While constituents complain about inflation, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers and wealthy donors bravely tackled the real crisis: the bad feng shui in the Hart Senate Office Building.
I was leaving a restorative sound bath near Capitol Hill last Tuesday when I decided to drop by the Hart Senate Office Building to visit an old friend. Not a senator—I find their energy incredibly draining before 11 a.m.—but Alexander Calder’s “Mountains and Clouds.” For years, the colossal sheet-metal masterpiece had been tragically severed, the massive suspended “Clouds” removed due to alleged structural safety concerns. But last week, I gazed up into the soaring marble atrium and gasped. The clouds were back. The space was whole.
I have been saying for years that the true root of our partisan gridlock is not ideological, but spatial. How, I have often wondered, could we possibly expect 100 of our most vulnerable public servants to pass a coherent farm bill when their primary architectural focal point was missing its kinetic counterweight? You simply cannot legislate effectively when the mid-century modern installation in your lobby is experiencing a trauma of separation.
When government funding stalled to fix the 38-ton piece, a coalition of private donors and legislators from both sides of the aisle stepped in to finance the restoration. There is something deeply moving about this. While the general public has become obsessed with the petty tribalism of tax policy and reproductive rights, our leaders quietly demonstrated that they can still unite to solve the problems that truly matter: paying engineers millions of dollars to hang a large aluminum shape above their heads.
The donors who funded this effort—quietly, heroically, without asking for anything in return other than perhaps a favorable regulatory environment and a discrete plaque—understand that a society is only as strong as its most aggressively curated government lobbies. It is philanthropy in its purest, most intentional form. They looked at a nation in crisis and said, 'Let us begin by making sure Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has a soothing visual to look at while he waits for the elevator.'
We realized that before we could meaningfully address the collapsing middle class, we first had to heal the atrium.
Re-hanging a two-ton aluminum cloud is exactly like setting a boundary with a toxic relative: it requires heavy machinery, a massive influx of un-taxed capital, and a complete disregard for what anyone else thinks you should be doing with your time. The Senate did the work. They paused the frantic, toxic hustle-culture of "governing" to romanticize their workspace.
Call me old-fashioned, but I find it incredibly refreshing. If you are currently experiencing the ick of living paycheck to paycheck, I gently suggest that you might be neglecting your own visual environment. We cannot all solicit bipartisan donor coalitions to reinforce the load-bearing beams of our personal spaces, but we can learn from the Senate's example. A small joy is still a joy. Have you considered taking a moment to sit quietly and manifest a multi-million-dollar art restoration of your own?
Our elected officials endure so much noise from constituents who demand constant, grinding attention to their everyday problems. It is exhausting. I, for one, am thrilled that the Senate finally took a mental health decade to put their clouds back in the sky. It is time we admitted that a beautiful, functioning mobile is the ultimate form of self-care.