stymied
Watching some professionals deal with several overgrown and unhealthy trees, handling unexpected hornets without qualm, one is drawn to reflect on one’s own skills and usefulness in the world. As I edged my way through several thousand words of someone else’s reflections on the state of (one small aspect of) the world – taking out commas, putting them in elsewhere, breaking up sentences that had accumulated more than their fair share of colons and semicolons – I was tempted to make some rather doomy reflections on the usefulness of such work. But it is useful – so long as one remembers to look up from the paper and consider the forest, the trees, the branches pruned, and the angry squirrel, chittering its confusion about the way the world changes.