musings

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

-Zora Neale Hurston

I think very often of Hurston’s quote.  And, in the last few weeks, even more than usual.

After a series of years that asked questions, 2019 was (at last) a year that offered some answers.  I described 2019 on Instagram as a year “with blessedly rounded edges.”  And it was.  And maybe the lesson was a simple one, one that’s eluded me for 45 years: just let go a little.  Let things come as they may.  Everything, after all, passes.  Both the good and the bad.

I’m grateful that 2019 was a year of relative smoothness, and whose ease offered some answers at last.  I haven’t chosen a word this year, because none has presented itself.  I’m also not a big resolution person.

But I do have Shawn Colvin in my head, right alongside Zora Neale Hurston (remember, years ago, when I wrote about Doctor Seuss and Mark Doty in the same breath?).

Steady On.

That’s what she keeps saying.  So I will.  And I’ll hope for another year that answers questions.  But if it decides to ask them instead, what I know now is I’ll make it through.

we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

Dad died two years ago today.

Thanksgiving is on Thursday.

I don’t feel sad necessarily, so much as skinless, feeling it all – the bright and the painful, the glory and the hurt, the joy and the sorrow.  There is so much of life that swirls around these last weeks of the year.  That’s always been true, but it’s a more emotional time for me now that it’s inextricably wound together with my memories of Dad’s sudden death two years ago.

I have Merwin’s beautiful words in my head, the same poem a line of which I shared the morning of my last Thanksgiving with my Dad (11/23/2017) and through whose prism I have long viewed Thanksgiving.  I just understand them better now.

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.
…
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

For a bunch of reasons lately, I’ve been reflecting on the fact that I definitely privilege hard work and toughness.  I may over-privilege it, truthfully.  I’ve been thinking about Dad, one of whose strongest messages (in a litany; we have established that his is, above all, the voice that I hear in my head, the original imprimatur that guides my living, doing, and being) was that life was full of uncertainty and challenge.  One thing you could count on, he taught me, was that there was a lot out of your control.

His view was probably overly cynical; I think he felt tht when things worked out that was a happy accident, and that mostly we should be prepared for challenges and switchbacks.  But he was also clear that life’s unexpected detours often took us to the most beautiful vistas.  His Fulbright year in Germany, for example, which happened because of the well-intentioned suggestion of a college professor, kindled a life-long passion for Europe and led to his spending a decade there with his young family.

Difficulty made life worth living.  He often joked that our family motto was “never easy, never dull,” a memory that truthfully makes me squirm a little bit inside.  I guess I would take that over boring, but sometimes, isn’t there value in things being easy?  I told him once, at a dinner the two of us in the mid 2000s, that I wanted someone to “keep the world at bay for me” (I’d been listening to a lot of Dixie Chicks.  I can still remember this facial expression upon hearing this; he shook his head, his scorn palpable.  His message, though delivered slightly more gently than this, was: no daughter of Kirt Mead’s needs the world kept at bay for her.

Run into the world.  Engage with the world.  You can and you will.

I am intolerant of wallowing and of complaining when something can be done to change a circumstance.  I think I can be overly tough on this dimension.  Sometimes life calls for love that isn’t tough.  I know that, and I’m working on it.

But life in the last few weeks has caused me to reflect on this important lesson of my childhood: that when things go wrong, it doesn’t mean all is lost.  There may be surprising adventures to be found in these unanticipated detours and even if not, hard work will get you moving forward again.  Never give up.  Life was not meant to be lived in a straight line.  It was never going to unfold without hiccups.  That’s the way of the world.  The weather is inevitable, and what matters is how you proceed through it.

“I ain’t lonely, but I spend a lot of time alone.”

Matt told me a while ago that this, the first line of Kenny Chesney’s Better Boat, made him think of me (aside: we are all country music, all the time at our house).  I haven’t been able to stop thinking about those words.  There’s such truth in them.  I don’t think I actually spend a lot of time alone, but it’s definitely true that it is often my preference to be alone.  And I am never lonely when I do that.  In fact, when I do feel lonely, I have learned that it’s always when I’m surrounded by people with whom I don’t feel a connection. I am literally never lonely when alone.

Sometimes people are surprised that I’m a very strong introvert.  There’s never been any ambiguity about my Myers-Briggs type: INFJ.  And I’m getting more I, not less, as I get older.  Reading Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking was definitely eye-opening for me.  It explained two important things to me: first, how much I’ve been compensating in my professional life, where extroversion is valued, and second, why I never felt fully comfortable at Harvard Business School (not that many I’s there!).

The compensating explains a lot about how much I crave being alone when I’m not working.  I truly love the people I work with, and I truly love my work, but it definitely demands interaction, attention, and engagement.  I am not surprised, therefore, that when I’m not working what I want is to be alone.  I want to read, or I want to drive in silence (this is a particular detail of my life that people find weird), or I want to just be by myself.  One of my friends from college recently bemoaned how she was getting plans mixed up because she just wanted to say yes to everything.  I quipped that that’s where we were different, because I just wanted to say no to everything.  And I do.

Sometimes I worry I’m becoming such a curmudgeon in my old age.  But then I remember that for 10+ hours a day I am interacting and somewhat intensely.  It makes sense that for me, I need to decompress in the day’s other hours.  It’s perhaps unfortunate for the two E’s who live with me (though my 14 year old son is very happy to have me in a room by myself and not talking to him!), but it’s just the way it is.  I think they get it.  Hopefully they do!

As I get older I am less and less inclined to override my instincts, which tell me to stay quiet, to stay alone, to breathe deeply, to look at the sunset, to build up my strength for the next day.  I guess we all just become more ourselves as we age.  And for me, that self likes to be alone.