musings

The dream that is living me

(iPhone picture of Nantucket sunset)

I adore this post of Meg Casey’s, The Dream that is Living Me. I find it so reassuring, because while I feel major shifting going on in the deepest parts of me, I also realize my external life looks the same. It is heartening to hear that despite feeling like I am, as she says “swimming against the current,” things may well be moving, albeit slowly, in the direction that I want.

The way I want my life to look floats like a gossamer scrim in front of my forward vision, taunting and inspiring me in equal measure. I know what I think I want – is that progress? – but have no real clarity about how to get from here to there. Still, I have a very real sense of the tectonic plates in me shifting. Sometimes, in fact, I feel like I am only moments away from an earthquake. I need to stop beating myself up about the fact that everything looks the same on the outside, and honor the shifts, either gradual or abrupt, that are happening internally.

I say all the time, “I am getting there …” All the time. Thank you for the reminder, Meg, that there is no such thing. There is only now. As usual, I struggle to honor the now because I tend to be caught between wishing for what was and fretting about what will be. And in so doing, I squander the only thing I have of real value in this life: my time and my attention. I imagine that it is only by surrendering to the now and trusting in the tiny movements that add up to the “current that carries us” that I can get to where I want to go.

So, thank you, Meg, for reminding me to be here now, and for reassuring me that despite outward appearances all of the internal work that I feel like I am doing is not for naught.

Repulsions

I love Danielle’s post about “what your repulsions have to say about you.” It is, as usual, wise and concise. (sidenote: I can’t wait to meet Danielle this weekend!)

I’ve been thinking about what really pisses me off. I have tons of little annoying peeves, but what really really aggravates me and grosses me out is a shorter list.

Lateness (100% for sure the first and most important one)
Entitlement
Over-familiarity
Clowns
Laziness
Complaining

Clearly many of these come from my family’s puritan roots. I was brought up to decry entitlement, laziness, and complaining. What one has doesn’t make one better than anyone else: this was a very strong lesson that I internalized into a profound truth. No single person has more inherent value than any other person. I could not believe this more strongly.

Everybody should pull their own weight and not whine about it. These beliefs are part of my family’s essential rubric, the power of which I am realizing now. Hard work and dedication are prized most of all, and there is a belief that most things can be solved if you try hard enough. This last part, I am learning, may not always be true.

Clowns are just creepy. Lateness and over familiarity, each in their own way, demonstrate disrespect for another.

What can you learn about what you dislike? As Danielle says, contrast can be a great teacher.

Naive

I have a rugged faith in the goodness of the human heart, a defiant sense that people are good at their core. I may come across as sarcastic sometimes, but I am not cynical. Fundamentally, I believe that people are trying their best and that if they stumble it is not out of any bad intentions. I really do. I try to assume the best rather than the worst, and generally I am proved right.

This faith has been tested lately. In August I found a web designer through a blog that I like. The designer is here: Eclectic Whimsy Designs. I contacted her and she responded quickly and we had a great dialog back and forth. I immediately liked this woman over email, shared with her many pictures that I wanted used in my blog design, and felt that she “got” me. Our emails bounced back and forth and I felt genuinely excited about a new design for my blog.

She asked me to pay her and I did, sending a check through the mail. During the last week of August she emailed me and said she would have something to show me by the weekend. I was ecstatic.

And then, silence. I have emailed her probably ten times since then. I connected with her friend through their etsy shop, and asked whether this behavior was characteristic. Her friend said no, it was not like Shawn to take money and walk away. I asked for Shawn’s cell phone number and I called her. She did not respond.

I am so deeply disappointed. I am shocked, actually. It is not about the money so much as about the fact that there are people who would behave like this. Also, about how wrong I was about her: I genuinely felt a connection with this woman, a real relationship. I am not often so utterly wrong in my assessment of other people (a skill that is a big part of my “real job”).

I feel naive and stupid for having so misjudged this woman, and for being so shocked that there are deceitful people in the world. How sad that I could be surprised by this! I suppose it is just a little chink in my faith in people, one step towards the cynicism that seems to overtake most people as they grow older. I don’t like it though. I want to fight this oncoming negativity, want to keep believing in the essential goodness of people. I am sad that this kind of negative energy exists in the world, and disappointed both in my own judgment and in a woman who I thought seemed very genuine and real. Am I wrong to be so upset?

Class of 1996

Found this little bit of memory on a blog I stumbled across, Samosas for One.

Instantly I was back in the room of a fellow freshman, a guy from Texas, I think, and I remember a big Texas flag hanging on the wall (I don’t think I ever went into someone from Texas’s room without noticing a flag, now that I think about it). I think at least 15 of us were crowded into the room, and we were watching the premiere of the show that we’d watch all through college. Because we were, after all, the class of 1996.

I’m sure I was wearing a worn-in LL Bean flannel shirt, and I’m sure one or more of my future roommates was with me. I think we were drinking grain alcohol punch of some kind out of plastic cups, or maybe warm beer. After the show was over we likely all traipsed the long walk to the Street together, trying to find a club that would let a marauding group of freshmen in.

It seems like yesterday and a million years ago, that night that could have been a hundred others, but that this opening sequence reminded me of. As Anu quotes in her blog, there is a line about people having two birthplaces: the first being where they were born, and the second being where they find out who they are. I’ve been thinking about that a lot and I struggle with the latter point. I think that discovery is a process, and therefore that I can’t pinpoint a single second “birthplace.” Rather, it is strewn among a small group of places and people, who either witnessed or participated in the process of my becoming who I am. And the process is very much still underway.

Why I Write

There’s been a proliferation of interesting writing on the topic of Why We Blog this week. Ronna addressed it, focusing on three main points: that blogging is a way to get outside ourselves, is therapeutic, and is a way to tell our stories. She asserted, and I agree, that we all have myriad stories to tell. She hinted that in this telling we are both ourselves enriched and, possibly, privileged to participate in the growth of others. Ronna included an Isak Dinesen quote I love: To be a person is to have a story to tell.

She followed up this post with a second, the next day, about the way that “blogging is a way to create and experience community.” I very much agree with this point, which echoed Aidan’s thoughtful observations on why she blogs. I share the sentiment that blogging is a way to meet (and be met by) people whose lives and stories are very different from our own. I am sometimes keenly aware of the general homogeneity of my life. I love my life, of course, but I do have a certain restlessness of the spirit that is slaked, in part, by learning about people whose lives and choices are very different from my own.

So I’ve been thinking this weekend about Why I Blog. I know I feel a visceral impulse to share the stories of my life, both the mundane ones and the meaningful ones. I know that writing often helps me put shape around my nascent or amorphous thoughts, helps me understand the underlying current beneath a riptide of emotion. Joan Didion put it best: “I write entirely to find out what I am thinking.”

But there’s another, impossible to ignore, reason why I blog. After all, blogging both assumes and actively seeks an audience. Obviously I need, on some level, to know that someone is reading my words. I think this is a reflection of the basic human need to be truly seen. But is it exhibitionistic? Does it make the thoughts and content less meaningful? Is it the wrong thing, to want someone to be reading? I have thought about this a lot, struggling with the initial feeling that it is immature and needy of me to need someone to be out there reading me. On some level this is just a continuation of a pattern of needing to be validated and approved by the big bad world out there, isn’t it?

I think it is that, yes. But I think it is more than that too. I imagine that most writers write for an audience, whether it’s an audience of one (perhaps Steven King’s Ideal Reader) or millions. I cannot in good conscience claim the title of “writer” for myself, but I know that one reason I blog is because I hope to, someday, provide for someone else that shimmering sigh of recognition that some writing I’ve read has given me. That bone-deep sense of being not alone when someone else can put into words thoughts or feelings that have swarmed incoherently around my head and heart. If I can, someday, give a single reader that feeling that I have had so many times in my years of blog-reading, then I will be happy. It feels arrogant to even wish for that, but in truth, I do. I am personally sustained by those moments when someone else’s writing makes my heart physically swell with identification and awareness, and I aspire to provide that for someone else.

For me, more than the community, more than the catharsis, more than the story-telling, it’s about that. About that feeling of recognition, that single moment when you read a sentence or a paragraph and suddenly understand something you’ve known all along in a new way. Which, when I think about it, is sort of an amalgam of community, catharsis, and story-telling. I’ve been blessed to be on the receiving end of that feeling many times, and I continue to hope that I might provide it for someone out there.

To illustrate my point, here is one such passage – a paragraph that made me shiver because it put into such beautiful words something I’ve thought before. A paragraph that happens to be ABOUT that feeling. (oh so very meta).

Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, at the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity?
– Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

Yes, I have. And I did just there. And that’s why I write.

(And no, I am not arrogantly comparing myself to one of the great writers of the last few decades. No. I come up to Carol Shields’ ankle. But she inspires me.)