Today’s a good day to read something that makes you feel a little uncomfortable.

Not sure where to begin?

• The National Museum of African American History and Culture has a helpful guide.
• Search for a reading list online.
• Read a handful of different articles and stories to get a sense of what’s out there.

It’s not that hard to get started (it wasn’t hard to start reading books by white authors because there are too many of them, was it?), and some time and discomfort aren’t too big of an ask.

And while you’re at it, read a few statements from corporate and community leaders, too. Why is Ben & Jerry’s able to do what they did, for example? Does it help? Can or should others follow?

Two different kinds of “about us:” the kind that makes it all about us, and the kind that recognizes that we’re all affected (but it’s not actually about us).

Choose wisely.

What do you do if the engine light comes on in your car?

Most people go straight to the shop: they know that the car’s telling them that something’s really wrong. You can probably drive that far, but you really shouldn’t plan a road trip without getting it checked out.

Cars are pretty good at telling us what’s wrong with them these days, but there are still a lot of systems we take totally for granted. As far as I know, there’s no sensor in the lug nuts that hold the wheels on, for example. They just work. (They’re also quintuply redundant.)

So consider this: you’ve already decided to ignore the engine light, and you’re cruising down the highway. You’re probably over the speed limit for good measure (who isn’t?).

One or two lug nuts come off. Maybe you notice, maybe you don’t. Either way, there are four more on each wheel.

And then, for some reason, those come off, too. Hard to believe, but it happened. And now you’re doing 80 with nothing actually holding the wheels on.

What would you do then?

When I was growing up, I wasn’t allowed to go to McDonald’s. And, on those rare road-trip instances when we did stop in, my brothers and I certainly weren’t allowed a Happy Meal.

So of course we wanted them desperately, with their tasty chicken bits, fun packaging, and — most of all — the cheap plastic toy in the box.

Now, I haven’t had a Chicken McNugget in longer than I can remember, and I want to think for a moment about why that is.

Growing up in the 1990s, there was still a case to be made that the McNugget (or the Happy Meal itself) was the apotheosis of the American promise. “A chicken in every pot” was a radical aspiration when Harry Truman uttered it; by my childhood, you could get chicken tastier than any President Truman had dreamed of, for cheaper than he could have imagined, 27/7. With a toy.

Then came Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma and a people’s history of everything. And we began to see the McNugget as the apotheosis of America: a weirdly unnatural affront to people and planet, relentlessly marketed at subsidized prices by a rapacious multinational corporation to children and vulnerable populations who’d been systemically priced out of vegetables. And that toy came from China.

These days, our culture is tearing itself apart over which version of that story is true. Of course, the trouble is that both of them are.

The deeper problem is that the promise is still the promise: whatever you want, you can have it faster and cheaper than you or Harry Truman can believe. But like most promises that sound too good to be true, this one is, too. And we’re no longer able to ignore all the costs we’ve hidden so deeply for so long.

Walking home this weekend, I saw a common scourge of lockdown life.

From the other end of a fairly long bridge, a Tesla SUV accelerated as if preparing for takeoff.

It rocketed by, down the wide-open lane, and was followed neither by a sickening smash nor a siren. And, as it passed, I shook my head and muttered, “Unbelievable.”

Hardly.

Like so much in the news today, it’s entirely believable that someone with car that might very well have a “ludicrous mode” might wish to try it out when suddenly freed from the usual snarl of traffic.

Self-centered? Perhaps. Ungoverned? Maybe. Not my choice? Probably. But unbelievable? Not really.

If the way forward is going to be any better, we’re going to have to stop shaking our heads at so much of what’s “unbelievable” in our world and in our culture.

Otherwise, a whole lot of hurricanes and killings and protests and tweets that are very, very much on trend will be relegated to the land of “thoughts and prayers.”

***

PS: Who and what to believe is another matter. Still another (predictable, believable) scourge showed up right on time: fake images and stories about protests and protestors, amplified by the credulous and the malicious. Just like when driving, please pay attention when (re)tweeting.

Among the many aphorisms of leadership I’ve taken from the outdoor-education community, the idea of being a thermostat rather than a thermometer is one of the strongest.

One tells you the temperature of the room, the other maintains it.

Sometimes it’s worth adjusting the thermostat, but watching the thermometer is at best like watching sports and at worst like watching a lit fuse.

Either way, it might be a form of entertainment, but it’s not leadership.

A book I’ve been meaning to read for years, discovered some time ago in a little library and recently rediscovered in a box mid-unpacking.

And, unlike The Grapes of Wrath, not a book I carry vague memories of from high school.

Just a few pages in, I’ve already had my hair blown back a few times by the writing, the style, and the structure.

And, yet again, I’ve been fascinated (to say the least) to see how much and how little has changed in the intervening not-quite-100 years.

***

P.S., a plug: I also renewed my subscription to the Oxford American. The sticky beginnings of summer bring back the old urge for Southern literature … and now feels like a good time to vote with my dollars for as many small businesses and cultural institutions as possible.

We already know all the metaphors. A muscle, once exercised, needs to rest to grow stronger … et cetera, et cetera.

And yet it’s so easy to get hooked on busy-ness, and so hard at times to unplug from it.

Hemingway said that he used to give some possessions away each year to prove that he in fact owned them and not the other way round; similarly, taking (and enjoying) some earned downtime can be a good test of work’s worthiness.

Having just re-listened to George Saunders’s magisterial and wildly creative novel Lincoln in the Bardo, I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of the bardo this past week.

The bardo is a liminal space in some Buddhist traditions: a place of suspended animation between this life and the next, where contact between them might be possible. (In Saunders’s imagination, it’s a bit like Halloween crossed with Purgatory, but that’s only a very rough analogy.)

Metaphorically, then, on this first day of a first phase of reopening, might we still be in the bardo?

And if the not-knowing inherent in transitions is still difficult (as it so often is), how might we embrace it, or at least learn to grip a little less tightly, as transition creates space for transformation?