What you see is what you get

I’ve written often of the sometimes-stealthy ways that the universe communicates with me: words that rise, unbidden, into my head, songs that seem to always be on the radio, conversations with friends who speak to a certain thing I hadn’t even realized was concerning me.  Today I was looking through my bookcase in the living room, a room I seldom sit in.  I noticed a book on the bottom shelf, between Feminisms:An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism and Christiane Northrup’s Mother-Daughter Wisdom: The Art of the Personal Essay, selected and introduced by Phillip Lopate.  I have no memory of this book whatsoever.

I opened it to find that it was from my dear Jessica, for my 22nd birthday.  1996.  I had just graduated from college and was about to start my first job, in strategy consulting.  And her inscription read:

Happy 22nd birthday, Lindsey – and happy 10th year anniversary of friendship!  To read when you’re tired of all that consulting; a reminder of your true calling.  I love you.  xox Jess

Tears filled my eyes and a swell of gratitude tightened my chest.  Someone had known all along that this – whatever you call this, what I do here, what I do in Word, what I do in my head all the time – was my calling.  And someone whose opinion – and whose writing! – I esteem so incredibly highly, too.  One of my true kindred friends, a native speaker, a steady and solid part of my life.  I may have wandered for years – I’m still wandering – in another sphere of the world (business) but I’m not crazy to feel a tug back to writing.  This is not insane, and it is not new, and it is not fabricated out of thin air.  Someone who really knows me has always known this.

What a relief that was: seen, understood, known.  Thank you, Jess.

Then I opened the book, scanned the table of contents, and flipped quickly Annie Dillard’s essay Seeing.  The words are familiar, some of the images etched in my memory, ones I return to.  But somehow, despite knowing the piece, I had forgotten this line, which seemed to both emanate from and pierce some deep part of me:

What you see is what you get.

An adage that we repeat to our children, over and over, through gritted teeth, willing them not to have a tantrum of dissatisfaction.  But so much more, too.

What you see is what you get.

That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?  This blog, this writing … I return again and again to the effort to pay attention.  To the belief, faint or foolish hope, that by really seeing I can somehow better cope with time’s relentless passage.  I don’t think I’m trying to stop time, anymore, but maybe what I’m trying to do is to capture the intense vividness of some of the moments.  That in doing that I both experience them more fully and create a cache, a store, that I can return to (Wordsworth’s “life and food for future years”).

If we don’t see our lives, in all of their gore and grandeur, mundane moments and startles of joy, we don’t really have them.  We all know this, I suspect, and it’s just a question of how hard we find it to stare into the sun, how attuned to the loss that underlies every single moment on earth.

This has been a day of weird weather, restless winds, a big branch falling unexpectedly from the tree right outside my window. It’s definitely fall and the streets and spattered with wet orange leaves, but it’s hot, summer-humid.  We are caught on the fulcrum between the seasons.  The storm portended by the day’s meteorology echoes inside of me, and I feel gusty, blown off course.  The words of both my dear friend and Annie Dillard provide a still point, however fleeting, and a reminder of what it is I am doing here.