oh this is hard

Tales of Quirk and Wonder

Lisa Ahn’s blog, Tales of Quirk and Wonder, is one of my favorite corners of the internet.  Since late last summer, Lisa has been running a fascinating series about inspiration.  I was both startled and hugely honored when she asked me to contribute to her series. I’m so often not inspired, is the thing.  And part of why I love Lisa’s series is that it always triggers a cascade of thoughts, ideas, and reflections in me.

I decided to look for inspiration where I always do.  I went outside, tipped my head up, and gazed.  And then, after a walk, I sat down at my desk.  The muse doesn’t find me unless I sit at my computer, after all.

I believe we are all full of stories.

I believe we are all looking for the way home. To whatever our essential, fundamental home is, where we are truly ourselves, where we are seen and recognized and known and witnessed as such.

I believe that telling our stories – to others, maybe, but most of all to ourselves – is the only way to find our way home….

I’m delighted to be guest posting at Tales of Quirk and Wonder today, writing about what inspires me.  Please click through to read the rest of my piece.

 

Discomfort

Last week I had an email exchange with my friend Jessica about the five years I spent living in London (ages 12 to 17).  It was a rich, irreplaceable interval of time, full of the number 9 bus and Fruit Pastilles and Doc Marten boots and weekends riding in the Cotswolds and signing our names on the Berlin Wall.  I still have dear friends from those years.

But there’s no question that the five years that I lived in London, the fifth of which I spent at boarding school in New Hampshire, were bracketed by deep discomfort.  I can close my eyes and stand in the doorway of my Upper Fourth classroom on a cold January day, when my future friend Stephanie threw open the doors and announced, “this is the new girl” before disappearing into the mass of foreign girls speaking in rapid, accented English.  I have rarely wanted to disappear more keenly (and trust me, that’s an emotion I experience a lot).

My childhood was as full of farewells as it was of blindingly bright experiences.  I saw countries and cathedrals and I also cried my eyes out, missing friends in Cambridge, in Paris, in London.  I went back and forth across the ocean so many times I wasn’t really sure, for several years, where home was.  I would never trade my childhood, and the unique terroir in which I grew (shared only by my sister).  But it was certainly full of dislocation, threaded through with a fundamental sense of discomfort.  I was always new somewhere, or about to leave.  The fabric of my life was woven through with departures.

I don’t know why this has been on my mind lately.  Maybe it is because I am particularly cognizant of how comfortable my adult life is, how different Grace and Whit’s childhoods are from mine.  After our trip to Jerusalem last year, I reflected that my sister and I had had seemingly opposite responses to our shared childhood.  I am the unadventurous one.  I have always chosen safety and comfort.

And yet.  The thing is, I still feel uncomfortable a lot of the time.  It’s not the same uneasiness that comes with being in an unfamiliar country: different coins (oh, how many times have I offered a palm full of foreign money to a bus driver and asked them to take what they need?), different names of dish soap, different kinds of foods.  But it is a vague sense of discomfort in my own life.  There are not that many people who feel like native speakers of my language.  There are not many places that I feel entirely accepted.  I long to belong.

I used to think that it was my childhood of constant goodbyes that created this feeling of fundamental otherness.  Years ago I described the way all those “departures remain within me, hard little kernels of sadness that the rest of my experience flows around, but not undisturbed.”  But maybe that’s not it.  Maybe it is actually the other way around.

Perhaps for too long I’ve incorrectly ascribed responsibility for the way I am to my peripatetic childhood.  Maybe this is my essential self, this nose-pressed-against-the-window sensation simply my way of being in the world.  It’s the reason I take the pictures.  It’s the reason I am often misconstrued as aloof and chilly.  I guess it is just part of who I am, for better or for worse.

Numbered Days

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Right now I feel incredibly keenly aware of how finite these particular days are.  I’m already more than halfway through my years with Grace living at home.  How is this possible?  I’m already seeing Whit blush when I kiss him goodbye on the playground.  They still hold my hand when we cross the street, but for how much longer?  Mere minutes.

A while ago I wrote a post about things whose days are numbered.  Almost all of those things are gone now, and even reading that piece brings hot tears to my eyes and a tightness to my throat.  These days are sliding through my hands even as I try to grasp them.

The truth is that all our days numbered.  Every hour is running out as we revel in it.  Isn’t that the very definition of life?  So maybe the intensity with which I long for these days even as I live them is about the fact that I so passionately adore this season of my life.  The aching loss that’s threaded through every hour is simply the flip side of the deep love I feel for right now.  I have never had one without the other, and they seem to be directly correlated.  The more joy I feel in a moment, the more pierced I am by my knowledge of its swift passage.

I’ve made some difficult decisions lately that reflect this growing sense of how limited are these sunlit hours.  What I want is more days at Crane’s Beach, more long notice-things walks, more evenings reading Harry Potter with my children curled beside me, listening raptly. I want to be here right now, this ten year old, this eight year old, this very early spring.

But I can’t have this without letting go of other things.  It is hard for me to admit that I have to choose.  This is the difficult, unavoidable truth of something I have long maintained: our only true zero-sum resource is time, and how we allocate this, our true wealth, is a direct representation of what we most value.

And I choose those three people in the picture.  Above all else.

Doubt

winter branches

Winter morning light on bare, snowy branches: one of the things that makes me feel most powerfully a sense of mingled doubt and faith.

I think I’ve decided that I won’t have a word this year.  But if I was going to have one, it’s pretty undeniable what it would be.  The word doubt has been presenting itself to me for the last several weeks.  Insistently, even.

There was this quote, which I saw on the wall of a dear friend’s house right before Christmas:

“Who never doubted never believed; where doubt, there truth is.  It is her shadow.” – Philip Festus

Naturally, these words reminded me of Anne Lamott’s famous line, which I think of at least daily:

“The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.” – Anne Lamott

And then Ronna Detrick, long a spiritual guide and teacher to me, wrote about doubt recently.  Her words reverberated around my head and heart with an undeniable familiarity, with the clanging echo of something I should listen to.

I keep returning to one image, which is of the way I can navigate my house in the dark.  Whether it’s going to the bathroom in the middle of the night or walking around the basement when the lights flicker off by accident, I know exactly where things are.  I know how many steps it takes to get here, where to put my hand, when I need to duck.  This house, where I’ve lived for eleven and a half years, is as familiar as the back of my hand, its contours and lengths so well known I can move among them with my eyes closed.

I always thought of that as some kind of manifestation of my comfort with doubt, that sense of familiarity with the dark, of being able to navigate without clarity.  Doubt, which I know so well, which fits me like a well-worn shirt.  Doubt, which keeps presenting itself to me these days, over and over.

But maybe that is just the other side of faith?

Life is beautiful

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I walked through Boston the other morning and marveled at what the heart of my city looks like in deep snow.  It was sunny but cold, and everything felt more difficult than usual: streets narrower, hands cold, wind whipping.  I crossed Beacon Street and headed into the Public Garden.  I passed a bush, empty of branches but full of clumps of snow, and the suddenly-deafening song of sparrows stopped me in my tracks.  Every time I notice a bush full of birds, singing their hearts out, I wonder at all the people around me, rushing past, heads down, apparently oblivious to the sound.  Am I the only person who notices this music?  Sure, it’s not symphonic.  But still: it is there, and reminds me of all of life that is invisible to the eye and yet still, asserting itself, going on, making beauty, making its mark.

A smile played on my face as I remembered the early-winter day with Whit, when he’d commented on the song of sparrows in an altogether different (but similarly barren) bush near our house.  A sensitivity and awareness whose source I know well throbs through my son’s veins, there’s no question about that.

I kept walking.  The sun glinted off of the frozen pond where the Swan Boats float in summer.  Snow dusted the back of the statue that marked the gate to Arlington Street.  Boston’s most natural season is winter.  This is the season of my city’s soul.

Life is beautiful.

The next day was difficult, and I had an overwhelming impulse to sit down to write this.  I think I wanted to remind myself that even amidst tears there is so much beauty.  As I sat at my computer, writing, dusk fell.  I looked out the window and sprang up, moved by the color of the late-day sky.  I took pictures and remembered: I am smitten by this world.

I leaned my forehead against the cold window, noticing the pinkish-white streak of an airplane across the gloaming, and thought: thank you.  No matter what, this life is beautiful.

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