musings

Sunset, Back Bay, June 23, 2016

The end of June may be my favorite time of year.  The children are out of school but have not yet gone to camp/grandparents.  The days are achingly long.  Usually it’s warm but not blazing hot.  A couple of months of a slower pace ripple ahead of us, full of promise.  Even in the midst of these days that I love so much, I am aware of their almost-over-ness.  In the middle of summer’s highest fever pitch, I can sense a kernel of fall, an unavoidable awareness of what we’re turning towards.  I love these days the most of all, but they’re definitely threaded with loss.

I can find a farewell in anything, can’t I?

Yes.  I can.  This too shall pass.

Everything passes. 

This is the source of the seam of sorrow that runs through my entire life, but it’s also at the root of any resilience I have.  Both.  At the same time.

When Grace was a colicky infant and I was not sleeping and I was more depressed than any time before or since, it was the feeling that this was never going to end that terrified me the most. Of course it did.  It passed.  As did other difficult times in my life, personal, professional, medical, difficulties belonging to me or to those close to me.

Everything passes.

Of course this is true of the joys, too.  And my deep awareness of time’s ineluctable fleetingness is the dark hole around which my whole life circles, I know that now.  In the most joyful moments I wish desperately that things would not pass, and yet they always do.

Even in the moments I love most, there are unavoidable reminders of the way things pass.  These haunt me and bring me to tears.  I think of Frost’s line that “nothing gold can stay,” but then my mind also pinwheels to Lao Tzu’s, about how “muddy water let stand will clear.”

It strikes me that one of the tasks of our lives is to accept the drumbeat passage of time.  I originally wrote that we have to lean into it, but that, I suspect, will be impossible for me.  All the days of my life I expect to feel this faint shadow of loss, this specter of all that’s over even as I love the moment I’m in.  That’s just who I am.  That balloon floats above me, sometimes occluding the sun.  But I also remember that it’s precisely this inevitable passage that makes the difficult stuff pass, too, and that this too shall pass is a comment mostly rendered in hard times.  It’s relevant there, too.

The mud will clear.  The gold will dim.  It is comforting and terrifying, this truth, both.

My friend Aidan recently asked a provocative question: what do people thank you for?

I’ve been pondering this for the couple of weeks since I read it.  The answer does not come to me that quickly.  That may be because I handle compliments poorly and generally react with redirection and discomfort or maybe it’s because the entire topic of being thanked makes me feel self-indulgent.  Even writing about it makes me feel a little uneasy, like I’m tooting my own horn.  But I’m forging ahead, because I do think there’s a lot of value in this question.

The value, of course, is in being aware of that which we do to which others respond.  And using that awareness to guide how we spend our time.  What people thank us for is probably something we ought to do more of.  At least that’s how I think about this.

People thank me for talking openly about my experience of life.  That is diffuse and hard to articulate, and sounds both enormous and tiny.  But more often than not, people say thank you for sharing my heartache at life’s small passages, for being honest about things that are hard, for keeping my finger on the pulse of that which hurts in daily life (for me, that’s time’s passage).

People thank me for taking pictures of the sky.

People thank me for talking about books I love.

What’s interesting, when I think about the things people thank me for, are they are all things I worry I do too much of.  I fret that I’m a broken record: another blog post about feeling sorrow mixed with joy at the world’s smallest experiences?  another Instagram photograph of the sunset from my office window?  another time asking “so, what are you reading?” at the baseball field?  And yet these things I worry I do too often are the things that people seem to appreciate.

This worrying about saying or doing too often that which objectively the world seems to appreciate is a dissonance I experience at a very deep level.  It reminds me of the feeling I have, more often than I like, that I am just too much myself.  Gail Caldwell called it feeling like “the volume of the world had been turned up a notch” and that has always made sense to me.

Even as I write this, with a cloudy, pale sunset to my left and my son and husband in the room to my right, I feel slight goosebumps up and down my arms.  Is this too messy to share, too self-congratulatory?  Am I revealing all the ways in which I’m too heavy, too serious, too sensitive, by sharing this?  I’m going to go ahead and hit publish because I think this is precisely the kind of honesty that people seem to react to, but for what it’s worth, it is still a complicated thing for me.

I think Aidan’s question is an excellent one, and likely points us to our true calling, or at least to the ways in which we can be most helpful to others in the world.  There’s discomfort in both the asking and the answering, at least for me, but I suspect that’s part of the value of the exercise.  Here I go.  Honest and candid, and a sunset, and a book, too (book review coming on Wednesday!).

What do people thank you for?

I grew up moving around a lot.  I’ve written about that before.  There were a great many privileges to this childhood, and one of them is that we traveled.  Hilary and I wrote our names on the Berlin Wall, saw more cathedrals than I can count, and visited far-flung corners of the United Kingdom like Northern Ireland and the Isle of Jersey.  There are still a lot of places that I want to go, though. There are also places that I have been but want to go with Grace and Whit, because I want them to experience them or because they were important spots for me (London, where Matt and I both lived for periods of time [separately], is near the top of this second list).

I’ve written before about my deep desire that Grace and Whit see the world. Whatever I can do to help with that, I will.  By traveling and seeing the grand sweep of this planet, I believe we understand both the enormity that we’re a part of and the tiny place we have in it.  We learn, both literally and figuratively, that ours is not the only language in this world.

Years ago, at a birthday dinner, the man of honor asked people to go around the table and say the one place they hadn’t been and really wanted to go.  It was a great question for a group, and I’m curious how you would answer, too.  What’s the one place you are most eager to travel to?  My list is below.  #1 is what I answered at that birthday dinner, and it’s still #1 today.

Istanbul

Saint Petersburg

Egypt

Alaska

Where do you want to go?

I suspect we can all agree that regret is one of the most toxic of the emotions.  It is both paralyzing and, fundamentally, useless.  I have my share of regrets, but lately I’ve been thinking about how there are certain things that I never regret and others that I always regret.  And even though I know these things about myself – surefire ways to feel good, surefire ways to feel bad – I sometimes struggle to act on them.  Why is that?  Is inertia that powerful?  I suspect that’s a big part of it.

The other day I started thinking about the various actions that I know cause regret, and those that never do.  I wanted to specifically name them, both because I’m interested in what these things are for you and because I hope it might help me remind myself of the value of choosing things from the first list and avoiding those from the second.

Things I never regret:

Going to yoga
Going to bed
Going for a run (or exercise of any kind)
Meditating (5 minutes is my max, so don’t be too impressed)

Things I always regret:

That last glass of wine (it’s been a while since I was in this situation, truthfully)
Opening the bag of jelly beans, or anything super sugary
Talking about myself in a social setting
Pity parties

What are things that you always, and never, regret?