musings

The internal ocean

I read Katrina’s beautiful words about the unclear, uncertain path that is writing last night and my tears fell freely.  Not eyes welling up with tears.  No, these were tears rolling down my faces, unabashed.  Full-fledged crying.  I wiped my face with the sleeves of my tee shirt but I couldn’t keep up.  Tears fell onto the pages of my friend Tracy’s essay, which I was reading for my writing group.

When I pulled myself together enough to look back down at Tracy’s work the page was speckled with the splotches of darkness where my fat tears had fallen.  A few words were blurred with the wetness.

I thought about how often tears blur things for me.  They blur my vision when my eyes fill with tears for the unexpected, unanticipated reasons that each day – each hour – seems to offer up.  They blur words on the page, either literally, as today, or as I read, when the writing of others, in blogs or books, moves me to tears.  This happens daily too.

I cry every single day.  And those tears cause a blurring at the edges, literally and figuratively, of my life.  My world suddenly swims; all at once my view of the light on trees, or the black and white words of a sentence, or the expression on Whit’s face dissolves into a swirl of wet saltwater emotion.

Last year, the tears blurred the white lights on our Christmas tree into streaks of light in a dark room.  This happened in a moment when I felt the presence of something far greater than myself.  This is a moment I’ve come back to again and again in my head, a moment when I instinctively assumed the posture of prayer, when I felt “infinitely big and infinitesimally small at the same time.”  What I don’t know is whether the blurring was a result or a cause of that fleeting, powerful feeling.

There are so many tears in my life.  Just as I return to the sea for my metaphors and my meaning, I cry an ocean from my very own eyes.   The ocean is inside of me as surely as it is outside.  Maybe this internal ocean has something to teach me.  Let me learn to sit with it and learn from what I see in the blur.

Turning our brokenness into something beautiful

This is the darkest season; we wake in darkness and we watch the sun wane again before the clock has hit 5:00.  The light in the middle of the day is often pitched, somehow, at a high, wavering note; it is full and thin at the same time, endings tangible within it.  Somehow, the dark bothers me less than it used to.  There is an internal light that helps keep the thick, sometimes-threatening darkness slightly at bay.

The optimist in me feels a wild surge of hope about this: perhaps I am witnessing the birth of my own faith. This is a holy month, after all, full of imagery of light, regardless of your religion. Perhaps it is the flickering, nascent light of my own belief that illuminates these dark days. The candles in windows and the holiday lights strung on trees and in windows everywhere I look both reflect and contribute to that internal flickering.

We move towards the solstice, every day closer.  The winter solstice may well be the single holiest day of the year for me.  I definitely prefer it to the summer one, which demonstrates as clearly as any detail about me how much the promise of something (good and bad) impacts me.  Even at the height of summer, with the longest days we’ll ever know, there is something gloomy to me about the solstice.  It represents the turning back to dark.  That’s the preemptive regret that I’ve written about, which can completely occlude any present radiance for me.  This solstice, two weeks away, is the opposite.  It promises a turning back towards the light.

A year ago I read some of Meg Casey’s thoughts on the holiness that exists in darkness.  They moved me so much then, and continue to, that I want to post them again.  Once in a great while I read a piece of writing that makes me want to kneel and press my head to the ground, saluting its gorgeousness and ability to evoke emotion. This is one such piece. Please read it.

December is a holy month. Maybe it is the dark silky silence that descends so early, that speaks to me of reverence. Maybe it is the promise that December holds–that no matter how dark, how cold, how empty it can get, the light is coming back. Something always shifts in me when December arrives–I embrace the darkness and am eager for the coming solstice when the whole world is still and holds its breath, waiting to be reborn again. December whispers to me of midnight mass, of ancient choirs, of stained glass windows turned into gems by candle light.

Meg then goes on to talk about the connection between holiness and wholeness, using the image of a stained glass window: Broken, jagged, sharp pieces of glass held together magically, transformed into one perfect design not by gold or silver but by something as mundane as lead. And, of course, it is the light that animates the beauty.  Meg’s post reminds me of one of my very favorite of Anne Lamott’s lines: “Love is sovereign.” Yes. As Meg says, Love is the transformative power that turns our brokenness into something beautiful.

I love this because I think we often think of light as exposing flaws, unearthing chinks, revealing ugliness.  Yet in Meg’s metaphor it is light that knits disparate pieces into a whole, that reveals the light that exists within them.  Love as light.  Transformative, healing brokenness, uncovering worth.  May we all strive to be this kind of light, even in the dark moments of our lives.

There are some themes in my writing of which I’m very conscious.  Others emerge organically, and I’m not aware of them until I reflect for a moment.  Light and darkness has been a message to which I’ve returned this year, over and over.  I am often moved to tears by the quality of light in nature, and the metaphor of dark and light has also been one to which I am consistently drawn. Light and darkness.  Holiness and grace.  Radiance and shadow.  We keep on turning, and the shadows keep dancing, the light flickering.  All I can do is keep watching.

The courage that comes before courage

Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be prevenient courage that allows us to be brave – that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is a great harm.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Maybe this year, 2010, has been the year that finally the prevenient courage has visited me.  Finally I mustered the strength to raise my eyes to the blinding sun of this life, to risk being burned in order to look into the heart of it.  At last my lifelong fear of the pain of that burning, which manifested itself in so many distracting and agitated behaviors, was outweighed by my increasing awareness that I simply had to honor these gifts.

The prevenient courage comes in that before I knew I could stand it, I knew I had to.  And it hurts, sometimes more than I can bear.  But it’s the only way I want to live now.  To do otherwise is a great harm.

The wound and the wonder

I have been thinking a lot about melancholy since my conversation with Chris over Thanksgiving weekend.  I think I was onto something when I said that melancholy was “the backdrop against which my entire life is lived.”  It is nothing less than an orientation towards experience, a lens through which I see the world.

But I don’t know that it’s as gloomy and sad as the connotations “melancholy” carries.  I looked up melancholy in the dictionary and found two definitions:

–noun

1.  a gloomy state of mind, esp. when habitual or prolonged; depression.
2.  sober thoughtfulness; pensiveness.

The first doesn’t feel right, but the second does, absolutely.  I’ve been thinking that melancholy, as applied to me or to how I live my life, is really another way of saying sensitivity.  Yesterday morning I stopped in my tracks, struck dumb by the glow of light leaking across the horizon as the sun began to rise, framed by the window of central parking at Logan Airport.  This morning, walking back to my car after drop-off, I noticed that the brown, curled leaves drifted against the curb, and on the sidewalk, the same way snow does in the winter.  Then this afternoon I observed, again, that thing which is really speaking to me lately: the web of barren branches against a steel gray sky.  And this time I saw two fat swallows high in the branches.  It looked – from my substantial distance – that they were sitting side by side, necks tucked as far as possible into their fat bodies as they faced into the late-fall-wind.

It’s all connected, the way I observe the world in sometimes-excruciating detail, the untrammelled rushes of joy I can feel at the most unexpected times, the heart-wrenching pain my life delivers at others.  This is all a part of being an exceptionally porous person.  Is it any wonder that I’ve had to develop coping mechanisms, be they an aversion to true vulnerability or a tendency towards distraction, in order to mitigate the power of constantly living in such an exposed way?  I’m easily overwhelmed by the grandeur and terror of this life, and I have over 36 years built up a variety of ways of managing the pain that that inundation can bring with it.  It’s a package deal, the wound and the wonder.  I don’t know how to have one without the other.  Even the most swollen, shiny rapture is striated with sadness.

So this is nothing new, I guess, just another assertion that “melancholy” in my case doesn’t mean depressed, or even sad all the time.  It just means incredibly open and sensitive to the world, in both its joy and its sorrow.  I’ve been depressed, have I ever, and this isn’t it.  Danielle LaPorte’s post about Depression vs. Sadness touches on this distinction.  It’s worth reading: Danielle’s words contain great wisdom.  I think the word “melancholy” as often applied to me just describes the skinless way I engage with the world.  I am easily moved, to either end of the spectrum of life’s emotions, easily hurt, easily overjoyed.  That’s just who I am.  And I’m fine being called melancholy.  I just want to describe how I understand the term.

A Thanksgiving Chat

My friend and HBS classmate Chris and I have connected through our blogs in the last year.  I did not know Chris at school, though I knew who he was, and my impression was that he was very bright and very authentically happy.  I assumed he would have no interest in someone with as little to offer in the HBS classroom as me.  It’s been a substantial joy, then, to have gotten to know him through his words over the last months.  He’s bright and happy, yes, but also thoughtful, wise, honest, and open.  Click over and check him out – I highly recommend it.

Last week Chris emailed me about my most recent blog post, beginning an exchange that ended up lasting much of the Thanksgiving holiday.  We touched on optimism, the underrated virtues of melancholy, and the conundrum of memory.  Here’s how the conversation went:

Chris: In this morning’s blog post, you quoted the following:

“We like to think that life is joy punctuated with pain but it’s not. Life is pain punctuated with moments of joy.”

The optimist in me wants to disagree with Kate about the joy/pain balance of life, but the pessimist in me senses that she is right. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, really, what the equation is, as long as we appreciate the joy and it sustains us through the pain. Of course everybody’s particular calculus is different, their balance of happy and sad, light and shadow individual. It’s no secret that mine leans towards shadow.

I think it’s interesting how our different personalities impact how we see the joy/pain balance of life.  You say that you lean towards the shadow.  In contrast, I’m a natural optimist with a preternatural level of happiness that my wife describes as well-nigh oblivious.  And that’s how most people think of optimists—as happy and possibly naïve.

Yet you’re different.  You’re an optimist, but it seems like you feel like your optimism is mistaken.  How do you reconcile that inner conflict?

Lindsey: I don’t think I’m a pessimist.  I think I am an optimist with a melancholy heart.  A melancholy optimist.  Perhaps I am misusing all of these words, but I don’t wake up every morning sure that the worst case is going to happen. Far from it.  I guess I do have guarded optimism, and a persistent fear of being disappointed, but more often than not that fear isn’t enough to keep me from hoping.

In fact hope is something I’ve thought a lot about.  I think it’s slippery, because I do think one of the keys to joy – happiness, peace, however you think about a pleasant life – is not being too attached to specific outcomes.  It is in the dissonance between those ideals and reality that a lot of sadness happens, I think.  And so my question with hope is how to avoid it hitching to a very specific result … does that make sense?

Chris: It makes perfect sense.  That’s the Stockdale Paradox in a nutshell (link).  Jim Collins wrote about it in “Good to Great,” which I think is one of those books that as HBS grads we’re legally obligated to quote on a regular basis.  Collins formulated the Stockdale Paradox based on the story of how Jim Stockdale survived the POW camps in Vietnam despite being repeatedly tortured and mistreated.  The paradox is as follows:

You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties.

AND at the same time…

You must confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

The first part of the paradox is all about optimism.  You have to be optimistic about life, if only because life without optimism is hardly worth living.  After all, we are all going to die, and most of us will suffer horrible, debilitating, and expensive illnesses before the grim reaper claims us.  The lucky ones die prematurely in accidents that bring instant death.

But a simple-minded optimism doesn’t work either.  The second half of the Stockdale Paradox comes into play because Stockdale noted that it was the optimistic prisoners who said things like, “We’ll be out of here by Christmas” who died first, largely because the realities of the situation shattered their delusions, leaving them broken and vulnerable.

To some, it must seem like a cruel joke—without hope, life isn’t worth living, but that very same life has a nasty tendency to dash your hopes.

The way I deal with it is to hope for the best, but prepare myself for the alternative.  I’ve spent my entire career in the startup world, living on the hope that I’ll be able to build a successful startup.  Yet at the same time, I know that the vast majority of startups fail, and that there is decent chance that I’ll go through my entire career without experiencing a life-changing “liquidity event”.  I’ve even written about the math in greater detail here: http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2010/07/entrepreneurship-is-about-happiness-not.html

The other nuance is that I focus on process rather than outcome.  I’m a pretty avid sports fan, and while I love to win, I know that luck plays a major role.  The best we can do is to make the right plays.  If the best play is to throw a long pass hoping for a touchdown, you should throw that pass, even if you know there’s a chance it will be intercepted.  Nobody’s perfect.  But if you play the game the right way, you’ll give yourself the best chance to win—in sports as well as in business and life.

Does your melancholy tend to come when you get disappointing results, or when the outcome is still in doubt?  I think the answer makes a big difference.

Lindsey: Two thoughts.  The first is that my melancholy is more a basic orientation towards the world – in fact sometimes I think melancholy is just another way of thinking about/talking about sensitivity.  I am wired in a way that makes me hyper aware of the sadness in every situation as well as the joy.  And my “melancholy” is about one thing and one thing only, which is the irrefutable and unstoppable passage of time.  This is so bittersweet to me that it sometimes is truly unbearable.  That we won’t have any of the past moments back haunts me.  So I don’t know that my melancholy comes in advance of results or because of doubt … it’s kind of just the backdrop against which my whole life is lived.

The second is your point about process and outcome, which I think is critical.  I’m working on a memoir which is about an early 30s “crisis” in which I realized that the whole way I approached the world was flawed.  I’m guided by the famous Carl Jung quote, “We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what in the morning was true will in evening become a lie.”

But your comments about process and result, and sports, make me realize that that is another way of saying the same thing.  I’d always lived focused almost entirely on the next hurdle I had to clear, the next accomplishment I had to accrue.  This is a very simple way to determine your direction, and it worked well for me for years.  But there comes a time in life when there is no “next thing” (I had the two Ivy League degrees, the two kids before 30, etc) and at that point that entire mode of engaging with the world collapses.  In your terms, the primacy of the result falters, and then we have no choice but to look at the process instead.

Chris: Your sensitivity to the passage of time really strikes a chord with me.  I’ve always been sensitive to time’s one way arrow as well.  From a young age, I was very conscious of the passage of time.  I remember being 11 years old and thinking, “I’m almost through my childhood.  I wish I could stop time now, because I know things will never be this simple and easy again.”

When I was a freshman in college, I remember staying up all night the final day before they kicked us out of the dorm, wanting to squeeze out every last drop of time, knowing that we’d never be assembled as a group again.  I’m always reminded of a line from the Eagles’ “Take it Easy.”

“We may lose or we may win / But we will never be here again.”

I find myself saving the artifacts of my life—old ticket stubs, worn out t-shirts, even holiday cards.  My wife is far less sentimental and tosses them in the garbage immediately.  I like to keep them as talismans which allow me to travel back in time via memory.  I’ve been blessed or cursed with a near-photographic memory (it sure came in handy when we were in school together!), which means that simply looking at a ticket stub can recall an entire evening.  I’m afraid to throw things out because without them, I might now be able to call up those memories.

It might be that this hoarding of memories explains how I’m able to escape that melancholy.  By putting the symbolic weight of my memories into external objects, I’m able to forget about the ticking of the stopwatch.  What kind of tricks does your memory play on you?

Lindsey: I’ve thought (and written) about memory a lot.  What strikes me, as I run through my own most prized and cherished memories, is how often they are not from the Big Days but, in fact, from the most mundane, regular days.  How the things I hold most dear are often things that happened in the grout between the tiles of life’s big experiences.    I can think of times in my life, very few, where I have been utterly present and simultaneously aware that I’m living something formative, special, important.  Mostly, though, it’s after the fact that I realize how moving or powerful an experience was, and then I find myself wishing I had been more conscious as I lived it.

I’m fascinated by the way that the mind curates our memories, and by why it is that we remember what we do (and how).  Anne Beattie has a beautiful line that I think of often: “People forget years and remember moments.”  This truth, and the pattern that I can now recognize in how my most meaningful experiences are often cached in very ordinary experiences, both contribute to my almost-obsessive focus on trying to be more engaged in, aware of, and present to my own life.  If I am not even paying attention to the mudane, there is no hope I will be able to see the magic.

Chris: I love the last sentence.  In some sense, we all walk between Scylla and Charybdis when it comes to our memory.  On the one hand, we must be present in the moment, or we’ll miss those special moments.  On the other hand, we build our memories of those special moments like an oyster builds a pearl—with layer after layer of remembrance and rumination.  Just think of how many times you’ve told your favorite stories from childhood—each retelling or reconsideration adding another shiny layer of nacre to that tiny seed of memory.

Focus too much on critical interpretation, and you’ll lose the plot.  Your Marxist interpretations of the hidden Maoist economic agenda behind “Garfield” shouldn’t cause you to forget that it’s about a fat cat who likes lasagna (even if that lasagna symbolizes the Sacco and Vanzetti case and its impact on Roaring 20s attitudes towards socialism).

Live in the moment without self-examination, and you’ll lurch from event to event without a connecting thread or larger narrative.

We began by considering whether life is pain punctuated by joy, or joy punctuated by pain.  Perhaps the answer is that it could be either…and that our lives consist of the process of writing that narrative for ourselves.