musings

I never saw the movie Boyhood.  I’m afraid to, honestly.  I worry it will be sadder than I can handle.  I remember years ago, at dinner with a friend and her husband, the movie came up.  I admitted that I was terrified about the heartbreak that would result if I saw it.

“What happens, something tragic?” My friend’s husband wasn’t familiar with the movie.

“Oh, no.  It is about the ordinary heartbreak of time passing.” She answered him.

“Oh, I see,” he seemed a little confused.

“In short, the most devastating thing of all.” I shook my head, trying not to think about it.

Lately I feel like I’m living in a version of Adulthood.  Time’s speeding by, what feels like decades in two hours.  I’m simultaneously wondering at time’s fleet passage and feeling the weight of every single passing week and month like an actual burden on my back. How can time simultaneously move rapidly and also creep by, every single moment an eternity?  I don’t know, but I’m living that paradox right now.

I won’t lie: I’m limping to the end of the year.  This has been a difficult year for myriad reasons and despite the fact that it’s also been replete with joy, right now I feel mostly exhaustion and stress and I can’t get out of my own way.  I hate complaining.  I know how intensely fortunate I am.  But I’m also worn down by worries that I can name and those I can’t, full of a bubbling mix of sorrow and anxiety that grates on me all day, every day.

I try to sleep as much as I can.  I go to yoga.  I go for walks, breathe the air, notice the sky, watch the sunsets.  I do all of these things, and daily I’m knocked almost off balance by the splendor that I see. All of that is true, and my deep awareness of all that’s good is an undercurrent even in these times that feel somewhat difficult and dark.

But I also feel overwhelmed by the demands I juggle daily.  Adulthood, again: I’m sense keenly all the ways that my family needs me, all the professional responsibilities I’m trying to handle.  More than anything, I just want this particular season to be over, and for something new to come.  And even as I feel that, it makes me uncomfortable: one thing I don’t like is living for the future, because I believe so firmly that what’s right in front of us is both all there is and where the glittering jewel of the human existence is hidden. So I feel something that I know intuitively is not what I believe, and that dissonance is uncomfortable.

I looked in these archives for the phrase “begin again,” since I hear those words in my head every day.  I don’t have a choice but to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and that not-having-a-choice is both a burden and a blessing.  I was interested to find this piece that I wrote in April 2012, a full 4.5 years ago.  Every single word resonates now. I’d forgotten about this theory, though as I read it it makes total sense.  I wonder what I’m preparing to let go of right now?  I imagine 2017 will show me.

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…A lot of people look better at dealing with the sine curve of life, at least from where I sit.  A lot of people – and I envy them, let me be clear – seem to experience fewer moments of spirit-shaking emotion than I do.  A lot of them can describe what Easter means to their children, or admire the clear, extraordinary blue of an April sky, or witness a christening, without bursting into tears.  Hell, a lot of people don’t burst into tears every single day.

I do.

Somehow that intense emotion, that wound at the very core of my being, is bearable most of the time.  Right now, though, it feels like too much.  I am bone-tired, my emotions are worn paper-thin, my is patience frayed.  I know my life runs close to the surface, that’s not news to me.  And this isn’t news, either, this sense of being deep in the weeds and of each step being a struggle.  It is so not-new, in fact, that I have a theory as to its cause: I suspect this exhaustion occurs when I’m letting go of something, even though I’m not sure what it is yet.  Right now I’m overly aware of the cracks in everything, and I can’t see the light they’re letting in.  Many days I feel a tightness in my chest and tears pricking my eyes and a general sense of sorrow that is, for now, as powerful as it is inarticulate.

But the children have questions, and the work phone is ringing, and the laundry needs to be done.

What’s my choice, but to get up, to keep going, to begin again?

These are the darkest days.  It is fully dark by 5pm here in Boston.  And when we wake up, it’s still dark.  The days are short, but they feel long at the same time.  Yet, strangely, I don’t find this depressing.  I have written before about my very specific memory from December 1996, working one evening at my first job in a high-rise building in downtown Boston.  I looked out the window and had this sudden, startling realization that the early darkness no longer upset me.  I noticed all the twinkling lights, and I felt surrounded, safe.

I think of that evening all the time, still.

For some reason, people are often surprised to learn I don’t find the early arrival of darkness gloomy.  I don’t.  It’s also true that I find the winter solstice a fundamentally more hopeful day than the summer solstice.  This is, perhaps, another manifestation of how hard it is for me to truly be here now: I always allow what’s coming to occlude – or at least to shadow – my experience of the moment.

I also think all the time of Wendell Berry’s lines:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.  To know the dark, go dark.  Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is travelled by dark feet and dark wings. – Wendell Berry

I’ve written about darkness, and about light, a lot (2011, 2013, 2014).  I also really like that picture of candles in Jerusalem, apparently.  That was a trip full of both dark and light, and one that triggered in me the choice of my 2012 word of the year, light.

The world is dark.  But I can’t stop seeing light.  There is so much to be grateful for, and I’m simultaneously deeply aware of the ways that our ordinary lives are fragile.  2016 has not been an excellent year on any count, for our family or, to my estimation, for the world at large. And yet at the same time I feel oddly buoyed by the darkness at this time of year, alternately exhausted and hopeful, the latter beyond what’s rational.  I wonder where that undercurrent of joy comes from, while being grateful for it at the same time.

This all made sense to me when I read Roger Cohen’s editorial in the New York Times last week (with tears rolling down my cheeks).  He called 2016 “a truly awful year.”  But he also asserted that “The most beautiful times of day are dawn and dusk when shadows are long, offering contrast, refuge and form. Death is the shadow that gives shape to existence, urgency to love, brilliance to life. ”  These thoughts are lyrical and made me cry, reminding me of long, deeply-held beliefs of mine that it’s darkness that gives meaning to light, of my oft-repeated thoughts on the ways I’m drawn to the liminal, the edges of things, where dark and light bleed into each other.

They also help me understand why it is that I feel a strange sense of lightness amidst all the darkness and heaviness of this year, this season, this week.  It’s partly because I’ve learned, in my adulthood, to lean into the darkness that flits around the edges of my experience, to see the blooming and singing of which Berry writes.  It’s also because in this difficult, dark time I’m also reminded of all that is good, as Cohen so beautifully describes.  Indeed.

Saturday evening, sunset from our hotel room, Florida.  I shared another shot of this sunset on Instagram.

Whit and I were studying vocab words recently and we came upon the word “creed.”  He asked me what my creed was.

Without thinking too much, I immediately answered, “My creed is to pay attention.”

He looked at me and nodded, turning back to his list of words.  “Sounds right,” he said, under his breath.

But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the word creed.  What’s my creed?

My creed is:

Pay attention to your life.

Tell people you love them that you do, and why.  Often.

Every human being has the same inherent value, and should be treated as such.

Say thank you.  Mean it.

Look at the sky.  Breathe the air. Get outside every day, even if only briefly.

Get enough sleep.

Everybody has their own demons.  You can’t know what’s going on with others.  Cut people slack.

Pay attention to your life.

What’s your creed?

Right now, when I think about the word I chose as my word of the year, I feel a grudging sense of oh, yeah, now that’s ironic.  Life right now is not replete with ease.  I was surprised to see, when I went back to see what I’d written about ease so far in 2016, that in the spring I was already asking is this the opposite of ease?

Now, ease does not mean easy, of course.  It doesn’t look like I expect it to.

When I think more about it, I realize that it’s not an accident that this is the word I chose for this year.  It’s precisely in the midst of these turbulent months that I am learning how to live with ease.  I’m not learning fast, let me be honest: I feel exhausted, and overwhelmed, and sad, and grateful, and emotional right now.  I do not feel ease.  But I’m aware of it, floating around me, and maybe that is the lesson right now.  It is there, the ease I want, and the way to reach it is to grasp less frantically, to breathe more deeply.

It’s only a goal now, ease, a desire, a fierce hope.  I am snappy and easily frustrated and my poor children are bearing the brunt of my not-easeful way of being in the world.  I’m so tired that the other night Whit observed that I looked like I had bruises under my eyes.  But still.  And yet.  Every morning I can wake up and get out of bed and as Jane Kenyon said, I’m keenly aware that it could have been otherwise.  Each day is an opportunity to do better, to be more patient, to be more gentle, to live in the days of my life with more ease.

So maybe that’s why this word presented itself to me at the opening of this year.  To remind me of what I want, what I aim for.  I think every single day of this quote, one of my favorites (author is unknown):

Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of these things and still be calm in your heart.

And so I return to my life, forgiving myself for being far from the peaceful, easeful person I want to be today, allowing myself to imagine that tomorrow I may inch closer to her.