Caring or not caring about every thing

The air here in the valley is that particular shade of smog-tinged blue that promises both sun and a certain, low-grade, municipal anxiety. I'm sitting on the patio, the cheap plastic mesh of the chair digging slightly into my thigh, watching a hummingbird, a tiny, frantic, iridescent mechanism, hovering above a bougainvillea that is determinedly surviving despite my intermittent neglect.

It is Sunday afternoon. The hour when one is meant to feel either a profound, cleansing rest or a low, prickling panic about the coming week. I feel neither, merely a kind of flat, observer's fatigue. And I am thinking, as one does when faced with the sheer, relentless volume of Los Angeles, about caring.

Not caring in the grand, abstract sense, like peace in the Middle East or the decline of Western civilization (though one worries, or in the least offers their divine thinkpiece about those too, of course, usually after the third glass of white wine). I mean caring about the small, adhesive things. The email you forgot to send. The precise, embarrassing phrasing of a text message from three weeks ago. The way the ice machine in the office makes that strange, grinding noise that everyone ignores but you. The fact that the dry cleaner put a crease in your favorite linen jacket where there wasn't meant to be one.

One is taught, early and often, that this is the essence of character: to be engaged. To be present. To keep one's eye on the ball, or perhaps, on all the balls (stop it), scattered wildly across the municipal lawn. It is a specific, American anxiety, this compulsion to be the central, organizing principle of your own chaos. We are asked to process, to feel, to have a stance on everything from the latest geopolitical folly to the color of the season’s nail polish.

And so we clutch. We hold onto the frayed edges of every minor slight, every administrative detail, every unfulfilled expectation, convinced that if we just hold tighter, if we just care a little more fiercely, we can somehow impose narrative order on the fundamentally un-narratable mess of existence. We become little hoarders of anxiety.

But the sheer weight of this posture. It is a kind of performance art, isn’t it? The woman meticulously curating her public outrage while ignoring the tremor in her own hand. The man demanding accountability from the city council while forgetting to feed his cat.

And there is the other option, of course. The clean, hard luxury of letting go.

Not in the manner of the gurus, the serene, sun-drenched types who tell you to 'manifest abundance' and 'release negativity' (I distrust any philosophy that uses 'release' as a transitive verb). But the functional, pragmatic jettisoning of things that do not, in the cold light of day, require your immediate, personal intervention.

The hummingbird, that tiny, frenetic creature, does not appear to care about the state of my garden's irrigation. It cares about sugar and survival and the next five seconds. And then it is gone; a sudden, vertical blur of purpose and disengagement.

Is it a moral failing to choose the clean sweep? To look at the heap of things demanding your emotional tax; the political scandal, the ill-fitting pants, the friend’s minor drama, the slightly stale bread; and to simply say, No. This does not matter to me, not now. To be indifferent not from malice, but from a calculated need for psychic survival.

Perhaps the true discipline is not in what you choose to hold onto, but in what you finally grant permission to slide away. The dust motes in the afternoon sun, the forgotten grudge, the unreturned phone call. No one has ever applauded a hoarder for their discipline in refusing to throw things out.

How about the shoe rack, abandoned in the humming purgatory of the laundry room, stands as a perfect, silent monument to things once cared for but now simply let go, a minor, persistent piece of clutter that demands no attention yet somehow irritates precisely because it remains undealt with. It does, however still offer use; a use better off for the bigger shoe rack placed in the correct location of my bedroom closet.

Sometimes its good to watch things go, and you realize the world has not stopped turning. The sun still sets, the bougainvillea still blooms, and the weight in your chest, momentarily, eases.

You probably looked up what bougainvillea was before you finished, but to bother you with repetition, its those flowers you see all too often in front of houses which its pink petals litter all over the ground when it rains. They could be confused with the cherry tree petals that fall as well, but it doesn't matter.

And that, perhaps, is all the order one can ever hope to impose.