and quiet.

My neighborhood is colorful and diverse in every sense, an eyeful and a story on every corner of every block.  But the part of town in which I work lacks some soul, a claustrophobic cacophony of steel and glass.  Men in black suits and ties lunch over terms like How Do We Get Our Work Onto the Agenda, and women practical heels punch at a Blackberry in right hand, cigarette in left.  Exit the polite double doors of any given office building, and one is welcomed by blaring of taxis honking, the whooshing of FedEx trucks and words, words, words about work in a language that I used to try to understand, but now seems so foreign.  There is a certain worldly power associated with this part of town– the World Bank, the IMF, the White House, the many lobbying firms and think-tanks that crowd the few blocks of downtown Washington, D.C.  And yet, I see so many blank stares, pinched faces, stressed countenances.  And many times I’ve thought: So many of them don’t seem happy.

***

I’m on a housing hunt these days.  I was barely a week back home from a trip when my roommate informed me that she was moving to a different part of town, giving me thirty days to scramble to find a place to live.  So my evenings have been packed with open houses, putting on a smile and nodding through chore expectations, and the obligatory small talk that characterizes the interview process.  And while I’d throw myself, exhausted, onto the couch in my half-empty apartment at night, I reflected on what I’d seen in the city.  The hunt took me to all corners, and while the rent was the same, the neighborhoods varied.  Rowhouses on quaint, tree-lined streets in quiet neighborhoods morphed into what some called the “rough” part of town, a fact which I conveniently hid from my parents.  My heart raced a little faster as I raced through these streets, and I wondered why the city was so fragmented.

One such neighborhood where my housing hunt has taken is the one in which I teach a children’s class.  On Saturday afternoons, with my co-teachers, we wave to neighbors as we collect the children, some of whom last week were dragging themselves to class.  I stopped by on a Wednesday evening, after looking at several homes in the children’s neighborhood.  And while I was already late for a class, I couldn’t help but linger on their street, where some of my students were teasing each other on front stoops, and scampering about the playground.  I was greeted with hugs and squeezes and laughter, as the obligatory drunken loiterers lounging in the playground muttered incoherently.  It isn’t an easy neighborhood, one where the children see and experience things that I hadn’t at their age.  And sometimes I see the struggles of immigrant families, of double-unbelonging, of making ends meet, and of the materialism so prevalent in American society pressing its finger upon their new lives in this country.  But despite the rough edges that characterize the neighborhood, I left that evening, prying the children’s arms from my waist and blowing kisses as I said goodbye, with a joy surging in my heart that I hadn’t felt for weeks.

***

And all of this– the stress of moving, the juxtaposition of materially poor and rich, and moving seamlessly between worlds seemingly apart– has made me think about happiness, a topic that has been covered in this space before.  As I mulled over this topic, I remembered a quotation by ‘Abdu’l-Baha that I’d read in The Secret of Divine Civilization:

…human happiness consists only in drawing closer to the Threshold of Almighty God, and in securing the peace and well-being of every individual member, high and low alike, of the human race; and the supreme agencies for accomplishing these two objectives are the excellent qualities with which humanity has been endowed.

‘Abdu’l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, page 60

***

To be continued in Part II.

Tags: childhood, happiness

• Reflections , Society
• Comments(2)