musings

Like so many of us, I’m finding this strange, unusual, unnerving time to be disorienting and also deeply introspective.  I think this is week 8, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the past and the future, as well as paying attention to the present in a new way.  I suspect we’re all thinking about changes we want to keep with us once the world “goes back to normal,” even as we suspect that it’s going to be a fundamentally changed normal.

I feel acutely aware of my parents these days, of the ways in which their example and inheritance shaped and formed me.  I feel my mother in my hands in the kitchen, and feel grateful for her ease and comfort around cooking that I know I inherited.  I sense my father in the ways I feel towards my children, in my fundamental belief that they are who they are and that many times the best thing I can do is get out of the way while staying nearby.

The other day, my business school classmate Chris Yeh and I interviewed our classmate Kwame Jackson for our podcast.  We ask everyone the same set of questions and since Chris and I developed them together it won’t surprise you that one thing we ask is about your favorite book(s).  Kwame cited a couple, including Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me.  Since that day I’ve been thinking of a line from that book which I adore.  Way back when I wanted to publish a book about parenting tweens, this was my working epigraph.  It remains probably the best distillation of how I feel about parenting I’ve ever found:

My work is to give you what I know of my particular path while allowing you to walk your own.

Amen.  I’m not sure if these weeks have provided the distance that’s really required for truly deep observation.  So perhaps some of these reflections will change and mutate as time goes on.  But I am more and more conscious of my bias towards independence.  That’s been true of me since the beginning as a parent.  I remembered the story recently of holding 2 year old Whit on my lap waiting for him to get blood drawn.  Grace wasn’t with us, but the waiting room was crowded.  “Will this hurt?” Whit asked me in a tremulous voice.  I remember hesitating, holding his sturdy toddler self and wondering what to say.  I took a breath and said, “Yes, it will.  But it will be over.”  The parents in the waiting room drew audible breath and I felt like I’d done some abhorrent.  But I stand by my answer and it’s come to represent a lot of how I feel about parenting.

Hold them close.  Tell them the truth.   Share our own stories, but as just that – ours, not theirs.  Let them find their way.  Trust that they will.  I believe firmly that Generation Z (which Grace and Whit tell me they are) will save the world.  I really, truly do.  This is going to be make them resilient, not destroy them.

My work is to give you what I know of my particular path while allowing you to walk your own.

Closing out week 5.  This is getting old.  And also kind of familiar.  Matt and I have gotten into a habit of walking after dinner while the kids clean up (!).  It’s a really nice way to close out the day.  Last night, as we walked (aside: it is still freezing in Boston, so I was wearing a parka and mittens, and yesterday morning I ran in the snow), Matt said something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.  “I don’t know that I believe in a greater power or God out there, but it’s kind of hard not to think in some ways this pandemic is something bigger than us saying STOP.”  It was actually the college process conversations we’ve been having that caused him to have the thought, but we went on to talk about the environment, and the way we live in general.

It is my devout wish that we emerge from this dark and difficult time with some things readjusted.  I really hope we do.  I suspect that this time will cause a wholesale re-thinking for a lot of us.  We live our lives at breakneck speed, which is wonderful in some ways and destructive in others.  I’m still fleshing out this thought, but I admit I find the notion of some larger power controlling all of this reassuring in some deep, fundamental way.

It feels correlated to say this is the the spring that I’ve most intimately noticed the arrival of spring.  Everything is bursting into bloom and the world is so beautiful right now (albeit cold).  Obviously I am paying attention in a new way.  There’s bittersweetness and irony in this beauty, too, but I’m trying to also just see the sheer joy in the raucous arrival of spring.

One more thing for your Friday viewing.  I watched the Andrea Bocelli concert on Easter, rapt.  My favorite part, of course, was when he closed with Amazing Grace.  The photographs of empty cities – especially Paris, London, and New York (two cities I’ve been proud to call home, and a third that is a second home) – made me weep.  I suggest everybody watch this.  Then watch it again.

Happy Friday, all.  How are you doing?  I’m genuinely asking.

I have written about my attraction to the edges of things, to this world’s, and this life’s, borders.  I was born on the cusp as one season turns into another, and I am drawn over and over again to the places were one thing turns into another – darkness and light, memory and the present, water and sand at the coast.  There are a million examples I can think of.

What I’m thinking about today is similar, and feels like a related or adjacent topic, but it’s slightly different. I am thinking about the poles that we each hold as we navigate this life.  Or, at least, the poles that I know I hold.  These days, the world feels so terrifying, so bleak, in many ways.  And at the same time, I’ve never been more aware of its beauties, of its tiny joys.  These poles.  These opposites.  Every single day holds both terror and delight.  I think that has always been true for me, but it does feel particularly bold now, the contrast between these two things.

I read my friend and mentor Katrina Kenison’s gorgeous post on a similar topic last night and haven’t stopped thinking about it. n The whole piece is exemplary, and it was hard to pick a passage to share, but these words, the ones she closes with, are a manifesto for us all:

Given the state of our fractured, imperiled world, it seems safe to say we’re in this struggle for the long haul.  If we’re going to find the strength to carry on and to fight for what matters, we must also continue to celebrate what we love.  To embrace delight, to dance with abandon, to soak up beauty, to share each day’s small gifts and doings, is to take care of ourselves and each other. So, if you should see a tree full of robins or a mackerel sky, be sure to tell someone. Your delight is mine.

In my comment I wrote about Katrina’s piece giving me permission to allow these seemingly contradictory poles of life to coexist.  Sometimes it can feel overwhelming, schizophrenic, the way I can be deeply sad about something and, simultaneously, intensely touched by the particular blue of the sky.  But Katrina’s post got me thinking that perhaps these two extremes of experience are – rather than random, unusual, or something to bear with – absolutely necessary.  Maybe we need both.  Or at least I do.  It also occurs to me that these seemingly-opposed feelings can be effectively mapped onto the bigger canvas of my life, as much as they can also inhabit the smallest moments of my day.

I’ve written before about the months after Matt’s and my fathers both died quickly and suddenly, and about the Robert Lowell lines that “darkness honestly lived through is a place of wonder and life.  So much has come from there.”  I said that that time had both “difficulty and surprising grandeur.”  And that’s true.  And it strikes me that those dark experiences somehow burrow into us, making room for the light. That makes sense on some existential level, right?  Was it Kahlil Gibran who said “the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain?”

When I write about “holding both poles,” an image of my child hands holding ski poles comes to mind.  Not sure why, and obviously that’s not the poles I mean.

Regardless.  I just felt like sharing that visual.

It is true that these days – whether that’s 2020 or being 45 or just the particular ecosystem I live in – things feel particularly charged, in both directions. The world feels threatening, unstable, and worrying.  And it also feels gorgeous.  I am so aware of spring being right around the corner, of everything about to burst into life. This tension – this pain and this beauty – is animate in the very bodies of my children, flying towards young adulthood as they both are.  It’s impossible for me to look at them without blinking back tears, some days.  It’s just all so outrageously lovely, and so unavoidably, excruciatingly short-lived.

I think I have a sense of why the world feels perilous and dark right now.  I think often of Dad, who in the months before he died was increasingly speaking about how uncertainty that the United States would stay united, and who I wish I could talk about what’s going on in the world.  It’s less clear to me why my awareness of life’s tiny joys and beauties feels so amped up right now.  Maybe it’s a coping mechanism.  Maybe it’s growing into midlife.  I’m not sure why, but I’m grateful.  I hope we can all hold both poles, welcome life – with all of its heartbreak and its beauty – with open arms.  As another one of my beloved teachers, Dani Shapiro says, “this too.  this too.”