oh this is hard

Receiving comments and emails from people who read my words here is among my very favorite things in the world.  Once in a while, however, the contents of those messages can make me uneasy.  Sometimes people comment that it seems I have a “perfect” life.  Other times I get adulation about my “perfect” children.  And, lest you think everything I hear is nice, sometimes I get slapped down for being unaware of how good I have it.

The truth is my life is very far from perfect.  My children are far from perfect.  Nothing here is perfect, and I know also that nothing anywhere is perfect.

It’s not all shiny here.  It’s not all wonder and noticing the streak of an airplane across the evening sky and reading poetry aloud.  Those things exist, absolutely: usually every single day.  But there is also shouting, and impatience, and tears.  Years ago I remember someone telling me in a disgruntled tone that they couldn’t possibly be “present” for every moment of their life.  They had a job to do, and dishes to wash, and on and on and on.

I was taken aback by that, and realized I was not communicating what I meant by “being present” clearly enough.  I meant, and mean, it quite literally: being awake, being aware, paying attention.  That does not mean loving everything.  There is plenty that I don’t like in this life of mine.  There is no question that the rooms of my days and of my heart contain mold and dust and there are regrets piling up in the corner.

But there is also so much good.  And I sincerely hope that one thing I am is aware of and grateful for my good fortune.  I don’t enumerate my blessings because I suspect that would be boring, and because it feels like gloating.  But I am incredibly, intensely conscious of how fortunate and privileged I am.

This awareness often adds to my guilt about the melancholy that hovers over me much of the time.  How can I possibly feel sorrow, and these prickly emotions, when I have so very much to be thankful for?  But I do.  And even in the wake of my oft-churning sadness comes a reminder of all the blessings that surround me.  At my saddest and bleakest I still can’t forget all that is beautiful about this life.  In fact I suspect it is precisely my sorrow – which comes directly from my awareness of how fast this life passes – that makes me so aware of loveliness and joy.  They come from the same source, and perhaps are even just sides of a single coin.  This experience, this life: sadness and joy, light and dark, beginnings and ends.  It’s all one.

But back to my point.  And I do have one: my messy, noisy, imperfect life.

Years, ago, I remember Katrina Kenison joking that her husband would “love to be married to the woman who writes the books.”  How this resonated with me, then and still now.  Sometimes when I am rushing everyone out the door in the morning, asserting that we are going to be late, late late!!! (despite the fact that I have literally almost never been late), Matt will turn to me and say: remember, Linds, live every moment.

Bedtime is a good example. I know how sacred bedtime is, how much I love these moments, how desperately I wish I had back all the bedtimes I wished away over the years.   And yet, still, sometimes I trip up and snap at a child who is dallying before bed.  Always, almost immediately, I am overcome with guilt.  I wasted this bedtime, I think.

Daily, I demonstrate in myriad ways my distraction, aggravation, irritation, impatience.  All of those emotions throb through my life, and I know I’m far from alone.  In fact my friend Aidan wrote about this very topic recently.  I know this frustration, this sense of falling down over and over and over again, is human.  I also know others who feel misunderstood, though I’m not familiar with many who have been directly accused of misrepresenting themselves (as I have).  I don’t, and I am not.  This is my life.  It is imperfect, and it is chaotic, and it is full of disappointments and regrets and mistakes, of raised voices and hurt feelings and tears.  It is also full of brilliance and beauty and joy.  I just choose to write about the latter more than the former.  But I assure you: it’s all there.

Have you ever stumbled in the perilous gulf between perception and reality?  Have others ever made assumptions about your life that don’t feel right?  Do you get aggravated, short-tempered, and irritated?

Years ago I described the fleeting nature of time as the black hole around which my whole life circles, the wound that is at the center of all my writing, all my feeling, all my living.  Certainly that seems to be borne out by what it is I write, over and over again.  At the very midpoint of the year, the sunniest, longest days, I find myself battling an encroaching sorrow, an irrefutable sense of farewell.  The proof is in my archives.

The world bursts into riotous bloom, almost as though it is showing off its fecundity.  The days are swollen and beautiful, the air soft, the flowering trees spectacular.  The children gleefully wear shorts to school, the sidewalks are dusted with pollen and petals, and we round the curve of another year.  We start counting down school days, we say goodbye to beloved babysitters who are graduating from college, and I find myself blinking back tears.

Every year, I’m pulled into the whitewater between beginnings and endings that defines this season.  I can barely breathe.

It’s all captured in the event that so many of us attend, year after year, at this time: commencement.  It was my own commencements that marked this season, for years: from grade school, high school, college, graduate school.  And then there was a time when, though I wasn’t personally attending commencements, I felt their presence, sensed the ebb and flow of the school year.  It seems that my spirit and the very blood in my veins will always throb to the cadence of the school year.  And now it is my children who commence, who close a year and begin another, wearing too-long hair and legs, vaguely tentative smiles, and white.

Commencement.  Isn’t this word simply a more elegant way of describing what might be the central preoccupation of my life?  You end and you begin, on the very same day.  You let go of something and while that I-am-falling feeling never goes away, you trust that you’ll land.  And you do, on the doorstep of another beginning, a new phase, the next thing.

No matter how many times I’m caught from the freefall of farewell by a new beginning, though, I still feel the loss.  As much as my head understands that endings are required for them to be beginnings, my heart mourns what is ending.  That a seam of sorrow runs through my every experience is undeniable; it may sound depressing, but I genuinely don’t experience it that way.  It is just part of how I’m wired, and it’s never closer to the surface than right now, as this school year winds down, as we celebrate the beginning that’s wrapped in the end, as we commence.

I used to so frequently parallel process and multitask that I actually didn’t know how to sit still or to do just one thing at a time.  I played Tetris during conference calls, needlepointed while watching a movie on demand, tapped out work emails while at the park with my children.  It wasn’t a deliberate behavior as much as it was my instinct.  I think I just kept moving, all the time, because that’s all I had ever done.  I was always in a rush to get to the next stop on the map.  Until I vaulted over the edge of that map, and realized I needed to start navigating by the stars.

That’s approximately when I started slowing down.

I’m sure it’s not coincidence that I now find many kinds of multitasking unbearably difficult.  This is most of all true when people talk to me while I’m engaged in something else, whether that is writing, reading, or listening to someone else.  It literally frays me to have my attention split like that.  I truly cannot stand it, and my poor children, who are frequently on the receiving end of a finger held up to say just one minute, can attest to this.

I sometimes feel like one of those many-armed Indian goddesses, and I need to sit down, take a breath, and remind myself: first things first.  One thing at a time.  Certainly part of this is a conscious effort I started making several years ago to be here now.  After all, my real life has already begun and I do not want to miss a moment of it.

But this feels like more than just my deliberate effort to be conscious of my experience.  When I’m interrupted when trying to write something, or when I try to do too many things at once, I sometimes feel like I’m going to leap out of my skin.  I feel a surge of sudden, overwhelming discomfort that verges on pain.  If I’m driving and don’t know where I’m going, for example, God help the person who turns on the radio: I will yelp and demand that you turn it off.  I need quiet to do a lot of things these days: not just navigate but read, write, think.

I still check my phone more than I should.  And I still sometimes play some quiet Tetris while listening to a call.  But on the whole my distracted, two-things-a-time behavior has gone way down.  And my irritation at being interrupted when I’m engaged in something has gone way up.  When I actually think about it, the change in how I inhabit the world is seismic.

Is this a symptom of old age and diminishing mental powers?  Or is it my slow turning towards genuine engagement in my own experience?  I can’t tell if it’s ironic or absolutely logical that this decreasing ability to parallel process coincides with my being busier than I have ever been.  It’s inconvenient timing, for sure, but perhaps it makes total sense.  I don’t know that there’s insight in the recognition that multi-tasking takes away from our ability to focus, but I do know that my own life, my own mind and heart, are giving me very real messages that I must more often do just one thing at a time.  I’ve tasted what life is like when I’m paying attention, and I am no longer willing to live any other way.