musings

A few weeks ago, I took Whit to his nine year pediatrician appointment.  As we waited to go in, I thought about the fact that it had been two full years since I wrote close to the surface after his seven year appointment.  Two full years and two minutes, simultaneously.

Whit and his pediatrician had a lengthy discussion about physics, the universe, how many dimensions there really are, relativity, and the potential for a quantum computer.  Incidentally, I love that Whit’s pediatrician casually quotes Richard Feynman in appointments with nine year olds.  This explains a lot of why Whit (who recently heard mention of Einstein and said, “I know Einstein!  He’s my favorite!”) so adores Dr. E.

I listened to them talking, and then watched as Dr. E listened to Whit’s invisible but extraordinary heart, and thought once again of the ways that at every edge science bleeds into mystery.  In the world of the intellect, both the tiniest things – electrons, spinning one way and the other and communicating mysteriously across light years – and the largest ones – the existence of multiple universes – bump up against that which we cannot fully grasp.

My father is a physicist who is fascinated with poetry, art, and Europe’s great cathedrals.  He understands this ineffable border, the slippage between logic and magic, the imperceptible and always-shifting line between what we can know and what we can’t grasp.  As I’ve written before, my father’s unshakeable faith in the rational mind is matched by his profound wonder at the power of the ineffable.  Who I am is indelibly shaped by having grown up in the space between those things.

At the outmost limits of science, where the world and its phenomena can be understood and categorized with equations and with right and wrong answers, there flits the existence of something less distinct, barely discernible. The finite and the infinite are not as distinct as we might think, and the way they bleed together enriches them both.

Whit reminds me of my father in many ways, most of all in the way he understands and esteems equally concrete math and science concepts and the most intangible notions, of memory and love and existence.  That he relates to the former is easily demonstrated by his fascination with the periodic table or his comfort with his math homework.  It is harder to explain how I know the latter to be true, but I do: now and then he will say or do something that evinces to me his familiarity with the shades-of-gray territory of the unknown that I myself walk so frequently.

Whit and I left the pediatrician’s office and walked back to the car.  He held my hand.  Even his hand, as solid as anything I know in the world, gripping mine back, contains that which is known and that which is not.  Blood beating through veins, bones, cartilage, and chewed fingernails, but also the pulse of life itself, the ultimate mystery.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve gotten carsick.  Quickly and very.  I may have mentioned the week-long safari Matt and I went on the summer after we met?  By lunch on the first day I was throwing up behind the Jeep.  I spent a week nauseous and vomiting all over Kenya.  It was very romantic.  I’m lucky he stuck around, frankly.

I very rarely get seasick, and I am always fine on airplanes and trains.  But, oh, cars.  My nausea is immediate and often powerful.  I’ve been wondering what this carsickness is about, and what it can teach me.

Is it another manifestation of my need for control?  Because if I am driving I’m fine.  It’s true that I’m an irritating passenger, with opinions about how and where and when to drive (“that’s a lot of wiper,” said under my breath when I deem Matt as having too aggressively paced the windshield wipers for a drizzle, is one of the comments I’m roundly mocked for).  So maybe it’s about not being in control, and that literally making me sick.  I’m not sure, though.

Maybe it’s connected to how I have always disliked rollercoasters.  The truth is that I have slowly been getting over my fear of rollercoasters, mostly because I’ve started riding them with Grace and Whit.  Of course we’re talking about the rollercoasters at Story Lane, or other pretty tame rides.  I’m still not comfortable on any kind of real rollercoaster.

A few years ago, when we were at Disney with the children, Matt goaded me into going on Rockin’ Roller Coaster with him at Hollywood Studios.  I was so tired of being mocked that I agreed to try it.  We got into the car, me fighting a wave of panic, and I asked why we had a harness over our shoulders.  Oh, no reason, he said dismissively.

That ride was among the most terrifying few minutes of my life.  As the ride came to a screeching finish, Matt looked at me and burst out laughing because, as he said between guffaws, I was literally green.

Perhaps, as I noted a couple of years ago, the swooping up-and-down movement along the tracks is simply too close to my own internal topography, which is already a kind of roller coaster.  I climb to outrageous joy and plummet to tearful heartache every single day.  Hell, I do that every hour.  Just inside my own head and heart.  Maybe it’s too overwhelming to also have my body do this.

Or maybe my propensity to get carsick is simply the universe pushing me to be still.  The surest way to get sick, for me, is to distract myself.  If I read, if I look at my iPhone, if I turn around and talk to the kids in the back seat, even if I engage too much with the radio: boom.  But my only chance at not being nauseous is to sit still, look out the window, and pay attention to what’s outside.

I’m not sure what the root cause of my carsickness is.  Maybe it’s just the way my inner ear is constructed.  Or maybe it’s some mysterious amalgam of all of these factors, whose precise components can’t be discerned.  I don’t know.  But I do know that for now, I’ll turn off the music and look out the window and watch the horizon, and hope that that is good enough.

For the most sensitive among us the noise can be too much.
– Jim Carrey, to Philip Seymour Hoffman

I have not been able to get Jim Carrey’s tweet on the occasion of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sudden death out of my head.  That line has been running through my thoughts pretty much constantly since Sunday.

No.  I am no Philip Seymour Hoffman, that’s not what I am saying.  And I am not saying I know anything about his private demons or struggles.  But I do know what Jim Carrey’s talking about, and I’ve written about it before.  The loneliness that is curled at the core of my human experience.  The quiet, jagged seed of desolation and sorrow that is buried deep inside of me.  The emptiness that I wrote to Grace about, warning her of the behaviors that so many people indulge in to fill the echoing void.

I’m convinced that this gnawing loneliness is a universal aspect of being human, but I’m equally certain that people are aware of it to varying degrees.  And there are many ways that people try to distract themselves from feeling it, and some of these behaviors are more socially acceptable than others.  Some of them are also riskier, as Seymour Hoffman’s story vividly demonstrates.  It’s the socially acceptable avoidance tactics that have always been my personal favorites.  This can, and does, lead into a trap: almost exactly two years ago I wrote about the dangerous complexity that is born when the ways you hide from your own life are applauded by the world.

I’m learning to stop avoiding my own life by focusing on external achievement, and beginning to let authentic goals replace brass rings.  There is no question I’m making progress.  But the thing is, as I get quieter and more in touch with the whisper of my own voice, somehow, the world gets noisier.  Maybe that’s what happens, as paradoxical as it is: we shut out the noises, the coping techniques that blur the pain, and in so doing we expose ourselves to the real noise.  Does that make sense?

The world’s noise has always affected me in a deep way.  It’s not the first time I’ve noted it, and it won’t be the last: I’m extremely porous, and the world seeps through my membranes quickly, powerfully, and, often, overwhelmingly.  In the simplest terms I like silence.  I was a cross-country runner in high school: is there a sport more designed for someone who likes to be alone, likes to be outside, likes to admire the seasons as they ripple across nature?  I don’t think so.

And yet the silence holds so much music.  It’s the same way that I now see how the darkness is full of stars almost blinding in their brilliance.

As I turn towards quiet, tune into my own internal world (the hidden geode lined with glittering that Catherine Newman describes), I am by turns dazzled by the symphony of sounds and disoriented by their startling cacophony.  You can’t have one without the other, I don’t think.  This is a line that each of us walks alone and we all make choices about how to cope with how open and exposed to the world’s noise we naturally are.  I am deeply saddened by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death.  Since Sunday I’ve felt a bone-deep reminder that the world’s noise can be destabilizing and terrifying for some, and that we all need to find a way to manage our porosity to the world.

self-portrait (I just cannot use the word selfie) at sunset last week.

I believe the past, present, and future are all woven together in ways I can’t fully understand.  I also believe that a central task of adulthood is accepting, making peace with, and celebrating our individual pasts and histories.  This is the only way we can embrace what is, let alone what lies ahead.

Today, 2014 dawns: clear, cold, brand-new.

As part of my desire to understand the past in order to fully move forward into the future, I have been reflecting on the year that has passed.

What did I learn in 2013?

Life is a lesson in letting go.  It never ends, this learning, and it seems like every single day there’s a new thing on which I need to release my grip.  Over and over again, I feel like I am endlessly saying goodbye, acknowledging losses.  Of course I am also welcoming new things, people, and learning, though sometimes the former swamps the latter for me.

I am an immensely attached person.  That makes the aforementioned letting go really hard.

Green juice – specifically grapefruit, ginger, and kale – is a terrific way to start the day.  Also, I will never be hungry for breakfast.

I am going to get a cold, a bad one, every single winter.  No matter what I do to try to stay healthy.

Poetry is my lingua franca.  It is in poetry that I feel the most at home, poetry that I remember most vividly and most often, poets to whom I relate most intensely.

That “it’s rarely about you” lesson that I aspired to teach Grace as she turned 10?  I need to learn it too.  Again and again.

Maya Angelou said there are years that ask questions and years that answer.  2013 was a year of questions, but then again so were 2012 and 2011.  It feels as though I’ve been in a period of more questions than answers, more uncertainty than clarity, more shadow than bright light.  What I don’t know is whether that is fact or about my growing and sometimes-overwhelming awareness of everything around (and within) me.

Music is about lyrics for me (see above point about poetry – aren’t lyrics just poems set to music?)   It’s hard to name favorites, but immediately Fix You, Home, Let Her Go, Breathe, Circle Game, and The Story come to mind as some I hold dear.

I asked Grace and Whit what they learned in 2013, and they had these observations to offer:  Whit learned that Leonardo da Vinci’s parents were not married and how they made candles in the 1800s.  Grace learned a lot about Samuel de Champlain, and how to write and edit a novel (she participated in NaNoWriMo).  Just over two years ago, they cited noticing things, manners, and using the potty, so I’d say they’re moving in the granular (though perhaps less practical) direction.

What did you learn in 2013?  How do these learnings inform what you aspire to in 2014?