I had intended to post this pic with something whiny. But while my kids were swimming at the (very VERY crowded) public pool today, I was reading Vikram Seth’s Two Lives, which chronicles the friendship and eventual marriage of his Indian-born uncle and a German-born Jewish woman. The part I read today described the correspondence undertaken during and after World War II between the woman and various people in their shared circle of friends. The tragedies and losses during the war, and the hardships and privations after the war, are vividly present in the letters.

Most striking to me were the stories of how the set of friends (which, before the war, included Christians, Jews, and Hindus) fractured, realigned, and healed (or remained unhealed) over time, principally owing to how people behaved during the Reich years. Under fear and duress, some people respond selfishly, others generously: the specifics of how that played out in this story are painful and ennobling by turns.

It’s really impossible for me to imagine the misery that people suffered during this time. It’s even more impossible to imagine how others in our overprivileged society would respond to similar circumstances. Every day, I see tiny inconveniences met with nuclear overreaction. Sometimes I’m even the overreactor. How can I, can we, shift from a place of entitlement to a place of patience and generosity in real time?