oh this is hard

The pain of the world threads itself through me

I read Jo’s gorgeous post, Everything Under the Gaping-Mouth Moon with a wince of recognition.  She writes – beautifully, as ever – about the dissonance she experiences between her own “singalong life” and the horrors that she knows are out there in the world.  “While children starve in North Korea, I barter with mine about dessert,” she writes, and I both smile and grimace, knowing the squeaking, nails-on-chalkboard feeling that putting two realities like that next to each other can generate.

Jo goes on to talk about how gratitude can be an antidote to the world’s suffering, about realizing that embracing joy, even in the full knowledge that out there is an ocean of sorrow, is not a bad thing.  In fact, it could be a good and generative and healing thing.  I love her points and highly recommend her post – Jo’s blog in general, actually.

As her writing often does, Jo’s words made me pensive.  I went off on a slightly different direction, though.  I can’t stop thinking about the ways in which my piercing awareness of the pain in the world – writ large and writ small – threads itself through my everyday life.  I regularly find myself keening – literally, wailing, internally if not externally – over the hurt in the world.  One day, driving through Harvard Square, stopped at a red light, Whit pointed to the man with the tattered cardboard sign begging from the stopped cars and asked, “Where’s his mummy?”  That made me cry so hard I had to pull over.  I can’t quite elucidate yet how devastated I am by homelessness; it’s a combination of guilt at my own comfort and despair about a society that abandons those who need it most.  I don’t read the paper anymore – some of that is from sheer laziness, sure, but it’s also because I simply can’t take the litany of news about deaths, despotic rulers, and economies in free fall.

This functions in a variety of ways.  Because of my porous nature, I’m easily hurt and saddened by what I witness, in my small world and in the larger one.  It also makes me, sometimes, awfully maudlin, even morbid.  This past weekend, sitting at a kitchen table at the Lost Island in New Hampshire with two of my very dearest friends, I descended into conversation about how the axe is hanging over our heads and it’s just a question of when.  Someone is going to get sick.  Someone is going to die.  Who will it be?  I’ve observed before that I have far more funerals ahead of me than behind me.  I’ve also been through enough severe illnesses, of parents and close friends, to know what that does to you.  And I ought to be more grateful, every single day, for the pulse of life that beats through me and my healthy friends and family.

And somehow I can’t.  I seesaw wildly between gratitude so intense it brings me to my knees, eyes full of tears, and crushing guilt at my own nonchalance about my good fortune.  I can’t believe I’m not more thankful, not more aware of the extraordinary good fortune of every single day that I – and, more importantly, so do my best friends and my family – get to be alive and healthy.  My existence is an odd combination of twinned grief and gratitude and overwhelming foreboding of bad things to come.  I know there is bad news on the horizon – there must be.  I also know that I ought to ignore it, and dance in the sunlight while it’s here.  And sometimes, truly, I can.  But not always, and in those moments I’m completely paralyzed by a simultaneous fear of those clouds and horror that I’m not appreciating the now better.

As one of my favorite, truly favorite bloggers, Kate at sweet/salty, put it: “Life is pain punctuated by joy.”  I hate being negative, I fight the creep of cynicism, and daily I wish I had more wonder in my life.  Still, I think she might be right.  There is so much damn rain in this world.  And, as I’ve realized, the more people you love, and the more deeply you feel, the more rain you get.  There’s no question about that equation.  Still, I’d never do it differently.  I wouldn’t trade my life for one with shallower feelings or one protected from the threat that I know clouds every moment.  Like my dear, beloved Jo, I sometimes want to pound my fists on the steering wheel, I squeeze my eyes closed to hold back the torrent of tears, and I rail against my own ingratitude.  Still, I know: this is life.  Radiance and shadow.  Turning, turning.

There are many ways to hide from your life

I’ve been thinking an awful lot about achievement, and the Race to Nowhere, and the ways we hide from our lives.  Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how complicated it gets when the ways you hide from your life are applauded by the world.  For me this has mostly been true: whether it’s running or studying with a fierce concentration or following the tide of popular sentiment down a path that might have been the wrong one.

This is a kind of hiding in plain sight, right?  None of your behaviors speak of anything being wrong.  In fact, they are celebrated.  For me, the pinnacle of this was at Exeter.  I’ve been very frank that my two years at Exeter were difficult for me.  I think late adolescence is an emotional and awkward time for most people, and some extenuating circumstances made mine especially challenging.  My parents were across an ocean (and in this pre-cell day, we spoke once a week on the payphone in the basement of my dorm).  My heart was broken at the very beginning of senior year when the first relationship of my life exploded in front of me (and in a hurtful, and public, way, no less).

What did I do?  I ran and I studied.  That is it.  I ran for an hour every single day, mostly in the woods out behind the gymnasium (across the bridge that appears in A Separate Peace), but when it was really freezing I’d run laps around the track suspended above the cage.    My senior year GPA was 10.8 (out of Exeter’s characteristically-unusual GPA scale of 11).  I read and I wrote and I studied and I went to bed every single night well before 10.  I didn’t have many close friends.  I didn’t have another boyfriend.  I didn’t ever break any rules, didn’t experiment with drinking or smoking, as so many boarding school denizens do.

It was a fraught time.  I was a liminal creature (Peggy Orenstein ascended even further in my pantheon of favorites when she used this, one of my favorite words, in Cinderella Ate My Daughter).  I was moving from girlhood to adulthood, and I was doing it mostly all by myself.  In this dark time, one I remember as still and ever-moving at the same time, I had one firm guide: James Valhouli, my English teacher, the first person to believe I had something of value to say.

But all of my coping mechanisms, things that I understand now were ways of avoiding actually engaging with my life, looked like success from the outside.  I was profoundly unhappy, but I don’t think anyone who didn’t know me well could tell.  I don’t know what the conclusion of this is, necessarily, but I do know that it points to a truth I’ve often referred to here: outsides and insides are not always congruent, and we ought to be slower to judge others based on the external indicators they display.  It also reminds me that there are many, many ways to hide from our lives, to numb ourselves to the things that hurt, and we would be well-served to approach all others with compassion.  They, too, are likely grappling with demons, even if we cannot see the struggle.

Full

I am thrilled to share writing from Christine from Coffees & Commutes here today. I absolutely adore Christine’s blog and every single time I read it I find myself nodding with identification.  More often than not I find myself crying.  Christine has written candidly about her struggle with depression and about her ongoing efforts to sink into the life she has with her two sons and husband.  She is currently exploring meditation and her writing about the impact that it is having on her is honest and compelling.  I’m looking forward to spending more time with Christine, but in the meantime her blog is one of my must-reads and I suggest you put it on your list too.  Please enjoy this beautiful post called FULL, and then visit Coffees & Commutes to read more of Christine’s lyrical, powerful writing.

FULL

Of love for my children and the countless ways they bless my life.

Of joy for a happy marriage and the partnership that I share with my husband.

Of satisfaction with my professional life and a career that continues to be meaningful and challenging.

Of friends to connect with and share laughs and tears.

Of pleasure for the creativity that flourishes in my life through words, and pictures and pretty paper crafts.

Of desire and curiosity to read and explore and enrich my soul with the wealth of words written by others..  ,,

Of wonder and excitement over my burgeoning desire and trust to freely ask the big questions.

Of urgency to focus on my physical and emotional health; to keep me strong and moving forward.

Of need for more time, energy and acceptance so that all of these things don’t overflow and drown me.

Thank you Lindsey, for welcoming my words. It’s truly a pleasure and an honor to share this space with you.

Off balance

(clouds, with otherworldly light)

Do you know that feeling when you read a blog and you think: wow!  This is a better-articulated, more-thoughtful, totally amazing version of every single thing I think about, every single day?  And then you think: my God I wish this person lived nearby.  I want to be her friend!  Well, I do.  And Walking On My Hands is one of those blogs.  Pam is, as her tagline says, learning to live with grace.  I really can’t recommend her blog highly enough.

Last night I had terrible, terrible insomnia.  Whit woke up at 12:30 to go to the bathroom, and the click of his bedroom door when he went back to bed woke me up.  Thursday for me began at 12:30, because I never went back to sleep.  I lay in bed for a while, went upstairs and lay on the couch for a while, watched Gossip Girl, and read Pam’s post.  And then I thought about it for the rest of the night.  The sentence I can’t forget is this:

There are about a zillion ways to hide from your own life, and I have done every one.

The identification with those words was so intense I felt like someone had knocked the wind out of me.  This is what I was doing, all those years when I was in such a frantic hurry that I never actually noticed the right-now of my life.  This is what I was doing when I wasted whole chunks of time mourning something or someone who was already gone.  This is what I was doing when I ignored that whisper inside of me that said hey, maybe this isn’t what you want, and instead hurtled towards the accolades that felt so good to receive.  This is what I was doing when I ate emotionally in the years after college.  This is what I was doing when I ran and ran and ran in the ice-cold winter woods at Exeter, an hour a day, tears often streaming, then frozen, on my cheeks.

Pam’s words fell on fertile soil: the me who is up in the middle of the night with insomnia, suffering from a kind of spiritual indigestion, is even more porous usual.  I couldn’t settle into sleep from my day on Wednesday.  All day I was just off balance, literally and figuratively.  I slipped several times during the day, twice during my early morning run (I caught myself both times) and once, wearing work clothes, in the middle of Back Bay after an interview (I completely wiped out).

Whit cried when I took him to school because these days I drop him off rather than waiting to take him up to his classroom.  I do this because there are about four parking spots in a one-mile radius of school and I don’t feel right hogging one of them for the 30 minutes we used to sit together.  But, still.  In the afternoon Grace pulled me aside, in tears, and listed a litany of all the little things I do that fail and hurt her.

I was keenly aware of my shortcomings as a mother.

I felt overwhelmed by my job.  The demands are coming fast and furious right now, as we enter an annual period of concentrated effort.  My calendar for the next couple of weeks suddenly felt chokingly busy, including a day trip to San Francisco.

My cheeks burned with the prickly heat of not being very good at my job.  Certainly, of doing a poor job balancing it.

I felt the guilty pressure of my nascent book manuscript sitting, untended, on my desktop.  I haven’t had the time to look at it, to really spend time diving into its pages, and that truth hangs over me like a storm cloud, its grayness shading every frame of my day.

My commitment to writing, and to this project in particular, felt perilously close to slipping away.

And so I spent Wednesday afternoon and evening in a funk.  I was tearful and frustrated.  At dinner with two dear friends I was distracted and quiet.  At home with Matt I was short and snappy.  I couldn’t sleep, and when I finally did it wasn’t for long.  I started this post thinking: I still avoid my life.  Isn’t that what I was doing by being pissy, and not really engaged, and wakeful?  I don’t know, though.  Maybe that IS being present to my life.  Even when it’s difficult, and full of obstacles, and feels empty of joy.

Even in the midst of my dense crankiness, however, I read an essay by my friend Katherine and found myself crying, moved.  I realize that the heart of me, that raw, tender place full of shadows and startling blazes of light, is so much closer to the surface now.  Even when it is temporarily occluded by the frustrations of a bad day, it’s never totally lost from sight.  This is what Pam is talking about, I think, when she speaks of not avoiding her life.  Isn’t that heart, in fact, my life?

Achievement is not a bad thing

I have been thinking a lot about The Race to Nowhere, and what I wrote about it, and about the thoughtful comments that people made.  My sister, the younger-and-wiser Hilary, and I have been going back and forth in email about it too.  She is the only person on the planet who shared with me the overwhelmingly rich and challenging terroir of our childhood and uniquely qualified to discuss those days and to hold up a mirror to me.  She is also a deeply thoughtful person and an educator, so I am particularly interested in her view on this subject.

And she said something that really struck me.  With regard to The Race to Nowhere, she averred that she did not like the way that “achievement has become anathema.”  And I agree.  Fully.  In fact when I read the comments on my post last week, I found myself with an uneasy feeling in my stomach, that creeping sensation of not having adequately or articulately conveyed what I really feel.  I’m worried I left out a big piece of my view.

And so here I will try again.  I think achievement is terrific.  I have written time and time again of how important it is for a child to feel the feel mastery.  Of a skill, a place, of themselves.  I will never forget the glow in Grace’s eyes when she rode a two-wheeler alone, the light in Whit’s face when he swam a lap of the pool solo, the sheer, palpable delight Grace felt when she began reading chapter books.  These accomplishments are immensely self-esteem building, and I would never, ever suggest that they are a bad thing.

In my life this theme reached a crescendo at Phillips Exeter Academy, where I went for 11th and 12th grade.  Frankly, my years there were relatively unhappy, for a constellation of personal reasons.  Despite this, even while I was there I felt a deep respect, almost a reverence, for the place, an awareness that I was somewhere unique.  The further I get from Exeter the more crystalline my appreciation of the place becomes.  As the years have passed, and since I’ve had my own children, I’ve come to understand why.

It feels rare, these days, that an institution that deals with children says as baldly as Exeter does: we have high standards.  And we know you can meet them.  I’m not entirely sure why that’s a threatened stance in education today, but as far as I can see it is.  And Exeter unflinchingly does that.  I’ve never been somewhere that so fiercely believed in the potential of its students: we won’t lower the standards, the voices seem to whisper, because we know you can do it.

And they do.  It’s powerful, being believed in.

Nowhere I’ve been to school before or since has even remotely touched the education I received at Exeter.  Exeter pushed me and defied me and never, once, for a single second, gave up on me.  And you know what?  I could do it.  It is the first place that I began to believe that I might have something to say.

I think the problems begin when one’s identity becomes entirely intertwined with achievement.  This is what happened to me; I entirely lost the voice of my soul, which was a whisper, because the voice of the world telling me what to do, and applauding me when I did it, was so deafening.  Of course the risk of this is high when you begin achieving, because the world’s adulation feels good.  At least if you are a pleaser like myself.

But never let me miscommunicate my lack of commitment to the idea of excellence in general, and of achievement in specific.  I hope to raise children who are tuned in enough to their inner voices to discover what it is that makes their hearts soar, and full of energy and passion enough to go after those goals with everything they have.