musings

Let go … again, still, more

let go

I adore this piece about 15 Things You Should Give Up to be Happy.  Loved.  And it made me think of how often I write about letting go.  I write about it a lot.  A search for “let go” in my archives yielded 26 pages of results.  I could do a favorite-posts-post JUST of “let go” posts.  But I won’t.  Right now, at least.  I do wear a necklace that says “let go” which probably tells you a lot about how much this phrase means to me.

Maybe that’s actually what this life is all, and essentially, about.  Is that possible?  Just letting go of things, releasing, letting ourselves float through life as lightly as the spring petals fluttering to the ground, dying as they go, but beautiful?

So much of this modern life seems about holding on and grabbing.  It is true when it comes to material things, and I already know I have an aversion to this, to the the piling-up of possessions.  That letting-go I have already done: the illusion that there is any deep, true contentment to be found in things.

But this orientation towards acquisition also applies to more abstract things, and there I’m as guilty as anyone.  I spent the first 30 years of my life madly racking up degrees and achievements and accolades.  In fact my first, rejected memoir was all about that: about the realization that that way of navigating the world is fundamentally broken.  When there is no next obvious brass ring to grab for, what do we do?  Well, fly into the abyss is one thing.  But as we fall, we need to figure out another map to follow, one less defined by external validation and achievement and more delineated by the internal voice of our soul.  That letting go I am working on, though I think I’m moving towards it.

But there’s a third way I – and we – lean towards holding on, and that is the trickiest one for me.  It’s the letting go of what we thought our life was going to be.  That is inextricably correlated, for me, with letting go of my grief about the passage of time.  I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to fully release that, but I know that right now I’m bound in its net, tangled in the cords of sorrow that tighten around me every time I kick.  My life is exactly as I planned it and nothing like I expected.  That sentence, which I use over and over again is fundamental, painful, and true.  What I have is here.  Now.  And to really live it, I have to let go of my white-knuckle grip on both yesterday and tomorrow.  That letting go: still a long, long way to go.

As firmly as I know I need to let go, as fiercely as I’m convinced that that is the lesson I was put on earth to learn, I know I am also, simultaneously, incredibly attached.  I am attached to people, to places, to outcomes.  In fact I’ve often questioned the whole notion of hope, because it is very hard for me to feel hope in the abstract.  It always comes wound around a specific future or thing that I want to be true.

I have said before and still believe that almost all suffering comes from our attachment to how we thought it was going to be.  But I don’t want – and I don’t think I could, anyway – to be less attached to those I love.

Maybe I can parse attachment, and divide it carefully into two groups, the way Grace painstakingly divides her Perler beads by color.  Let go of what I thought life would be like?  Absolutely.  Yes.  I must.  Let go of those I love?  I don’t think so.

What are you letting go of right now?  Do you think it’s possible that learning to let go is life’s basic and most important task?

Commencement

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Years ago I described the fleeting nature of time as the black hole around which my whole life circles, the wound that is at the center of all my writing, all my feeling, all my living.  Certainly that seems to be borne out by what it is I write, over and over again.  At the very midpoint of the year, the sunniest, longest days, I find myself battling an encroaching sorrow, an irrefutable sense of farewell.  The proof is in my archives.

The world bursts into riotous bloom, almost as though it is showing off its fecundity.  The days are swollen and beautiful, the air soft, the flowering trees spectacular.  The children gleefully wear shorts to school, the sidewalks are dusted with pollen and petals, and we round the curve of another year.  We start counting down school days, we say goodbye to beloved babysitters who are graduating from college, and I find myself blinking back tears.

Every year, I’m pulled into the whitewater between beginnings and endings that defines this season.  I can barely breathe.

It’s all captured in the event that so many of us attend, year after year, at this time: commencement.  It was my own commencements that marked this season, for years: from grade school, high school, college, graduate school.  And then there was a time when, though I wasn’t personally attending commencements, I felt their presence, sensed the ebb and flow of the school year.  It seems that my spirit and the very blood in my veins will always throb to the cadence of the school year.  And now it is my children who commence, who close a year and begin another, wearing too-long hair and legs, vaguely tentative smiles, and white.

Commencement.  Isn’t this word simply a more elegant way of describing what might be the central preoccupation of my life?  You end and you begin, on the very same day.  You let go of something and while that I-am-falling feeling never goes away, you trust that you’ll land.  And you do, on the doorstep of another beginning, a new phase, the next thing.

No matter how many times I’m caught from the freefall of farewell by a new beginning, though, I still feel the loss.  As much as my head understands that endings are required for them to be beginnings, my heart mourns what is ending.  That a seam of sorrow runs through my every experience is undeniable; it may sound depressing, but I genuinely don’t experience it that way.  It is just part of how I’m wired, and it’s never closer to the surface than right now, as this school year winds down, as we celebrate the beginning that’s wrapped in the end, as we commence.

Huge hands

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I grew up in the embrace of several extended families.  One of these was my godfamily.  And one of these godsisters, who lives nearby, had a baby this winter.  One February afternoon after school Grace, Whit and I stopped by.  I parked too far away so we walked several blocks in the cold, our shadows already growing long in the golden, quick-to-fall February light.  Impatient, Grace and Whit galloped away in front of me.

We tiptoed into the living room and took off our shoes.  My godmother handed the baby to me and I instinctively cradled her and looked down at her closed eyes, wrinkly skin, rosy, pouty lips.  She wore a pink knit cap, and my mind immediately pinwheeled to the cream cotton cap with curls of ribbon tied around the top that a nurse at the hospital had given Grace to wear home .

“May I hold her, Mummy?”  Out of the corner of my eye I could see Grace bouncing up and down on her toes next to me.  I remembered a Saturday walk a year ago during which I carried my friend’s two year old most of the way.  That night Grace had fallen apart, weeping inconsolably that “she wanted to be my little girl.”  Grace explained that she was sad about a time in her life that she couldn’t get back, as well as a little jealous.  I worried, as I do so often, about the sensitivity my children have inherited from me.  Whit has this tendency too.  It is perilous having a mother who is more shadow than sun.

“Sure.  Sit down here on the couch.” my godmother sat next to Grace, helped position her arms, and I slowly lowered baby C into Grace’s lap.  I stood back and looked at them, Grace and the two-day-old baby of a woman I met when she was two days old.  I took pictures of both Grace and Whit holding the newest addition to our godfamily, and then, anxious not to overstay during what I know first-hand is a raw, precious time, we left.

That night, I uploaded the three pictures I’d taken of the afternoon.  I couldn’t stop staring at the picture above.  Look at Grace’s hands: they are enormous.  They engulf the baby; she is closer to the size of an adult now than to the baby I still sometimes think of her as.  I remember our pediatrician’s words that adolescence’s growth spurts often start with feet getting rapidly bigger.  Is this true of hands, too?  Has Grace stepped into the tunnel that will spirit her, faster than I can blink, to young womanhood?

When I look at her holding the brand-new member of our godfamily, I can’t deny that the answer must be yes.

The language of mystery

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Since our trip to Jerusalem last year I’ve been mulling an essay about faith and the unknown and our inadequate vocabularly to talk about these things.  The essay, in my head, is called “the language of mystery.”  I’ve never written it.  In particular, the idea came to me when we drove by a mosque one day last winter in Cambridge.  We were stopped at a red light on Prospect Street and Grace pointed out the window.  She called Whit’s and my attention to a building to our right.  It was a mosque, and I realized that though I had driven past that mosque more times than I can count, I was now, after my experience in Jerusalem, noticing it in a new way.  The mosque is covered with beautiful blue tiles, on some of which are elegant white characters in Arabic.

“Is that Hebrew?” Whit asked from the back seat.  No, I explained, it was Arabic.  We talked about how our cousin Hannah knew how to say “thank you” in both Hebrew and Arabic and, perhaps more importantly, knew when to use each.

I felt an unmistakable frisson of fear and bewilderment when I read that that mosque is where Tamerlan Tsarnaev worshiped and where he stood up and asserted his radical views in January of this year.

But I let that chill go.  The truth is that that fact, while certainly uncomfortably close to home, doesn’t change how I felt that day driving by the mosque.  It doesn’t change how I still feel.  I was struck by my childrens’ innocent confusion of two languages that they don’t know; they aren’t aware of how radically opposed those languages are in many places, how infrequently anyone who knew would interchange them.  They just see a holy site, a place where people worship their God, and a language they don’t know.  They and I have long admired the beautiful tiling on the side of the Cambridge mosque, just as we noticed and appreciated the outrageously beautiful detail on the side of the “gold dome” in Jerusalem (that is the photograph above).

My mind skipped from Grace and Whit’s confusion of these two languages to thoughts about language in general.  I love words, there is no question about that.  But I also know that in a great many circumstances it feels like a blunt tool to express what it is I experience.  There is so much of life that runs through the fingers of language even as I grasp at it.  Slippery, inchoate, both too enormous and too tiny to put into words: life itself.

This week, in addition to rededicating myself to not taking this ordinary life for granted (in this effort I know I join millions of others), I will refocus on the mystery at the heart of all of our experience.  The mystery that pulls our glance to the sky, that brings tears to our eyes, that inspires glorious buildings, that moves us to write words that make others gasp with recognition.  Isn’t all writing – all art, all living – grasping for the vocabulary to express the mystery around which our lives revolve?

Maybe it’s time to write that essay.  There is so much mystery, so much faith, so much we all love, and so little adequate vocabulary to express it.

I am a runner from Boston

There are a very few things that I am deep in the marrow of my bones.  One of them is a Bostonian (I was born here, my parents live here, I met my husband here, my babies were born here, this is my home in the most essential sense of the word).  Another of them is a runner.

I am a runner from Boston.

I have been running in Boston for 30 years (part of why the photograph of Grace’s first road race so moved me is because when I was her age I was running regularly in 10K road races; the echoes and flashbacks are powerful).  I have run two halves but never a full marathon.  I’m not sure if my iffy knee could take it, unfortunately.  But if I ever do run a marathon, you know there’s no question which it would be.

On Tuesday morning, when I drove to school with Grace and Whit, we had had a conversation about fear.  We didn’t listen to the radio, because I knew what we’d hear, so I turned on a CD.  Immediately, Phillip Phillips’ Home flooded the car and tears filled my eyes.  So I turned it off and we talked.  Grace told me that she was scared.  I said I understood that.  But, I went on, to be scared and to cower is to let them – whoever they are – win.  I caught her eye in the rearview mirror and saw that she understood.  And, when I got home, I laced up my sneakers and went out for a run.

That day, and yesterday morning as I ran along the Charles River at dawn, I sensed that I was asserting something, claiming something, refusing to give something up.  I have run for as long as I can remember.  When I searched the archives of my blog for “running,” 10 pages of posts came up.  In many of them, my memories of running are braided so tightly around my memories of Boston and Cambridge as to be indistinguishable.

Running is as natural to me as breathing.  This week, my runs felt suddenly like an act laden with meaning as powerful as it is inchoate.  They felt like a statement of defiance and of optimism.  This is a running town, this is a proud town, this is a brave town.  We won’t stop running.

I’ve never run a marathon before.  Maybe next year is the year to do it.