Choosing What Matters

8 Feb
At our yet-to-be-named book club (so far our ideas range from Bitches Be Bookin’ and Good In Bed, both of which are fairly inappropriate – but make us laugh) last week, we discussed The Secret Life of Bees. Our Martha Stewartesque hostess provided us with a honey themed menu that was to die for. If you’ve never experienced sliced pears and mascarpone cheese drizzled with honey, well, do that. It’s delightful.
Moving on, during our discussion we decided that our favorite passage of the book was a section about choosing what matters. How often have you been faced with something and said to yourself or someone else, “I know what I should do, but it’s not what I want to do.” This passage describes it beautifully:

“There’s one thing I don’t get,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“How come if your favorite color is blue, you painted your house so pink?”

She laughed. “That was May’s doing. She was with me the day I went to the paint store to pick out the color. I had a nice tan color in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink. She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish flamenco. I thought, ‘Well, this is the tackiest color I’ve ever seen, and we’ll have half the town talking about us, but if it can lift May’s heart like that, I guess she ought to live inside it.’”

“All this time I just figured you liked pink,” I said.

She laughed again. “You know, some things don’t matter that much, Lily. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person’s heart — now, that matters. The whole problem with people is –”

“They don’t know what matters and what doesn’t,” I said, filling in her sentence and feeling proud of myself for doing so.

“I was gonna say, The problem is they know what matters, but they don’t choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.”

-From The Secret Life of Bees

One Response to “Choosing What Matters”

  1. Anonymous February 10, 2010 at 6:05 pm #

    Great book choice.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: