musings

It is what it is

In my guest post at Karen Maezen Miller’s site, I wrote about the expression it is what it is. I’ve always found the saying annoying, honestly, an oft-repeated hymn to trite capitulation. And then, as seems to happen a lot, I realized the folly of my ways. In a single flash of light, the startle of shook foil in my eyes, I realized the deep wisdom in the phrase. Yes. A lot of the time it would behoove us – me – to recognize what simply is. To accept the fact of what is rather than continuing to chafe against it in some misguided attempt to change it.

I wonder how many oxbow lakes I’ve carved into my soul with my relentless efforts to change the immutable rock of what is, wearing it down, perhaps, infinitessimally, but at what cost?

It isn’t clear to me, still, where the line is between wise acceptance and premature accedance. Surely there are some cases where work is required, merited, even. And yet there are others where the only path is to say, head nodding, a kind of radiant resignation on our faces, yes, it is what it is. The radiance comes from the true and whole-hearted embrace of our lives as they are; it is something I rarely exhibit myself and that I am consistently drawn to in others.

The thing I’ve been thinking about recently – that it is what it is makes me think of – is whether we suffer more because of the things that are fixed and invariable in our lives or because of the things we can change. Different kinds of pain result from each, certainly. There is the frustration and head-banging pain of facing the mute, unalterable truths of reality. And then there is the agony of wondering about choices we make (and made), the haunting way that taking one path shuts off another, the echoing impact of our decisions on other people and on the rest of our lives.

I think, if pressed, there is more suffering from the things we can change, but I still know both kinds of suffering intimately in my own life. I’m curious about what others think about this.

The slow turning forward of my time on earth

I’ve written almost incessantly about my particular struggle to live in the present, about the way my near-constant preoccupation with both yesterday and tomorrow quite often entirely obscures today. On Saturday morning I felt a simultaneous impatience for fall to arrive and a desperate sorrow that summer was ending, and the moment perfectly captured all of this agita: push-pull, hurry-slow, there-here.

There are lots of reasons that I’m this way. I’m just wired that way, sure. I’m sensitive and I cling and I fear farewells and abandonment and things cut me deeply even when they are not about me.

I recently decided, too, a connection might exist between when I was born and my difficulty with living now: I think my late-summer birthday may contribute to my sense of myself as liminal, to the automatic way that I lean forward or back, turn the page sooner than I need to, generally feel frantically unable to just be here now.

I think my childhood of hopscotching across the Atlantic may also be part of this: I was always in constant motion, always either anticipating a goodbye or getting over one.

But something hit me hard this morning. This is true Captain Obvious territory, I realize that even as I write it, but it was insight to me. I was at my parents’ house in Marion, which represents summer to me, sitting still for a moment, windows open. I listened to the cicadas outside (which always remind me of summer nights spent at my father’s parents’ house in Long Island, lying in a narrow twin bed at 90 degrees to Hilary’s, summer wafting in through the screens). I watched the light flicker on the trees and thought of Lacy, whose hair is like mine and of whom the turning-to-fall light always reminds me, and suddenly it occurred to me why it is that I’m so impatient, so forward-focused, so quick to dwell in the past.

It is often simply too painful for me look this moment in the eye. Doing so requires me to accept the loss inherent in every minute of my life. To recognize the red leaf in the green grass is to really live with the fact that summer turns to fall, that life cranks forward and I walk closer and closer to the end of it every day.

Suddenly, this morning, I understood. I’m hurrying into the future and hiding in the past to avoid staring into the sun of my life. To escape the reality that every minute is gone as I live it. To pretend that it’s not true that I can never have any of those moments back, ever. My life’s single most painful truth is the slow turning forward of my time on earth and the inherent loss that that represents.

It hurts to stare into the sun. I blink and my eyes water and sting. But that’s not a reason to hide. I know that in my head, and even in my heart. Making it so is harder, though. The impermanence of this life is truly heartbreaking to me. Every single day contains goodbyes and I find fact the of that nothing less than brutal.

But what is my option? I will be a lucky woman if I have another 36 years ahead of me. May I not squander them in the same fear that so eroded many of the first 36.

Prayer flags

When I’m at home I almost always run the same loop.  A creature of habit through and through, I am.  The route takes me past the used bookstore that I used to go to as a kid with my sister and father, past a kid-friendly restaurant where I ate when both of my children were small, and past a front porch festooned with prayer flags.

It’s those prayer flags that are on my mind today.  They are tattered from from being whipped around by the wind, bleached out from the sun and rain.  Yet every day they recommit to the same task, snapping around according to the wind’s whimsy.  Even with their faded, worn-out fabric they continue to transmit their hopes, their prayers, to the world.

I feel similarly buffeted by the wind, likewise faded from the elements.  It’s been, as I’ve written, a summer full of wind and sunshine, memories and joyful moments, but also one that has bruised my heart and made me feel tired in a bone-deep way.  The reasons are personal and I’m aware of and sorry for being a broken record.

Still, the prayer flags snap away as their edges fray and their colors fade.  I’m not sure I have the same conviction about my prayers and hopes as do those small squares of colorful fabric, though I wish I did.   I picture them in my mind’s eye, take a deep breath, try to inflate my exhausted heart, and steel myself for more winds ahead.  May I keep waving.

How sheer the veil is between this life and another

Matt has had a lovely assistant, M, for four years. I’ve spoken to her thousands of times (at least) on the phone, and I finally met her a couple of weeks ago at the firm’s summer event in Chatham. She was friendly and warm, her voice familiar even though her face was new.

M died last night. She was 39 and left two children in their early teens. It was entirely unexpected.

I feel sad today, for her, for her family, for the abrupt loss of someone who had so much ahead of her. I feel as though something chilly has brushed past me in the dark, something I can’t see but something I can feel. Yesterday, I spoke to her. Today, she is gone. Where? My mind still struggles with this truth, which is maddeningly abstract and painfully concrete at the same time.

I also feel keenly, shiveringly aware of how close we all tread to the line of our worst nightmares every single day. The yawning terror of what might be, of that we most dread, exists just off to the side of our lives, and though we skirt it and forget it it still threatens. We live on the precipice, walk on a tightrope, exist in a world where the boundary between normal and tragedy is far more gossamer and fragile than we ever let ourselves imagine.

Death has actually been on my mind since my Aunt E’s funeral, actually, and since a dear friend lost his mother unexpectedly in July. As I sat in the pew at my aunt’s memorial service, I thought about how there are many more funerals ahead of me than behind me. And when my friend’s mother died I had an eerie sense of what is to come as the generations fold and my peers and I take our place at the head of the line. Both of these thoughts give me goosebumps, and not in a good way.

I’m sorry for this not-at-all-upbeat post. It seems incongruous, as I sit here on vacation, waiting to pick my boisterous, tired, and sunburned children up from the bus that bears them back from summer camp. But that is the point, I guess: to remember, always, how sheer the veil is between this life and another, between good news and terrible, between just another regular day and the day it all grinds to a halt.

There’s only one way to honor those who have stepped through this veil, one way to turn this tragic reality that flickers at the edges of our experience: to use the awareness of what might be, and of the proximity of the chasm, to heighten our awareness and celebration of the days that we remain safe. To remember, always, those trite sayings that are also so achingly true: today is all we have. Seize it. Take nothing for granted.

I’ll be hugging these two extra hard when they get off the bus today.

Where I’m From

I am from a glass-fronted bookcase full of antique red-spined Baedeker guidebooks, a black and white photograph of my mother sailing a small dinghy at the age of eight, and the smell of pipe smoke.

I am from a Victorian two-family home in North Cambridge with a turret, one bathroom, a back hallway that my sister and I painted one summer, a short-lived guinea pig called Caliban, and a navy blue Volvo that I coaxed to life from the backseat on winter mornings, chanting “Go car, go!”

I am from a French school with a tall green gate and a rabbit by the front door, from a playground with a baguette under my arm, from the pond in the Jardin Luxembourg where people sailed their remote-controlled boats.

I am from an all-girls school London with an intimidating brass door handle, an elegant marble-floored “Great Hall,” and the soaring voices of hundreds of girls singing “Tomorrow shall be my dancing day” in a candlelit December evening.

I am from the top of a European church spire, the crypt of the basilica in Assissi, and a formal confirmation ceremony in St Paul’s Cathedral.

I am from a tiny apartment in Paris with thick velvet curtains full of dust and ladies of the night in the entryway, from a garret ballet studio with an elderly teacher barking commands, and from a tiny Thanksgiving roast chicken with a single strand of cranberries draped on its back.

I am from a linoleum-floored kitchen where you wait to go to the garden to cut the asparagus until the water is already boiling and a rose-strewn back porch with a big picnic table and a swing that rocks back and forth on springs.

I am from albums upon albums of family photographs, all anotated in my father’s fountain pen script, from two ceramic angels hanging on the living room bookcase, from an annual solstice celebration on December 21st at 11pm.

I am from Mount Gay and Nantucket Reds and Bird Island lighthouse and eight children piled into a ranch house on a point in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts.

I am from Priscilla and Henry and Janet and Lawrence, from Susan and Kirtland, from Rhode Island and Long Island, from a thick, much-paged hardcover book with “Whitman” embossed on the red cover in gold leaf.

I am from sailors and engineers and Yankees, from frugality and pride and hard work. I am from traveling around the world to come back to right where I started.

Inspired by this template, the exercise of which I love.