When a good man and thoughtful writer pens a reflection on a trip to death’s door, we do well to stop for a minute and read what he has written.

Today, Michael Gerson published an article reflecting on a recent confrontation with cancer. It was published in the “Opinions” section of the Washington Post. There’s a low hanging irony or pithy insight there, but I’m not sure yet what it is. He came out on top for now, but he didn’t escape without knowing what it feels like to approach death. His piece puts skin to Solomon’s words to all of us who aren’t dead yet: ”It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart” (Ecclesiastes 7:2).

In my mid-20s, I had a new bride, a plum job on Capitol Hill and, apparently, the beginnings of a cancerous tumor on my right kidney. For 20 or 25 years — the best estimate of my doctors — it accompanied me at birthdays and on holidays and at the delivery of my children. It was quiet and kept to itself. Undiscovered, it would have donned camouflage and killed me in the end.

A cancer diagnosis is the experience of about 13 million Americans. Mine came early enough for surgery to make a difference. There were weeks of testing, waiting and attempting to focus on other things. At the hospital, cheerful young nurses ask you to pull down your pants at odd moments — which is not nearly as pleasant as it sounds. Then six hours on the table, the haze of narcotics, the clockwork routine of poking and prodding, the welcome visits of family and friends. Then a growing desire to escape the pervasive, repulsive smell of cleanliness and to go home.

As an instinctual Calvinist, I’m not prone to ask “why me?” — as though mortality were carrying out some kind of personal vendetta. But my first impression was the apparent arbitrariness of it all. I have no family history of kidney cancer. I’ve never smoked. I haven’t worked in a uranium mine. Any philosophy of life must take into account that random, witless developments — a tumor, an aneurism, a drunken driver — can be highly consequential. At some point, many of us will feel “as flies to wanton boys.”

In my case, this realization of the radical contingency of events gave way to more constructive thoughts. They are not observations I can universalize. They don’t apply to those in constant pain, or address the incomprehensible suffering of children with cancer. My experience left me less able to understand such horrors.

I was fortunate to see mortality in the near distance. Stepping outside that experience, as writers tend to do, it had elements of a physics experiment. As I awaited to learn my fate, I noticed an effect on matter — an odd intensification of physical experience. Things around you offer more friction and hold your attention longer. Commonplace things like the bumps on tree bark. The light filtering through floating dust. The wetness of water. A contrast knob is turned, revealing the vivid pleasures of merely existing.

This heightened awareness applies to strangers in the street, who suddenly have faces. An unsolicited smile, the obvious creases of worry or pain, engage your emotions. There is nothing more democratic than mortality. Even if we are insects, we are insects (said Dickens) on the same leaf.

All of this is a function of a shifting perception of time. When the days seem limited, we more fully inhabit them. The arrow of time makes decay inevitable — and each moment unrecoverable. So we gain in appreciation for things as they are when we realize they will eventually be otherwise.

I’m sorry to report these effects are temporary. Perhaps they fade when you stop taking the Percocet. But I don’t think the impressions are illusions. The healthy (rather than morbid) recognition of our mortality is realism. Cancer is a horror, but it is also a metaphor. Each of us is conceived with a seed of mortality that can’t be surgically removed. It grows until it kills us, hopefully after a long life that honors the incredible, temporary privilege of living. We are, as W.B. Yeats harshly put it, “fastened to a dying animal.”

That, but not only that. At every stage, even in the manner of their dying, people can demonstrate they are something more. I recall my Italian, New Yorker grandmother — full of years and full of cancer (the result of a lifelong smoking habit) — telling me through some of her last, gasping breaths: “You have made me so very happy.” Such are the gifts human beings can give each other, even when there is nothing else to give.

It was not my time, thank God, to demonstrate such generosity. I’m left, for the moment, to experience some additional moments and to hope there is a plot behind random and witless events. But I’ve gained — along with many given a cancer diagnosis — a greater appreciation for the familiar words of the psalmist: “Teach us to number our days.”

I agree with that opinion, and especially those last words. Psalm 90:12 also tells us why we should number our days: “that we may get a heart of wisdom.”

How absolutely beautiful is this?

Some articles make us roll our eyes. We either keep reading for perspective or stop reading. Some articles we want to read twice. David Brooks has written one of those articles.

After taking a break from his regular column at the New York Times, he reentered with a piece on the nature of government and how we should think and feel about government. I’ve unfolded most of Brooks’ article, “The Stem and the Flower,” under a number of headers:

The question.

How much emotional and psychic space should politics take up in a normal healthy brain?

Common answers can be illustrated by way of two extremes. 

On the one hand, there are those who are completely cynical about politics. But, as the columnist Michael Gerson has put it, this sort of cynicism is the luxury of privileged people. If you live in a functioning society, you can say politicians are just a bunch of crooks. But, if you live in a place without rule of law, where a walk down a nighttime street can be terrifying, where tribalism leads to murder, you know that politics is a vital concern.

On the other hand, there are those who form their identity around politics and look to it to complete their natures. These overpoliticized people come in two forms: the aspirational and the tribal. The aspirational hope that politics can transform society and provide meaning. They were inspired by the lofty rhetoric of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address. The possibilities, he argued, were limitless: “Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty.”

The problem with this lofty rhetoric is that politics can rarely deliver, so there is a cynical backlash when the limited realities of government reassert themselves. This inevitable letdown is happening to a lot of President Obama’s supporters right now.

Then there are those who look to politics for identity. They treat their partisan affiliation as a form of ethnicity. These people drive a lot of talk radio and television. Not long ago, most intelligent television talk was not about politics. Shows would put interesting people together, like Woody Allen with Billy Graham (check it out on YouTube), and they’d discuss anything under the sun.

Now most TV and radio talk is minute political analysis, while talk of culture has shriveled. This change is driven by people who, absent other attachments, have fallen upon partisanship to give them a sense of righteousness and belonging.

This emotional addiction can lead to auto-hysteria.

So, how should we think about politics and its place in our lives? 

So if politics should not be nothing in life, but not everything, what should it be? We should start by acknowledging that except for a few rare occasions — the Civil War, the Depression — government is a slow trudge, oriented around essential but mundane tasks.

Imagine you are going to a picnic. Government is properly in charge of maintaining the essential background order: making sure there is a park, that it is reasonably clean and safe, arranging public transportation so as many people as possible can get to it. But if you remember the picnic afterward, these things won’t be what you remember. You’ll remember the creative food, the interesting conversations and the fun activities.

Government is the hard work of creating a background order, but it is not the main substance of life. As Samuel Johnson famously put it, “How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” Government can set the stage, but it can’t be the play.

So, government is the background order to an orderly society. Why shouldn’t it be more? 

It is just too balky an instrument. As we’re seeing even with the Obamacare implementation, government is good at check-writing, like Social Security, but it is not nimble in the face of complexity. It doesn’t adapt to failure well. There’s a lot of passive-aggressive behavior. In any federal action, one administrator will think one thing; another administrator will misunderstand and do something else; a political operative will have a different agenda; a disgruntled fourth party will leak and sabotage. You can’t fire anybody or close anything down. It’s hard to use economic incentives to get people moving in one direction. Governing is the noble but hard job of trying to get anything done under a permanent condition of Murphy’s Law.

Okay, so as an average person, how much of my brain should be devoted to politics? 

So one’s attitude toward politics should be a passionate devotion to a mundane and limited thing. Government is essential, but, to switch metaphors ridiculously, it’s the stem of the flower, not the bloom. The best government is boring, gradual and orderly. It’s steady reform, not exciting transformation. It’s keeping the peace and promoting justice and creating a background setting for mobility, but it doesn’t deliver meaning.

I figure that unless you are in the business of politics, covering it or columnizing about it, politics should take up maybe a tenth corner of a good citizen’s mind. The rest should be philosophy, friendship, romance, family, culture and fun. I wish our talk-show culture reflected that balance, and that the emotional register around politics were more in keeping with its low but steady nature.

For some of us a tenth of our mind probably sounds like a lot. For others, hardly much at all. But this sounds about right to me. We should care deeply about politics because we care deeply about people, but without getting carried away so that we miss the people immediately in front of us. One of the most important reasons to participate in politics is to keep it the stem so we can enjoy the flower.

Here’s a helpful answer to that question by G.K. Beale from Clarus 2011:

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Jim Wolf is a U.S. Army Veteran. He has struggled with alcoholism, poverty, and homelessness for decades. As you watch this timelapse video of his physical transformation, remember these words from Scripture about what God does for us:

“He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor.”

—1 Samuel 2:8