musings

What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while. – Gretchen Rubin

If this blog has a theme (and it doesn’t, as I’ve established), it would likely be wonder, but close behind that is a preoccupation with daily-ness, with the small activities, thoughts, and emotions that make up our days and therefore our lives.  I think at least daily of the quote that last year’s family holiday card featured: “How we spend our days, is, in fact, how we spend our lives.” – Annie Dillard

Or of the salient reminder that  “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” (I’ve seen this ascribed to Aristotle, Cicero, and others, so I’m not sure precisely who to attribute it to).

I also like the Gretchen Rubin’s assertion of the importance of what we do every day. So I’ve been thinking about what I do every (or most) day(s).  And, conversely, what I rarely do.  Just as I think we can look at a week or a month of our lives and view our time allocation as a map of what matters to us, I think we can draw conclusions about what we care about through looking carefully at what we do (and do not) do regularly.

Every day I read, most days I exercise, every day I work, every day I spend time with Matt, Grace, and Whit, most days I text or email with a small circle of dear friends and family. Every day I brush my teeth, every day I change into pajamas at the earliest opportunity (sometimes in the morning if I’m working at home), most days I cook for my family, most days I do laundry. Most days I take pictures of the sky, some days at sunset.

Rarely I go out, rarely I talk on the phone for personal reasons (though I do all day for work), rarely I watch TV

What do these small, mundane acts say about my priorities?  I think they say my family, my work, and our home comes first.  I think they say that I’m an introvert who prefers my pajamas to a night out.  I think they say sometimes I need to work harder to get exposure to the wide world out there.

I’m comfortable with what my priorities look like when I stare in the mirror, when I map out what I do every day, how I spend my days, how I spend my life. Far from perfect, but entirely aligned with my values.

What do you do every day, and what do you do rarely?  Do you like what these answers say about what you value?

I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s piece in Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process, In Praise of Stubborn Gladness, in one fast gulp, my heart in my throat.  Just the title made me gasp, because it reminded me of my own musings on what I called sturdy joy.

Gilbert, writing about a poem by Jack Gilbert, evinces a perspective on what it means to live fully in the world that’s so familiar and resonant to me it felt like I was reading my own thoughts (albeit far more beautifully expressed):

When it comes to developing a worldview, we tend to face this false division: Either you are a realist who says the world is terrible, or a naive optimist who says the world is wonderful and turns a blind eye. Gilbert takes this middle way, and I think it’s a far better way: He says the world is terrible and wonderful, and your obligation is to joy. That’s why the poem is called “A Brief for the Defense” – it’s defending joy. A real, mature, sincere joy – not a cheaply earned, ignorant joy. He’s not talking about building a fortress of pleasure against the assault of the word. He’s talking about the miraculousness of moments of wonder and how it seems to be worth it, after all. And one line from this poem is the most important piece of writing I’ve ever read for myself:

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.

This defines exactly what I want to strive to be – a person who holds onto “stubborn gladness” even when we dwell in blackness.

I went back and re-read this passage, and the whole essay, several times.  Maybe it’s this stubborn gladness that’s at the root of this blog and has been for years.  I know that “wonder” is one of my most-used words here, and it appears in pages and pages of blog post subject headings.  I don’t have much to add to Gilbert’s perfect lines (both of them, Elizabeth and Jack) other than to say yes, yes, yes, and me too, me too, me too.

I’ve written a million times about the fact that I’m as much shadow as sun, about my unshakable experience of life as an amalgam of light and shadow (and that each enriches the other), about how “untrammeled joy” isn’t part of my vocabulary.  All of that is true.  I believe the world’s a ruthless furnace, no matter how you look at it, and our lives are pocked with loss, sorrow, difficulty, and melancholy.  None of that takes away from the brilliant flashes of joy that can – and do – exist throughout, though.  If anything, life’s unavoidable shadows make the joy it contains more lambent.

Here’s to vivid experiences, to living along the margins of light and dark, to experiencing both fully, and to having, along the way, a deep seam of stubborn gladness, of sturdy joy.  Amen.

I’ve always, since I was a child, been interested in the relationship between the individual and the whole.  How do we calibrate our feelings on a larger scale?  I remember wondering how those “rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10” signs in a hospital worked.  How does my 7 compare to your 7?  As an aside, I can tell you on that particular issue it was Grace and Whit’s births that helped me locate my own personal 10. The questions ripple out, though: when I see the color green and call it “green,” how do I know that it’s the same color that you see when you notice that something is green?  Is there any reason, in fact, to assume that those are the same thing?

The bigger question that interests me, I think, is how my personal experience fits into or correlates with the larger experience of the world as a hole.  I’ve always hungered to understand how the absolutely singular experience I’m having on this planet relates to the universal.  I think we all do.

This is what is is at the core of good writing, after all: making a specific, particular story shine so brightly that it somehow accesses something larger than its own individual details. Part of the impulse here for me is to understand: how does my experience relate to yours.  And another part of it is to find meaning: is there something larger that I can glimpse by putting my own individual story next to yours, and next to yours, and next to yours?

What I do know is that at the end of the day, I can never know if your headache is the kind of pain that would send me to the h9spital.  I can never know if the cornflower blue sky that you remark on looks the same to me.  I can never know what your love, and your loss, and your joy, and your sorrow feel like.

I’ll always wish I could find out.

I had to let the dust settle a little bit.  Over the last few weeks I have been reflecting on the summer and on the big event that capped it, Grace’s departure for boarding school.  I started this post in mid-September, and obviously, since then there have been even bigger events in our family.  Matt’s father’s death, and the weeks that followed, have clearly overshadowed Grace’s leaving for school.  That said, I’ve done a lot of thinking about what this summer and early fall were like, as Grace left, and that’s what I want to reflect on today.

And I can now say that the anticipation of Grace’s leaving was worse than the reality of it.

There’s no surprise here.  Anyone who knows me – even those who don’t! – knows I suffer from acute fear of what’s coming, and a keen, preemptive awareness of loss and endings.  I’m sure I learned that in my peripatetic childhood, which was marked by a big goodbye every four years.

The summer was glorious but it was also overshadowed by my anxiety and sorrow about what was coming in early September.  Every time someone asked me how I was doing – whether a dear friend or a kindly neighbor – I would burst into tears.  Literally. Regularly I started talking and had to stop because I found myself in tears.  This happened at the post office, at the dry cleaner, in the street as I brought groceries into the house. It’s fair to say that my sadness about all that was ending almost choked me.

The day itself came.  Yes, it was hard.  But the truth is, the day before we dropped her off was worse than the day after.  I miss her, desperately.  Our family is figuring out its new formation, and I think often of Launa‘s image of the shopping cart’s four wheels and how wonky things can be, how fast, when one wheel is off-kilter.

But the worry that hovered around the edges of this summer was, predictably, worse than the reality of life this fall.  I don’t know if in my preemptive grief I had done a lot of the hard work already.  I don’t know if I imagined a world so bleak that the truth of life now feels light in comparison.  I don’t know why, but I feel … okay.

Part of why I feel okay, I suspect, is my unshakeable belief that I truly lived the years with both kids at home.  I sank into them, and appreciated them, and loved them.  This belief reminds me of the last, devastating, glorious lines of Catherine Newman’s piece about facing the departure of teenage children:

“That was the time of our lives,” I’ll say to him.
And he’ll say, and this will be true, “At least we knew it.”

These last years, a blur of tucking Grace and Whit in, of the Science Museum giving way to Snapchat and homework and races and games, might well have been the time of my life.

You know what?  I knew it.

And the lesson, yet again, for me is that the anticipation of a transition is worth than its reality. I seem to need to keep learning this lesson over and over again. Grace is happy, and we are proud at how she’s adjusting and of how comfortable she seems. Her first few weeks of her great adventure were, of course, a lot rockier than we’d imagined.  And still, she persevered.  The three of us at home and figuring out our rhythm. I know there is joy ahead.  In fact there’s already joy right now.  I’m also not giving up hope that what lies ahead may hold its own wonders.