musings

The beginning of love

I don’t know much about Eunice Kennedy Shriver, but I do know that her death is a loss. She and her husband, Sargent, seem to me to be the very definition of public servants. He served in WWII and then held leadership roles in government social service programs such as Head Start and the Peace Corps. Eunice famously started the Special Olympics. I wish I knew more people who had similar ambitions in the real of public service today.

Tim Shriver wrote a letter to the Special Olympics families today announcing his mother’s death. It contained a quote that I have heard before but not known the attribution for. The words are a much more eloquent statement of one of my points about learning to love all of the various prismatic complexities we learn to see in those we are close to.

“the beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image, lest we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” – Thomas Merton

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters


A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. – Adrienne Rich

Cherish your wilderness. – Maxine Kumin

It’s thesis day around here, clearly, with Anne Sexton this morning and Adrienne Rich and Maxine Kumin this evening. I know I have both monsters and wilderness in me, and I know I share Sexton’s view that there is nothing uncomplicated about love.

Have been sort of heavy-hearted today, feeling an inarticulate and undefined cloud of vague sadness hovering around my head. I find myself wondering if I am even capable of happiness untouched by this melancholy that is just part of who I am. Actually, I know I’m not. So what I wonder, I guess, is whether I care. Of course this thought exercise is not very practical since I can’t change it, even if I wanted to, but it is interesting.

I am incapable of experiencing joy unlimned with loss. I am always, achingly aware of the imminent farewell that hovers around any happy moment. I am simultaneously in the moment and already grieving its passage. I am a palimpsest whose first layer is one of deep sorrow, and no matter how much paint I apply on top, that orientation towards sadness always shows through. This is okay with me: some of my favorite expressions of beauty, like the deep blue of a hydrangea or the fire of a summer sunset, seem to share, somehow, this underlying sense of joy’s intractable connection with loss.

Despite my endless ruminations, I have actually accepted this part of who I am rather peacefully. I struggle to relate, in fact, to people whose outlook on life is more simply sunny. These people are often a breath of fresh air to me, and a positive influence, but I am fundamentally unable to understand the way they are wired. Surely my life would be simpler if I was able to live my life without preemptively mourning the fact that every day will pass, without dwelling on my inability to capture and hold the things I love most dearly. But it would not be my life. So instead of wishing I was someone else, I will try and try, as summer fades into fall and the world again reminds us so viscerally of loss and time’s passage, to embrace my own complicated, squirrel-like mind.

Puzzles

What complex, multi-layered animals humans are. I am melancholy tonight, thick in the fog of free-floating sadness that follows me around, hovering nearby and descending regularly to envelop me. Thinking about the legions that are contained in each single person, the layers of emotion, memory, defenses, and biology that make us who we each are.

A fascinating article in the Atlantic describes a study of 268 men for 72 years. The study’s lofty goal is to understand happiness. The article about Vaillant, the originator of the study, makes many salient points – it is long but well worth reading. But the one that stuck with me is the assertion that the key determinant of both personality and happiness is how one responds to challenge. The article is thought-provoking as it describes the array of defense mechanisms available to people. Calling this behavior important is not provocative; claiming it is the most important contributor to whether a life is happy or not is. Other than causing me to feel bleak about my own immaturity, I found myself wondering how much of these defenses are hard-wired, and from where and when. Is it possible to, with hard work and effort, retrain these grooves in our head? If so, how? Can someone teach me?

I find it hard to read the article without suspecting that a lot about how things turn out is somewhat random. Yes, self-awareness is important, and there is much to be learned about how we – and those we love – respond to stress or perceived attack. But some of what happens is just chance, luck, fate. The study also makes crystal clear the notion that you must not assume from someone’s outside what their inside looks like – some of those with the most charmed looking lives are the least happy, and vice versa.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to truly understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our lives to try. – Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace

We can only scrape the surface of those we know. As I’ve written before, we all leap to conclusions based on the sparsest of information, but in truth we simply cannot know what happens in the head and heart of other people. And how sad it makes me that we all judge so quickly – I myself am just as guilty here as anyone else. All human beings want, I think, is to be known. We all want someone to say to us: I see you. That somehow in being seen – and maybe not until then – we become real.

I believe the highest goal we ought to have for our relationships is to honor the hall of mirrors that we find inside the hearts of those we care about. To see both the beautiful and the ugly and to reflect both back without judgment. Of course this is hard work; how we react to others is, ultimately, about us. And the flip side: to reveal ourselves honestly, without any filters or screens. This is, maybe, harder yet.

For someone who craves clarity and struture as much as I do, who enjoys puzzles and laundry and tetris and all sorts of expressions of creating order out of chaos, this deep and essential unknowability is destabilizing and scary. I must accept that I simply cannot fully understand anyone else and that I cannot be fully known. It may seem inconsistent, but this craving for organization coexists (and may sometimes be masked by) with an exquisite, occasionally irrational sensitivity.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. – Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

When I think of myself, I know how many Lindseys there are. There are many facets to me, and they do not always agree. In fact it is the tension between some of these parts of my heart and head that animates much of this blog. And it is so so rare for me to be in a place or with a person who accesses every layer of me. I think this is the root cause of the vague loneliness that accompanies me everywhere I go, of the haunting sense that I don’t seem to quite fit anywhere. Surely it contributes to my difficulty being present in the moment. Sometimes the loneliness is breathtaking and threatens to swamp me. What will it take for me to feel seen? Known?

Much of the time it is surprisingly easy for me to just fire on one cylinder, to just be one part of me. I hate the ease with which I can be just Mother Lindsey or Professional Lindsey (well she’s pretty JV and doesn’t come out much anymore) or Friend Lindsey or Grew up in Cambridge Lindsey or Princeton Lindsey or etc etc etc. You get the drill. I’ve always held contradictions in my hand, participated in wildly different worlds. But shouldn’t it be harder for me to be just part of me?

It’s as though I am made up of a bunch of little thin slices of a person and have not figured out what the unifying theme is, the way they all work together. Once in a while, in a particular moment (the analogy of finally getting a manual car into gear, the instant transition from jerky to smooth – something I have only done once or twice in my life – comes to mind) or with one of a handful of people I glimpse the unified whole and I think: Yes, oh, okay. I am not crazy. It doesn’t escape me, by the way, that most of the moments when I’ve felt that were with other people and that this implies I cannot find wholeness without a mirror, without being reflected by someone else.

Anne Patchett described this the best way I’ve ever seen in Truth and Beauty: “Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn’t even realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.”

How truly blessed I am to have the handful of friends who speak the same native language. Unfortunately those conversations are the exception, not the rule, so I must learn to live with the tensions that this sense of myself as refracted though a prism creates. Maybe I am just being melodramatic (it wouldn’t be the first time). Maybe this sense of multiple selves, this difficulty identifying entirely with one world, is universal. Maybe it is totally fine and normal. Or maybe it is not. All I know is I struggle with it.

I feel deeply saddened by both my inability to fully understand anyone else and my sense of being very rarely fully known myself. I suppose there is nothing to do other than to be aware of it, to celebrate those few people who do make me feel seen and known, and to ask for their gentleness and empathy as they show or tell me about the morass of things, both flaws and features, that I know they see.

18 or 81?

(just a random photograph of my farmer’s market zinnias)

Tomorrow, it’s August. And that means it is the month that I turn 35. I am not looking forward to this birthday at all. Hilary finally made me realize, last year, that birthdays are not, on the whole, happy occasions for me. That has historically had little to do with getting old, but this year that fun detail is thrown in the mix as well.

As I drove home from Providence today I was thinking that I just do not feel 35. I just don’t. I am simultaneously an old soul (many, many people have commented on that to me) and an arrested adolescent. I often look at my children and wonder when the real mother is going to show up. To, maybe, show me what to do too.

I was thinking there are a lot of ways that I’m still 18 and also a lot of ways that I’m ready to join the AARP. Not that many ways that I feel like – or act like – a 35 year old mother of two. Though it’s important to note that none of these behaviors or preferences are deliberate – this is just how I act and feel naturally. But still.

Signs I am an 18 year old in full-blown arrested development:

  • I dress like a teenager: jeans, juicys, sneakers, logo tee shirts, ponytail
  • I eat like a teenager: crap, crap, and more crap
  • My music tastes tend towards the teenybopper: Taylor Swift, Britney, Jessica Simpson – and who doesn’t secretly think Miley’s The Climb is a moving anthem??
  • I bite my fingernails down to the quick – professional that’s not
  • I paint my toenails dark sparkly blue
  • The pimples that just will not stop, even when they battle for real estate with wrinkles

Signs I am a senior citizen:

  • I prefer the 5:30 dinner reservation to the 8:30 one (hello, cmoore!)
  • I like to go to bed before 10
  • I could – and often do – eat the same four things every single day
  • I can’t stand too much noise, smell, or overstimulation of any kind
  • 4pm is the new 5pm when it comes to an end-of-day glass of wine (or several)
  • The deep wrinkles around my eyes

I wonder if my birthday goal this year, other than limiting my seemingly-out-of-thin-air bawling, should be to find a way to feel more 35. I wonder, too, if this is connected to my general discomfort in my skin, the persistent insecurity about who I am that manifests in a multitude of awkward and unappealing ways. I should try to find a way, I guess, to embrace my 35 year old self, to relax into her middle-aged body and enjoy the joys of right now. Easier said than done, sadly, but a worthy goal.

Memory

I haven’t been able to get Aidan’s thoughtful post yesterday about the ways memory holds and haunts us out of my head (I guess it is holding and haunting me).

What strikes me, though, as I run through my own most prized and cherished memories, is how often they are not from the Big Days but, in fact, from the most mundane, regular days. How the things I hold most dear are things that happened in the grout between the tiles of life’s big experiences. Often they are things, moments, people that I may not have even realized were as important as they are when they were happening.

I can think of times in my life, very few, where I have been utterly present and simultaneously aware that I’m living something that I will very soon wish I was back in. Mostly, though, it is after the fact that I realize how special or moving an experience was, and I wish I could have lived it more consciously and with more awareness.

In those few moments when I know I’m living something special, a line from Tintern Abbey always comes to mind: “in this moment there is life and food for future years.” You may mock me for brandishing good old Wordsworth, but that poem… wow, is it full of great lines. In fact it is an entire meditation on precisely this topic: what we remember, why, and how some memories can sustain us.

I also, often, find myself hearing over and over a single line from Colin Hay’s gorgeous song, Waiting for My Real Life to Begin: “Just be here now.” If only I could. I try, oh I try! And when I succeed … there are no words.

I suppose what I am saying is that the memories that I come back to, rubbing over in my mind like a hand worrying a smooth stone in my pocket, are sometimes from days and moments that look utterly unremarkable, unmemorable, on the surface. The memories are often triggered by surprising things: some songs, other songs, certain smells, the way light falls on leaves at certain times of day. If it is the quiet moments of mundane days that end up staying with me, that implies that every experience has the potential to become one of these touchstone memories. Which, in turn, reminds me (yet again) that I need to work harder at being present.