“I don’t think poetry is based just on poetry; it is based on a thoroughly lived life. And so I couldn’t just decide I was going to write no matter what; I first had to find out what it means to live.” – Jane Hirschfield
Thanks to my friend Kris for pointing me to this perfect passage.
I’ve written before about the perilous gulf between perception and reality, and about the dangerous assumptions people make about others (okay, fine, me) based on outsides.
Outsides and insides are not the same.
When I was much younger, and struggling in a difficult period, someone very dear to me expressed frustration and disbelief. How I could possibly be blue when everything seems to be going so well, he asked. I have never forgotten that conversation. It felt like he was challenging the authenticity of my emotions, and my initial reaction was anger. I know now that his intentions were good. But I had and since then have seen so many people who seem to have “perfect” lives struggling that I knew the disbelief was unfounded. Even all those years ago I knew that how things looked was no reflection on how they felt. My life, while far from perfect, was back then indeed on a smooth highway. It still is. I often describe my life – at 30, or 35, or, now, 40 – as exactly as I planned it and nothing like I expected.
This whole things-aren’t-always-as-they-seem works both ways. Some people who seem to have “everything” aren’t actually that happy. I also know that some of the most genuinely joyful and contented people I know are the ones whose lives may not look perfect and glossy on the surface. I don’t know that it’s an inverse correlation, but it’s at least a random scatter.
This train of thought seems related, to me, to what I wrote about on Monday, to my reflection on David Brooks’ marvelous essay about shifting from emphasizing “resume virtues” to “eulogy virtues” in his own life. This shift is similar to – maybe parallel to – a movement from relying on external indicators to the recognition that what matters is not visible on the outside. Even as I write that I cringe a little: it sounds simplistic. But I do think there’s something there. And most of all, I just want to exhort everyone to stop making assumptions based on what they can see. First of all, we can’t see the whole picture, ever. What we see of other people is like the tiniest tip of the iceberg, and the lion’s share of their experience, of their entire person, is beneath the water, out of sight.
I need to remember this too.
Just as I started thinking and writing this post, I read these words of Anne Lamott’s on this very topic on my friend Rudri’s beautiful site.
I often like David Brooks’ work, but I absolutely adored his piece The Moral Bucket list from this weekend’s New York Times.
ABOUT once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all.
When I meet such a person it brightens my whole day. But I confess I often have a sadder thought: It occurs to me that I’ve achieved a decent level of career success, but I have not achieved that. I have not achieved that generosity of spirit, or that depth of character.
A few years ago I realized that I wanted to be a bit more like those people. I realized that if I wanted to do that I was going to have to work harder to save my own soul. I was going to have to have the sort of moral adventures that produce that kind of goodness. I was going to have to be better at balancing my life.
It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?
Brooks goes on to talk about how our culture focuses on and applauds achievement and the building of “resume virtues” but provides very little guidance in the development of character and the “eulogy virtues.” I read his piece with tears in my eyes, nodding, a deep echo of a familiar gong sounding somewhere deep inside me. It strikes me that what Brooks is talking about is the primacy of interiority; about investing in and embracing who we are, not just what we do.
But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.
This reminds me of something I’ve thought and talked and written about at great, often excruciatingly repetitive (I’m sorry!) length. Yes. For so many years I was so focused on external achievement, and I definitely felt the yawning open of the gap that Brooks describes. I’m not sure I experienced it as humiliating, but it definitely was something I could no longer ignore. It wasn’t a gap borne out of desiring some other self but rather an insistent awareness that I was missing my own life. My inner life wasn’t, as Brooks says, as rich as I wanted it to be.
And now, of course, it is the opposite for me. I’m dazzled by what I see behind my own eyelids, and my attachment to my home and my family and my quiet, ordinary life is so ferocious that I’m conscious of becoming alarmingly close to a shut-in.
It strikes me that the “eulogy virtues” are mostly about things that happen to us, whereas the “resume virtues” are about things that we do. Perhaps a shift towards embracing the “moral bucket list” of Brooks’ piece happens in tandem with acknowledgement that life is mostly about responding what happens to us. That our reaction and response and what we do with the raw material of our lives is what makes us who we are. At least for me, that awareness has come as the second half of my life has dawned. I don’t mean to downplay agency, which I do think we all have, but so much of life’s events are out of our control, and in my view we can tell a lot about who we are by our response to them.
I love that the New York Times published a piece that so strongly celebrates the power of a quiet, strong, honest, internal life, one built through setback and pain and loss and love. I’ve noted before that I’m most drawn to people who have experienced some difficulty or challenge. That vague pattern, which I’ve only become aware of recently, makes a lot of sense to me upon reading Brooks’ piece.
What I’m not sure of, though, is that these two things – a focus on the “resume virtues” and one on the “eulogy virtues” – are mutually exclusive. That seems to be to be unnecessarily draconian. I don’t think it’s as clear cut as walking away from a conventional life to live in isolation and focus exclusively on character development. I think we can live in the world and be focused on the experiences and perspective that result in the attributes that Brooks cites as belonging to “the people we want to be.”
I guess it’s just a question of our priorities and our values, of where we spend our only true zero-sum resource, our time. I am certainly grateful for my “resume virtues” and know that they help me in the world on a daily basis. To disavow them or to deny how much those achievements contribute to my life today is disingenuous at best and flat-out dishonest at worst. But my heart doesn’t live in those virtues, and I understand with a crystalline clarity that’s new in the last several years that the map of achievement doesn’t lead me to joy or contentment. Where my heart lives is in the effort to be kind, brave, honest, and faithful. it lives in deep love, the kind I feel for for Grace, Whit, Matt, and other dearly beloved family and those friends who are native speakers. That I know for sure.
I am a lake, my poem is an empty boat,
and my life is the breeze that blows
through the whole scene
stirring everything it touches–
the surface of the water, the limp sail,
even the heavy, leafy trees along the shore.
– Billy Collins (excerpt from My Life)
Great Children’s Books Celebrating Science – We are a houseful of science- and book-lovers, and this wonderful list on Brain Pickings touches both. It doesn’t include our current favorite, On a Beam of Light: A Story of Albert Einstein
Tweet, Memory – Many, many beautiful words have been written about my friend Lisa Boncheck Adams. Reading the eulogies that were delivered at her funeral, which I missed because I was abroad with Grace and Whit, brought me to sobs. But this piece in the New Yorker by Dani Shapiro is my favorite. Not least because Dani so beautifully describes a feeling I share, which is being private despite writing personal things. But most of all because she brings Lisa and her brave, powerful, beautiful persona so vividly to life. Flowers, corgis, illness, Sharpies, birthday cards, fierce love, and unwavering acceptance of reality’s brutal face: that was Lisa.
Primary – I absolutely love this new company, whose mission is to offer affordable, high-quality basics for children. I just wish that my children weren’t about to age out of it, because I love the simple designs, bright colors, and quality fabrics, as well as the price point and the company’s focus and mission.
What Would My Mom Do? – This piece made guffaw at the same time as I felt its undeniable wisdom sink in. Yes, we’ve gone too far, our generation has. I love what Jen says about how her mother majored in the majors and minored in the minors. I would say the same of my mother, whose example is one I strive to emulate every day.
Thirteen Windows – Kristen’s beautiful piece on Brain, Child brought tears to my eyes. She captures so beautifully something I’ve thought about a lot, which is the way in which childbirth is our introduction to all the ways in which parenting is out of our control. I love Kristen’s writing, and this piece is one of my very favorites.
Tinker Crate – I subscribed to Tinker Crate for Whit for his birthday and he’s loving the projects. I’ve also sent Kiwi Crate subscriptions to other kids in my life. I love this company and in particular the ways in which Tinker Crate supports children who like to build and make things. Let’s hear it for the next generation of makers!
What are you reading, listening to, thinking about, and loving lately?
I write these Things I Love posts approximately monthly. You can find them all here.