musings

Skipping rocks with my Dad.

I remember being a child, maybe 7 or 8, standing on the rocky beach on Long Island where my father grew up. His parents still lived in his childhood home, a few blocks’ walk from this beach. Set back from the beach were rows of wooden changing rooms, whose gray paint was peeling slightly. We used to run down the aisles between the changing rooms, laughing and chasing each other. My grandparents’ room (they were all assigned, and locked) had life jackets in it, and a strong and persistent smell of Shower to Shower talcum powder. To this day that smell takes me right back there. There was a long, narrow pier that protruded into the ocean, with a dock at the end of it. The dock is where Hilary and I played the popsicle game with other children.

Today, though, we’re not swimming. Dad is skipping rocks. He’s always been good at this: he picks the right kind of rock, flat and round, and is able to make it skip four, five, six times before it sinks into the ocean. I try to skip rocks like Dad, but I’m not as skillful, and manage at my best two skips before the rock stops moving and drops to the bottom of the ocean. So, mostly I watch. I’ve stood next to him while he skipped rocks into countless bodies of water: the ocean here, on Long Island, as well as that in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Ahead of me, though I don’t know it, is rock-skipping all the way across this ocean, off the coast of England and into that country’s lakes.

I sit here on an airplane, watching my children across the aisle, hearing Whit wonder whether we are “on the earth,” “in outer space,” or “somewhere in the middle.” For the record, I’m going with (c). I am as far as possible from my 9 year old self on the shore of Long Island Sound. Yet I can’t stop thinking of my brown-haired father, meditatively flinging rock after rock into the ocean, making them skim across the water before falling in, creating the illusion of a solid where there is really only liquid.

My mind is like that, skipping from one place to another before surrendering and sinking deep into the dark unknown. It tries to stay afloat, tries to believe that the surface that it is skimming over is solid enough to support it, to keep it buoyant. And yet, eventually, my thoughts always wind up being pulled underneath the surface. I am forced to admit, over and over again, that this surface is not solid enough to keep me from sinking deep into the layers. But maybe that is okay, maybe the lesson is that, as my father kept skipping new rocks, new thoughts will come and take me skimming across the surface again. And the buoyancy of that skipping, of that being aloft, means so much more for the knowledge of what lies beneath.

Having drive and being driven.

I took this picture last weekend. I am struck by two things: the incredible, blade-like line of the airplane moving through the sky with purposeful speed, and the aching blue of the sky. The movement and the stillness that underlies it. The trajectory and the background. This image is a good metaphor for something I’ve been thinking about lately: having drive, and being driven. Our society says both are excellent qualities. But both of these descriptors puzzle me, for correlated but separate reasons.

To have drive. To be ambitious, to believe in oneself, to do great things. Right? But drive also assumes motion. For most of my 35 years I would have nodded vigorously and agreed with this. But in the last couple of years I’ve heard an increasingly loud voice in my head telling me that that may not be right. Telling me that maybe the ultimate goal is not motion but stillness. That, even in the midst of a frenetic life with many goals, the real richness is right here. That “great things” in fact consist not in having propulsion, necessarily, but in having the patience and strength to be still.

To be driven. Same general connotations: eagerness, striving, energy, goals and aspirations. And yet. To be driven is to give the agency to another, no? Who is driving? This might sound a little pat and pedantic, but, really, what does it mean? And where are we being driven to? Are we setting the direction from the passenger seat?

These questions, clearly, are part of my larger rumination on the notion of velocity vs. direction, speed vs. stillness. This is not a new theme for me, of course, but it’s much on my mind lately. I wrote about this last fall at Mrs. Chicken’s lovely blog, Chicken & Cheese. There are so many ways that this tension reverberates in my life. Writ large, I think, I’m questioning velocity as a defining emphasis for life. Starting to realize the ways that focusing on where we are going takes us away from all we have: here. now. And yet there are parts of me that are innate, immutable: I am impatient, I speak and move quickly, I am not, by nature, a still and calm person.

What’s new, I guess, is my longing to be. And if I’ve learned anything in the past year or two, it’s that being engaged, present, patient, is less a trait and more of a practice. Sure, I think it comes more easily for some, but I am greatly encouraged by a strong sense that this is something we can work on. As Dani Shapiro said at her book reading, the practice is beginning again. Recognizing our thoughts taking over, and returning again to the place of stillness.

What if I wasn’t driven? So what? Begin again.

What if I didn’t have drive? So what? Begin again.

What if I’m distracted, my mind doing cartwheels, my anxiety bubbling up? So what? Begin again.

Be here.

Holding ambiguity, emanating peace

I sat at the kitchen table yesterday afternoon drinking tea and watching my children play in our back yard (“yard” is optimistic – suffice it to say we live in a very urban area). Still, I’m always delighted when they entertain themselves with little fuss or stimulation, and they did.

For some reason I was randomly poking through my archives and found a post that I wish I had written today. Maybe because I am entering a period of ambiguity and am aching for peace.  Maybe because the friend I mention had another scare about her daughter this week, and still in the midst of that found time to be generous and thoughtful towards me. Maybe because, despite the sunshine, it’s been a fairly gray weekend. I don’t know. Apologies for the retread, but this speaks to how I’m feeling and I wanted to repost it.

Holding Ambiguity and Emanating Peace

The membrane between me and the world is very porous.

Certain people have unfettered access to me; I take their input and criticism as truth. It is like having a central line into my chest. Which is good as long as the input is well-intentioned, even if negative.

I celebrate compassion. I believe kindness is the most important thing. That life is not black and white. That there are many grays. That what matters is doing the best you can. And I believe that most people are genuinely doing their best.

I think that relationships are art, not science. It is a fallacy – a comforting, seductive one – that there are clear rights and wrongs. That there are rules. There aren’t. There is instinct, there is fuzziness, there is lack of clarity. This is uncomfortable. You have to let go and trust. In fact, to force human relationships into a rigid framework of binary 1s and 0s is to miss out on some of their most exquisite, moving nuances. It is in the spaces between that the real love exists.

Life is endlessly long and it is heartbreakingly short. We are all flawed and wounded, we all limp. None of us dances without stumbling. But none of us needs others to tell us we are broken. We aren’t. There is a fine line between wanting to help each other be better people and being downright destructive. There is much good in every single person, so much to celebrate. None of us is more important or more worthy than anyone else. Nobody. This I believe as firmly as I believe anything.

People are amazing. There is more in each of us than we know. Last weekend I watched a dear friend practicing her passion. She had taken a risk, walked away from a safe professional harbor, and she is also enduring significant pain and fear in her family. Handling – with such grace – something most of us can barely imagine. And there she was. Laughing and smiling and creating beauty in the world. She is amazing. People like her make me realize I need to be a better me.

We must learn to hold ambiguity in our hands and still, somehow, emanate peace. We need to accept the terrifying uncertainty of it all. Maybe, actually, embracing that uncertainty is the only road to true freedom. It could all end tomorrow. This moment – and only this moment – is life. What are we all waiting for?

Ambivalence and regret roll into my heart like thunder

I had a professional conversation yesterday morning that triggered a landslide of self-doubt. I realized anew, sitting in a conference room as snow drifted down outside, how little I feel I have accomplished in the 10 years since I graduated from business school. I have very clearly chosen a path of a foot in both worlds (“career” and “home,” both in quotations because I think these definitions are simplistic) and as a result I have a home in neither. In being unwilling to give up active participation in either world, did I just end up doing a poor job at both?

What does it mean to have a foot in both worlds? I think it can be wonderful and it can be tormented, depending on the person and the situation. I’m just not sure which it is for me. I’ve always straddled the gulf of the mommy wars, always worked part-time, always spent part of my week in office buildings and part in the sandbox. I have adamantly insisted on keeping a “foot in the door” professionally because I was sure I’d want to “ramp back up” someday. All of these phrases seem foreign on my tongue now, like a language I used to speak but have lost.

I made an active decision to scale back my professional aspirations and involvement in order to have more flexibility to be home with Grace and Whit. And yet I have such an ache about having missed the babyhood of my children. It’s easy to blame that on the fact that I was at work some of the time, but when I’m really honest I don’t think that is the reason at all. I think it’s about my wiring, my frantic restlessness, the way I struggle to be fully engaged in one thing at a time. Still, I wonder if I had chosen to be home full-time I would feel better about my childrens’ infancies, if I would feel I had caught more of the swollen moments of feeling that are what it’s all about.

And yet I also feel frustrated by what feels like wasted years, spent only partially engaged in jobs which, in retrospect, did not mean very much to me. In order to keep the flexibility I prize so highly (to allow, among other things, time for writing) I have had to take jobs that are often peripheral and not core to a company’s function. This has eroded both my sense of real contribution and my feeling part of a cohesive team. What was the point of having missed hours with my faintly baby-powdered scented babies, for something that feels so insubstantial and inconsequential now?

Of course, the dirty truth is that I didn’t really want to be there every single second. I hate admitting that, because now I wish so devoutly that I had every single one of those seconds back. But, still. I know I needed the perspective of time away. I guess I just wish that I felt better about what I had accomplished in the hours I was away. I wish I didn’t feel like a fraud who is hiding the fact that she doesn’t know anything real.

There are two things that people tell me all the time about the way I have navigated the complicated territory of work/home. One is that I am lucky to have flexible, part-time work. This infuriates me because while I am deeply, firmly aware of my tremendous good fortune, I think calling my professional situation lucky trivializes the amount of work and forethought that went into it. And then, of course, my gerbil brain goes off on the wheel of: oh my God, I spent all of that time planning … this??? Anyway. The second is how well I’ve figured out how to have both. And when people tell me that, I always smile and nod and express my satisfaction with my situation. But I haven’t figured anything out, and those comments always make ambivalence and regret roll into my heart like thunder. They remind me of all of the anxieties and misgivings I have about the trade-offs and choices I have made.

Aidan at Ivy League Insecurities wrote a couple of weeks ago about how she frets that she has wasted her education. I relate to this, though my reasons are slightly different. I worry that I am letting down my parents, for their enormous financial and emotional investment in my education. I worry that I am failing the special teachers who took a particular interest in me, made me believe I was not stupid, helped open my mind. And I don’t feel that I am letting those people down because of my specific choices but because of who I am: that I am not more curious, ambitious, intelligent.

Days like today I feel that I’m the epitome of that trite and critical saying, “a mile wide and an inch deep.” I feel as though I’ve skimmed the surface of many worlds but not had the courage to really pick one and immerse myself in it. On other days I think that, as I wrote at Kelly’s blog, Cleavage, I am simply more kaleidoscope than laser. On those days, when I am feeling kinder towards myself, I think a life splintered into myriad pieces just fits me. I think that I could never commit to one place because I never found one that felt like home. I don’t know. I just know that today ten years of frantic effort has left me with a handful of dust and a heart full of questions.

The bright freight of memory

I was reading a newly-discovered blog yesterday called Catching Days.  Cynthia Newberry Martin was writing about Devotion, a book I also adored.  She cites specifically Dani Shapiro’s passage on memory, which was one of my favorites as well.  I was grateful for this prompt to return to the elegant pages of the memoir, and I thought about memory all day.

There are two passages that strike me from Devotion‘s section 54.  The first, Cynthia also quotes:

Why do we remember the particular things we do?  Great pain certainly carves its own neurological paths.  But why random, ordinary moments?

I have written before about how some of the memories I recall most vividly are of “random, ordinary” moments, whose eventual power I would never have known as I was living them.  I am fascinated by this particular alchemy: why is it that we recall what we do?  Certainly my mind has power to shape our memory in ways beyond my conscious awareness: this is at work, I think, in the way my brain seems to airbrush over certain incredibly difficult times, smoothing the specific contours of grief and pain into a uniform, though unmistakably sad memory.  The years at Exeter, for example, are for me a blur of snow, cold, running, and my tiny dorm room.  Very few specific memories endure.  The same is true of the months after Grace’s birth, as I grappled with my post-partum depression.

This makes me think of the oft-quoted line from Ann Beattie’s gorgeous short story, Snow: “people forget years and remember moments.”  As curious to me as why certain moments become eternal, sturdy parts of our memory is how rarely we can know as we live our lives which specific experiences will be elevated to this pantheon.  Which moments endure?  Why?  What message is our spirit sending to us in the patchwork of our lives that it preserves with glowing, brilliant detail?

I randomly remembered an essay I’d written during freshman year on To The Lighthouse (why this memory?  why today?) which addressed something similar.  I opened it up tonight and, amidst an odd encounter with my 18 year old self, found this line:

“Mrs. Ramsay illustrates what most human lives are like – a long thread of day-to-day banality and an occasional, vivid gemstone of insight or memory.  It is these memories, these moments, that make life interesting and valid; we live from one of these special times and experiences to another; while the stuff of life may be the mundane, it is the rare moments for which we truly live.”

How is it that we can’t recognize the gemstones as we live them?  Certainly there are hours, days, months of our lives that feel more alive than others.  Some periods of my life feel like going hand over hand through a swarm of gray days, clinging to the few moments of emotion or meaning that rise through the fog.  Other periods are like standing under a waterfall of feeling, unable to take it all in, pounded with emotion and sentiment, so awake and receptive I feel either pain or a gradual, defensive numbness.  Still, we can’t know which will be the memories that really endure, that lodge in our minds and stay with us for the duration.

The second passage about memory from Devotion comes at the end of section 54:

I had experienced my own memory as a living thing, a palpable presence in my body.  I had felt my past unfurl inside me as if it had a mind of its own.

I was actually thinking about something like this before I reread the section and found these lines; again, Dani puts into exquisite words the bumbling and humble thoughts of my heart.  I was thinking about some of the most cherished memories, the ones whose remembered details stud them like the jewels that cover a Faberge egg, who glitter most brightly in my mind.  Some of these take on an odd power, functioning almost like a lens through which I see my life.  Retrospectively, yes: the memory of that time in my life is refracted through that specific, salient moment.

But also, perhaps more oddly, this works prospectively.  There are certain moments who seem to have, in retrospect, informed the shape of the rest of my life.  I can’t know if this happened in real time or in retrospect.  I remember sitting at the foot of my bed, holding 5-day-old Grace, dripping tears onto her newborn head and answering earnestly the question of “what are you looking forward to?” with “when she goes to college.”   This has taken on such power as a defining moment of that time in my life, and of my motherhood in general.  But did that happen then, or only as I remember it and the (admittedly blurry) months around it?  I don’t know.  I have the phrase “freight of memory” in my mind, but in truth this is more like memory pushing something formative in front of it, rather than pulling it behind it.

In this way our past unfurls inside of us, cohabiting our present.  The past and the present echo inside of us, both creating the music of now and anticipating that of tomorrow.  We cannot understand the mystery of memory; my goal is merely to accept the messages it offers.  To honor the things my soul seems to hold dear, as represented by which memories bob up out of the morass to be the ones I recall with blinding brightness.  To remain open to the ordinary moments, as I can never know which will become those to which I return again and again, rubbing them like a touchstone in my pocket.  It strikes me that this trick of our mind is, perhaps, just another way of acknowledging the grandeur and beauty of the most mundane moments in our lives.