DotMagis: Living frugally on surprise (redux)

In March I wrote a piece for DotMagis about living frugally on surprise (a line taken from Alice Walker's poem Before you knew you owned it: “Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.”) Today, driving to a meeting, I thought again about the practice of living open to surprise, an antidote to a hermeneutic of anxiety or suspicion.

I note that my email is still chirping "like a nest of starving baby birds, messages popping up and demanding answers faster than I [can] stuff answers in them." but I'm perhaps a shade less anxious about handling the worms.

I had to go downtown to observe a student teacher today, midday the traffic is generally light, but today construction had 76 crawling.  I put myself entirely in the hands of Google Maps and ended up on a route that wound through Fairmount Park — the largest expanse of urban park in the US — and then turned me out on Martin Luther King Boulevard along the Schuylkill River.  The magnolias are in bloom and the trees are leafing in earnest.  It was an unexpected moment of beauty in my day, a surprise dollop of grace that turned my day upside down.