Vox Meditantis

What is something others do that sparks your admiration?

Wednesday, 10th December 2025

Questions about admiration arrive like an examination of conscience – someone asking not what impresses you, but where you’ve been keeping the standard you hold yourself accountable to when no one’s watching.

The Historical Society’s quiet hours began at three this afternoon, the December light already thinning through windows Maggie had covered with muslin to soften what the exhibits demand of people. I’d volunteered – partly because the sanctuary rooms were my design and deserve my attendance, partly because Wednesday clinic hours ended early and the alternative was returning to a flat that knows I’m leaving for Québec on Friday and has started to feel vaguely accusatory about my packing choices.

The lights were lowered to that particular amber that invites lingering without insisting on it. Benches positioned where someone could sit with a daguerreotype or a ship manifest without feeling observed. Small cream cards placed beside the harder displays – the ones documenting loss, migration, the stubborn fact of people who arrived here with nothing and built something anyway – each offering the sort of permission museums rarely grant: to pause, to return, to let difficult histories arrive at their own pace.

Attendance was modest. Three visitors across two hours, which by any institutional metric would register as failure – barely worth the heating costs, hardly justification for staff time. But Maggie moved through the space as though the room were full. Adjusting a card that had slipped. Checking sight lines. Sitting briefly on each bench to confirm the light fell correctly, that the invitation held.

I watched her work with the particular attention I’ve learned to bring to moments that teach something I’m not sure I want to learn.

The Ones Who Work for Rightness

There’s a quality some people possess that looks, from a distance, like stubbornness or perhaps delusion – the willingness to show up month after month to work that offers no applause, no visible return, no evidence that anyone notices the care you’re extending.

Kevin Lawson leads the river clean-up on the third Saturday of every month, rain or shine, regardless of whether three people arrive or thirty. I’ve watched him set out the same buckets, the same gloves, the same cheerful clipboard for sign-ins, his face carrying no resentment when the turnout is thin. He works the shoreline with the same attention whether he’s alone or accompanied, as though the river’s cleanliness were a moral fact rather than a popularity contest.

Maggie curates these archives as though someone will need them desperately – and she’s almost certainly right, though she’ll never know who, or when, or why. She arranges sanctuary benches with ceremonial care, writes wall text that grants permission before it instructs, keeps the heat running during quiet hours even when the visitor count wouldn’t impress a budget committee. The work is worth doing, so the work gets done. Audience optional.

I thought of the Minerva Creek multi-faith event at the shopping centre last month – the one where organisers outnumbered visitors, where the carefully arranged candles and pamphlets and translation sheets sat mostly unwitnessed. I’d braced for bitterness when I saw them packing up, the sort of defeated energy that arrives when effort meets indifference. Instead they moved with grace, already planning next year’s iteration, discussing what might be adjusted without ever suggesting the work itself should be abandoned.

And David – who I know from Kevin practises Bach in the Methodist church on Tuesday mornings, alone in that cold space with its honest acoustics, playing because the music is worth playing whether anyone hears or not. He’s never mentioned this to me, which is somehow the point. The work doesn’t require witness to justify itself.

This is what sparks my admiration: people who do the thing for its rightness, not its reception. Who build infrastructure for care without requiring proof that anyone will use it. Who show up not because the metrics are promising but because consistency itself is a form of integrity.

It’s the opposite of everything I learned in training, where evidence-based practice and measurable outcomes governed every intervention. Not that those metrics are wrong – but they’re incomplete. They can’t account for Kevin’s riverbank on a morning when no one else arrives. They can’t capture Maggie’s quiet hours when the room stays empty but the invitation remains open.

Some of the most essential work looks, by conventional standards, like failure.

The Ones Who Know When to Stop

There’s a second group I admire with something closer to envy: people who can end a thing cleanly, who know when a season is finished and have the courage to walk away without apologetic half-measures or the mournful choreography of slow decline.

My father clocked off his bus route at the end of each shift and went home. Never sneaked back to the depot to straighten timetables or check whether the relief driver was managing properly. His work had edges, and he honoured them – not because he didn’t care, but because he understood that sustainability requires boundaries. The route would be there tomorrow. Tonight, he could sit in his chair with the paper and let the day be done.

Helen Garrison retired from teaching last year without the valedictory tour some colleagues require – no farewell assembly, no speeches about legacy, just a quiet departure trusting that her work would live on in former students rather than formal accolades. I saw her at the library two months ago, looking lighter than I’d ever seen her, and when I asked how retirement was treating her, she said simply, “I’m learning to be interested in different questions.”

And then there are my mother’s Nevada letters, the ones I finally read at the Historical Society with Maggie working quietly at the next table. One described the night Elizabeth Scott decided casino floors had taught her what they could, that it was time to leave the neon for something more sustainable. She wrote about it with such calm – not as defeat or escape, but as completion. The work was done. The next thing was waiting.

I find this harder than the first kind of courage. Beginning experiments comes easily to me – I’m fluent in risk when it wears the disguise of professional development or civic contribution. Declaring them complete, though, feels like admitting defeat, like proving I couldn’t sustain the ambition I announced.

But perhaps – and this is what I’m learning slowly, terrestrially, with yesterday’s cartoon metaphors still fresh – perhaps the most admiring thing I can do is borrow my elders’ courage. To end this daily phase not with apologetic trailing off but with the same intentionality that began it.

When Experiments Become Obligations

This blog started in October as an experiment – a daily public experiment in being slightly less armoured, as yesterday’s entry named it with more clarity than I’d managed previously. The work was specific: to practice visibility, to risk ordinary intimacy, to discover whether the fifty-eight-year-old psychiatrist who’d spent decades being excellent at witnessing others’ courage might finally, belatedly, locate some of her own.

Three months in, I can report: the experiment yielded data.

I’ve learned that seven readers is enough. That writing daily creates its own discipline, yes, but also its own tyranny – the pressure to convert every lived moment into narrative before I’ve fully inhabited it. That the blog has become, if I’m honest, another way of converting presence into performance, another sophisticated shelter from the messier work of simply being here without documentation.

Québec awaits in two days. Michael and Linda’s visit last weekend taught me that family can gather around inherited recipes without perfect execution or flawless hosting. David has started appearing not just at concerts but at my table, in my kitchen, in the risky category labelled possibility. The museum’s stillness rooms reopen to the public in January, and I’m committed to Thursday afternoons there through spring – care as public furniture, sanctuary built into the city’s architecture rather than hidden in consulting rooms.

All of this is happening, will continue happening, whether or not I narrate it daily for an audience of seven.

The work of becoming less defended doesn’t require constant documentation to be real. In fact – and this feels important to admit – the documentation might actually be preventing the thing it claims to record. Might be creating just enough distance between living and writing about living that I can still pretend to be in control of the plot.

So tomorrow’s entry will be the last daily one for a while. Not a grand farewell – I’m suspicious of those, they tend toward performance I can’t sustain. Simply a pause. A drawing of breath, as yesterday’s tide metaphor suggested. Even the harbour rests between going out and coming in.

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The quiet hours ended at six. Maggie locked the doors, turned off the carefully lowered lights, retrieved the cards we’d placed beside the difficult exhibits. Three visitors across two hours. By institutional standards, barely worth the effort.

But one of them – an elderly woman I recognised from the Wednesday farmers’ market – had sat with the shipyard photographs for forty minutes, returning twice after brief absences, using the permission we’d designed into the space. She’d nodded to Maggie on her way out, a small gesture that might have meant thank you or might have meant simply I was here, and it held me.

That seemed like enough.

On the walk home, the harbour was doing its December negotiations with darkness – the water going from grey to ink, the Christmas lights someone had strung along the pier blinking on with municipal optimism. I thought about Kevin’s river clean-ups and Maggie’s archives and David’s solitary Bach and all the work that gets done without guarantee of witness.

And I thought about my father’s bus routes, ending when they were meant to end. My mother’s clear-eyed departure from the casino floor. Helen Garrison’s quiet retirement. The adults who taught me, mostly by example, that finishing well matters as much as beginning bravely.

Tomorrow I’ll write the last daily entry – not because the work has failed, but because this particular season is complete. Because sustainability requires honouring edges. Because even a tide rests between going out and coming in.

The people who know when to stop aren’t giving up. They’re practising a different kind of courage: the discipline of completion, the ethics of ending well, the radical act of trusting that what comes next doesn’t require them to remain in perpetual motion to justify its arrival.

That’s what sparks my admiration tonight.

That, and Maggie’s face as she adjusted those sanctuary cards – working as though someone who desperately needed permission might arrive tomorrow, even if today the room sat mostly empty.

Rightness before reception. Presence before applause. And the courage, when the season’s finished, to clock off and go home.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.