musings

(drawing by Grace, 11/10/2009)

“These are grand words; we must make sure we deserve them. Listen to them again: ‘I love you.'”

“Perhaps love is essential because it is unnecessary.”

“So religion and art must yield to love. It gives us our humanity, and also our mysticism. There is more to us than us.”

all from A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, by Julian Barnes

“The eskimo had fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.” – Margaret Atwood

Thinking about love today, about its manifestations both permanent and transient, about its permutations and power.

(view from 402, winter 1994)

The trees outside of my little office are all bare now, black webbing against the gray sky. It may be 70 degrees outside but from in here it looks like another November day. This is my eighth fall in this house. The eighth season I have watched from this small window. The view is so dear to me, so familiar, though it has changed over the time I’ve sat here, because the house across the street turned over and was renovated.

This window and its view reminds me of the tiny window in my sophomore year room at college. My three roommates and I got the very last room draw in the most absolutely undesirable residential college. The jackpot, it was not. We had to remove all four desks to unbunk the beds (which we did without hesitation). Still, some of my happiest memories are in those two tiny rooms, connected by a bathroom so small that you had to sit on the toilet to open or close either door.

Both rooms (402 and 403) had small windows jutting out of eaves in the roof (did I mention we were on the fourth floor?). The windows overlooked the golf course, and I have vivid memories of sitting in the little space by the window looking out at the sunsets. for getting bigger ones, we had to call Universal Windows Direct of Syracuse.  For some reason these memories are all in the winter, and I recall a sky streaked with gray and pink, coral and near-white. The spire of the gothic graduate college stood off to one side, the golf course covered in ice that glimmered faintly in the dim light.

The view through that window, like this one, was through the fine mesh of a screen. The screen makes, in particular, taking pictures out of this window really hard. But I have grown so accustomed to the view having a faint but unmistakable pentimento of mesh squares. And it reminds me of a similarly demarked view from so many years ago.

The winter of 1994 echoes loudly today, reminding me of the incessant, rhythmic way that the world turns towards fall and winter. My view today, so familiar from my adult life, is haunted by shadows of a similarly dear vista from a time when I was just becoming who I am now. The past and the present collide in a single lens, in a neat rectangle, bisected with white wood, through which I view the messy world.

So many things are different now, 15 years later, and yet many things endure. That is the subject of another post. For now, I will look out the window, feeling as though if I squint I could be back in the small space under the eave, my college roommates dancing to Shawn Colvin, watching the sun go down in New Jersey.

This essay, For the Boy Who Makes Waves, from the New York Times Modern Love column (Glo, like you, I love it) has me in tears. It is so beautiful, so direct, so self-disclosing. I love this man’s courage in admitting his weakness, in describing the great challenge of his life as that of being kind to his son.

I find the author’s candor deeply moving. The theme of how children challenge us to seek and strive for a better self really resonates. He writes:

I have had glimpses of the kind of man I should be. Such are the revelations we are afforded. Passing glimpses, like the small, hidden pond you pass while driving on a particular road for the first time. Suddenly opening up and then closing once again. So that it can be instantly forgotten, or recalled only in part.

Those lines give me that a-ha feeling where the world simultaneously shrinks to a tiny kernel of truth and opens into a yawning chasm of meaning. Yes, yes, yes. I’ve said something very similar myself before:

I feel like the mother that I want to be flits in and out of my days, perniciously resistant to capture, her rhythms confounding in their resolute illogicality. Her very presence – tolerant, patient, engaged – is a blessing, telling me that I am, occasionally, the parent I aspire to be. But it is also a deep reminder of how often I fail to meet those goals, an ever-present yardstick showing me how far I am from what my children deserve.

Thoughts for a Sunday, inspiring and daunting at the same time: how can I work harder to be a better mother for these darling, challenging, marvelous, painful children of mine?

I loved Jen’s post today about both the importance and challenge of saying thank you to the people who touch us in our lives. The essay brought to mind for me a cascade of thoughts and of other writing that I’ve liked in the past. The point that really resonated with me was that we forget to thank those whose impact on our lives might not be as obvious – we just don’t think of it, and then the opportunity is gone. She was not speaking of our best friends, but of those strangers or acquaintances whose lives have somehow touched ours, often in much more meaningful and long-lasting ways than they probably ever imagined.

Of course my mind started cartwheeling through who these people might be for me. The kind friend of my father’s who I had lunch with my sophomore year at Princeton, asking professional advice. He had had the career I (thought at the time I) wanted, and his counsel was firm: don’t go into chemistry just to get a job at McKinsey. Major in what you love. He was right, of course: I majored in English, I loved it, I spent ten years in management consulting and … look where I am now. It is also the wonderfully kind teacher at Exeter whose support and encouragement made me consider, for the first time, that I might have something real to say. It is also my first yoga teacher, whose inspiration was enough to light my practice on fire; that fire may flicker and wane, but it has not and will not go out. It is also the midwife who, firmly but gently, diagnosed my post partum depression and changed the trajectory of the early weeks of my motherhood experience.

I could go on, of course. It is a good exercise, I think, to think through who those people are for each of us. I actually think, too, that those we hold dearest can never be told enough how much we care about them. I think often of Peggy Noonan’s wonderful editorial after 9/11, about the last phone calls made and messages left by those who perished in the attacks. The column asserts something I believe deeply: expressing how we feel frequently doesn’t cheapen the words, but allows them to sink into the object of our affection’s very marrow. Her line that I love is this:

We’re all lucky to be here today and able to say what deserves saying, and if you say it a lot, it won’t make it common and so unheard, but known and absorbed.

Hanging over both Jen and Peggy’s columns is, of course, the specter of the fact that someday we won’t be able to thank those who matter to us (near or far). In each case, the words are haunted by the fact that we can’t know when that day will come, that day when we can no longer say “thank you, you mean a lot to me.” It is tragic to me how often I hear of people rushing to a deathbed to share how they feel, or, worse, hear about regret at not having been able to express those feelings in time. It seems obvious that we ought to work harder to thank people, to let those who we love know it, as we go along.

As we travel the arc of our lives, whose shape – graceful and long or abrupt and short – we cannot know, it would behoove us to be grateful, thoughtful, and communicative. Easier said than done, of course. Like cleaning up as you go along while cooking dinner, this is instinctive for some, learned for others, and impossible for a few.

Without that vague threat that someday we won’t be able to do so, would any of us express anything at all? Is this just another way that death defines life? This article by Todd May in the New York Times addresses this in a thoughtful, elegant way. His claim that it is the very fact of death that both animates and delineates our lives has been stuck in my head. I’ve been turning it over like a stone, looking at the argument from both sides, finding myself rubbing its smoothness, agreeing with its truth. He describes humans “forward-looking creatures” who see the meaning of everything we do in the “light” of the future. And then, of course, death is there in every moment, dampening that light and giving it shape. This seems like an unresolvable tension: without death our lives are formless, but it is also the fact that is hardest to reconcile with our essentially prospective natures. This conundrum lies at the heart of living, says May, and I agree with him.

His closing lines say it better than I can:

But it is precisely because we cannot control when we will die, and know only that we will, that we can look upon our lives with the seriousness they merit. Death takes away from us no more than it has conferred: lives whose significance lies in the fact they are not always with us. Our happiness lies in being able to inhabit that fact.

I described this week how it is easier for me to answer “what don’t you do?” than “what do you do?” That’s for sure true. Likewise, there are certain thing I’ve never done that have become defining characteristics for me. At least, in my own head. Certain experiences I have never had that I cling to because they say who I am. I’d list them but they are private. Okay, fine, two examples are: Watch Star Wars. Be on Facebook.

And I realize that is ridiculous. Ridiculous. Who I am is solid as marble (or should be). Who I am is not defined by something I have or have not done. Just as I wrote in my earlier post, what we do and do not do is a deeply imperfect reflection of who we are, not at all a complete picture. Of course it isn’t. In fact, isn’t relying on those external indicators, those small things, to judge either our own or someone else’s self kind of a copout? A shortcut that is easier than actually getting to know who we – or they are?

I wonder if I cling to these external markers of identity so fiercely because without them I feel lost. Without hanging on to the edge of the dock that concrete definitions represent – until my fingertips are white! – I am bobbing alone in the sea. And that is terrifying. I’m not a great swimmer. And in the ocean of Identity, Meaning, Self-Confidence? I can barely do the doggie paddle.

But I have to trust. What’s my option? I have been doing an online course about creativity and manifesting our dreams, Mondo Beyondo, which has really made me think. I haven’t dedicated as much time or attention to it as I wish I had, but I have read every “lesson” post that the two teachers have shared. Many of them have clanged around in my brain like a loud gong, their echoes coming up again and again. One lesson in particular was about how sometimes, to get to our dreams, we have to disassemble significant things. The piece asserted that while we assume that “living our dreams” is a positive, happy thing, it can actually require a significant amount of letting go, breaking down, breaking through.

What does that mean for me right now? I’m still figuring it out. But I think part of it is about letting go of these silly things I’ve clung to that tell me who and what I am. Or, really, that I think tell others who and what I am. I am not saying I am going to do all of those things I’ve never done, run wildly into the wall of reckless abandon, change my behavior in a radical way. Of course I’m not! Frankly many of the things I haven’t done and don’t do are because I have no interest!

But I am going to try to let go of those definitions. I am going to try to trust that those who matter really care about a much more fundamental me. I am going to try to believe that identity, and personhood, is much more essential than superficial indicators suggest. And that mine – my identity, my personhood, my self – is enough just as it is.