change

how to live

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“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

I saw these sentences written somewhere. I don’t live as though I might die tomorrow (trying and failing to be more spontaneous), but I learn and experience – in a solitary way – constantly. There is no time that I am not trying to inject some kind of information.

A recent acquaintance, despite a surface-level tenor and brevity, gave me pause for in-depth self-reflection. There have been some rough things in my life that I’ve attempted to bury. The acquaintance, by launching into rapid-fire, almost interrogation-style questioning, prompted a lot of buried feelings to bubble up.

He didn’t really seem to care about the answers to these questions (which also makes me realize once more the value of active listening, being heard, detail and memory – and how much I do not relate to people who don’t care about these things). But I understood suddenly that I have to start to confront and deal with more of these rough things.

I also came to understand more acutely than ever what a serious person I am. That is not to say I don’t have fun, laugh, joke or have a sense of humor. It’s just that I am not the kind of person who feels the need to disconnect from heavy subjects or depressing ideas or concepts to decompress. In fact I seek out the heavier things purposely and immerse myself in them. I do not want to be distracted or distant from the inevitable pain of life.

It takes all kinds, of course, but I am going to spend my spare time studying Hungarian, reading about business psychology, devouring books about algae (and never shutting up about them afterwards), doing demanding degree programs that have almost no professional application whatsoever, and watching thought-provoking and often sad films and series in a host of other languages. I mean, I once longed to see a film about nomadic people trying to get one of their camels to lactate and accept its baby. I whined about missing its theatrical run for months before finally getting to see it.

My tastes are difficult to share and, for many, insufferable. I know this is not going to be for everyone – people are, for the most part, never going to share my unusual interests. But maybe I am finally accepting on a more finite level that they don’t have to – and I don’t have to share theirs.

 

cog

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It will surprise exactly no one to learn that failed Theranos‘s failed founder, Elizabeth Holmes, is the daughter of a former (failed in the biggest way and should have been a cautionary tale but isn’t!) Enron exec. Haha. I’m about to read Bad Blood, the saga of the rise and fall of Theranos, thanks to being reminded of it last night by my good friend JEB. But before the reading for enjoyment, there’s the rest of this week to get through work-wise and school-wise. It’s too easy to fall behind with just a slight turn in the schedule.

This time last week, I passed my thesis project in the neverending saga of my 2012-begun master’s program. Many people asked if I felt relief, or possibly even that sense of emptiness that often follows finished projects that have occupied so much time and space in our lives and brains that their completion leaves a (disappointing/disappointed) void. But I find I don’t even have time to feel much of anything. I have ongoing real work  and schoolwork (for the current degree program) and another thesis coming up. No time to rest in the void.

Photo by Valentin Salja on Unsplash

please don’t

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There are things you cannot change until you accept them. I have always hated the moments when people are deluded about themselves and their time. Protesting, “But it will be calmer soon…” or planning for some illusory moment down the line when they’ve organized themselves better, when this or that thing is finally resolved, yes…. then there will be time. Then they will embrace the life they really want for themselves. But that time never comes. Because this chaos you wade through now is your life… and without accepting it as the norm, you can’t find a sustainable way to step outside and change that norm.

I am not immune to this behavior – it just depends on the cast of characters. With most people I bend over backwards to put them first, dropping everything to be there for them. We’re told, after all, that what matters in the end –  and should matter all through the journey – is people, right? The people we care about. So if they are most important, I am going to treat them that way. But that only considers that these are the people who are important to me… there are still people who demand attention or time, but if I don’t perceive them as important, I am just as guilty as everyone else of putting them off with the endless protests of, “It’s so busy right now but it will calm down when…”. And it’s never going to calm down – first because I keep taking on more and more stuff that I want to do but also because, whether I like that person or not, they aren’t atop my list of beloved-important-people.

On the other side of this equation, people who are most important to me may not feel that I am important to them. Sometimes I feel this, even if it’s not true. Mostly because if you’re not a squeaky wheel, showing that you need attention or time, you’re probably not going to get it.

fish tales

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Fishing rights – and debate about them – formed a backdrop to my entire life. If it wasn’t in my childhood, listening to my grandfather angrily railing against Native American fishing rights, or studying/hearing about Native American fishing rights and meeting the cause’s activists, it was later the way fishing, fish, fish quotas pervade and form the Icelandic culture, even now. Moving to Norway, and later Scotland, fish tales continue to follow me (or I them).

It never occurred to me that discussions about fish, fish survival, populations and existence, and the rights to access said fish, weren’t universal to everyone who lives in a society that, in one way or another, is engaged in fishing. I suppose the distinction is whether a society relies on or merely engages in fishing. In many places I have lived, livelihoods were built on fish – and cultures revolved around fish-related identities.

we’ve changed to be

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From what or whom did we change to become what we are now?

A letter arrived in which someone exclaimed that she’d taken up near-obsessive baking, and she finally understood my own (now waning) obsession with baking or started to associate baking with some of the feelings I had attached to it – relaxation, a sense of producing something. And when did she turn from a non-baker to someone who dreamed up something sweet to create every night?

For that matter, when did I become someone who welcomed 30C/85F temperatures? There was a time when I would hide from such weather, feeling miserable in the warmth from which I could not escape.

Is it age? Is it experience? Is it the combination of both mixing to give us acceptance of or approval for things we once felt indifferent toward or actively disliked? How do we come to long for things we never wanted?

More curious… how do we change and then change back? Did we never really change or were we having a break? What are the inner workings that drive these sometimes unconscious shifts… and what shifts them back? Is it the need for reflection/rest? Is it the vitality to try something different before feeling the pull of old habits (they do, after all, die hard) and comforts?

quietly in a room

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“All human miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.” –Sepharad, Antonio Muñoz Molina

I have never been one to make grand declarations about my plans or hopes (at least not since reaching the trials of adulthood, watching hopes and plans be beaten like a piñata – what you end up with in life is some of the candies and tchotchkes that fall from the piñata. Pieces of your hopes and moments of sweetness in unexpected flavors that you’ve scrambled to pick up before someone else does), knowing that change will come regardless of what I do. I might be able to guide the changes that occur, making decisions and taking actions that will influence outcomes. But claiming – ‘everything changes and is different from today’ is a dangerous and foolhardy path. And yet, without sometimes taking leaps, if not always the grandest or furthest, palpable change isn’t possible. Sometimes to agitate movement, you have to force things through. Sometimes you have to do things that are uncomfortable or that hurt.

And this week I’ve had to do something that I long ago should have done – something that does hurt, but the longer-term effects of not taking this course of action will hurt much more. The last three years have been a long process of slow change, acceptance and finding contentment. Now, the trick is to move forward with longer, faster strides – and this is not possible with lingering elements grabbing at my ankles and trying to trip me up.

I can and do sit, happily, quietly, in a room alone. I can no longer invite those who cannot into my room with me.

The other day I was thinking about the creation of “victim selfhood”. I know a lot of people who create their own miseries (in a host of different ways). I think and write a lot about this, but reflect also on the fact that it’s not as though I am immune. We can all see our own actions and behaviors through a prism that relieves us of blame or absolves us of responsibility. I try exceptionally hard not to do this now – possibly even to the point of being annoying to the people around me who would rather that I not analyze my own actions and motivations in such detail.

Looking at youth (and this could be anything between childhood and one’s early 20s), in particular, we can, in our naivete and inexperience, really believe we were in the right and not reflect on all the things that we did wrong, excusing them, if acknowledging them at all, with mild self-exculpations: “I was a child. I didn’t know what I was doing.” I’ve written my side of many stories involving my long-ago friends, examining my own feelings and reactions – but not necessarily divining all the details of things I did to set things in motion. Yes, for example, I was competitive with others for the attentions of the one friend we all wanted to love us best; yes, I was messed up and trying to escape in my own way, leading me to slip in and undermine a close friend in a situation neither one of us should have been in at all, and then, to my own detriment, took that situation further, creating a reality that was not real, doing all kinds of things that, while they seemed innocuous to me at the time, still surface and haunt me and make me want to apologize to people 30 years after the fact. (In fact I already have – years ago, even if there is some part of me that realizes as a 40-something woman that children cannot be held accountable for emotional repercussions that they do not have the maturity and experience to understand.)

But on some level, of course we know what we are doing. But being young and inexperienced, I didn’t comprehend the seriousness of the things I did – not just in the moment, how some of my actions could lead to perilous consequences, but also further-reaching repercussions – toying with the psyches of fragile, damaged, middle-aged men (for example), but in truth, despite living with one of the most troubled, damaged people I have ever known and seeing other evidence of it all around me, I somehow didn’t really believe that adults could be that fragile – and felt that the silly games of a bored 13-year-old girl couldn’t possibly wound anyone so very deeply that it would matter and would in fact harm the trust they were able to place in all the future relationships they tried to build. It is almost as though the life I led, that all people led, before adulthood, wasn’t even real life. So much of life during that time felt surreal and out of my hands and control, that the things I could control – as destructive as they might be – were seized, eagerly, giving me a (false) sense of maturity and power.

It’s rather stream of consciousness, this whole thing. I am just coming to terms with finding strength in considering these flaws and mistakes of youth – borne as they were of youthful insecurity (wanting to be liked?), fear and fragility. It’s a strange dawning – daunting, even – to recognize how fragile people are. And how willing they are to put their fragility on display.

“How could she allow herself to break down like that, in front of everybody? Jane had never understood this willingness on the part of these from-aways to peel up the scabs of their emotions and let everyone see their festering sores. They were like children that way. They had no shame and even less self-control.” –Red Hook Road, Ayelet Waldman

Even the strongest ones. But the strongest ones have ways to cope and get through; they have people they can turn to. The weakest, well, they don’t have reserves to deplete. And some of them, like parasites, move on to deplete others of their reserves. Once depleted, though, there is just nothing left. Each experience leaves us empty, feeling as though we will never feel again. Sure, we will feel. We will make long strides. We will sprout a joystick. We will feel enthusiasm and excitement and stirring.

But to get there, we (I) must (know how to) walk away, whatever it costs. And sit alone, quietly, in a room.

admonishment to vigilance

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“‘Drive,’ she said when she sat down next to Sami. ‘Where to?’

She thought for a moment. Without looking at him, she said, ‘To where the country ends.’

‘For me it ended a long time ago,’ he hissed.” –To the End of the Land, David Grossman

Each day, the least democratic thing we could imagine (or even couldn’t imagine) happening happens. And then the next day, something even less democratic happens. This is true in the political realm, and it’s increasingly apparent in technology (now that we have algorithms deciding for us what we can/will see).

“‘I went,’ he told her, ‘because every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.’” –The Plot against America, Philip Roth

How much of what we think and see is influenced by what we are fed pre-emptively? How can we think for ourselves and discover new things when there are limits on what we see (thanks to algorithms and our blindly, blithely feeding all of our own data into massive data crunching/manipulating machines)? I have been thinking about this for some time. Most of the jobs I’ve had were directly within or at least adjacent to/dependent on the collection, analysis and use of data about users and their behaviors and habits. Many companies exist solely because of their access and ability to harvest data – it has created entirely new business models and applications. But it’s never been mysterious what was going on (even if most average people don’t consider the implications). I don’t know why people are now, suddenly surprised.

Just as I was trying to figure out how to discuss this, an article appeared on HBR.org:

“The ability for an elite to instantly alter the thoughts and behavior of billions of people is unprecedented.

This is all possible because of algorithms. The personalized, curated news, information and learning feeds we consume several times a day have all been through a process of collaborative filtering. This is the principle that if I like X, and you and I are similar in some algorithmically determined sense, then you’ll probably like X too. Everyone gets their own, mass-personalized feed, rationed by the machines.

The consequences are serious and wide-ranging. Fake news and misinformation are pervasive. Young kids are being subjected to algorithmically generated, algorithmically optimized pernicious content. Perhaps the least concerning implication is that there is systemic bias in our information feeds, that we operate in and are informed by tiny echo chambers. It’s a grotesque irony that our experiences of the world wide web today are actually pretty local, despite warnings from the likes of Eli Pariser back in 2011.”

My own words – base oversimplifications – are totally inadequate to deconstruct and intelligently discuss the complexity of these issues. But almost every book I read contains a warning. Almost none are direct cautionary tales in the vein of 1984, but almost all advise us to consider what we have and how easy, without vigilance, it is to lose:

“Because civilization isn’t a thing that you build and then there it is, you have it forever. It needs to be built constantly, re-created daily. It vanishes far more quickly than he ever would have thought possible. And if he wishes to live, he must do what he can to prevent the world he wants to live in from fading away. As long as there’s war, life is a preventative measure.” –The Cellist of Sarajevo, Stephen Galloway

But then, we also need to consider that the erosions and explosions of “civilization” also come about because not everyone agrees about what constitutes civilization – this fundamental disagreement poses its own dangerous fragmentation.

Photo by paul morris on Unsplash

Preening peacocks

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Sometimes overthinking becomes so confining that one must step back and think only of the shallowest things and all the plumage that adorns and connects those things. And how those things are completely transitory.

S cares a great deal about looking good, and often refers to himself jokingly as a peacock. This is mostly evidenced by his colorful and well-tailored sartorial choices. We thus talk a lot about peacocks – of both the figurative and literal sorts.

I think of this sometimes – peacocks. When I first moved to Gothenburg I misread a sign on a restaurant called Peacock, but I swear that even now my eyes are fooled every time I see it, thinking it says “Supercock”. From far away, the Chinese characters that precede “peacock” really look like an “S” and a “U”. Maybe I see what I want to see.

The peacock theme comes up now and then. Not long ago I read Flannery O’Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose) and a story about a loud peacock and chickens (“From that day with the Pathé man I began to collect chickens. What had been only a mild interest became a passion, a quest. I had to have more and more chickens.”), which reminded me of a former colleague who loved her chickens and was always trying to convince me to get chickens of my own – to persuade me by doing everything from bringing me fresh eggs to letting me borrow comprehensive books about how to raise chickens.

Then this week, a friend from school days posted in social media about her new peacock, which she has perfectly named “The Fonz”. She gave him a mirror, and he stands admiring himself in it. Of course he does.

In the meandering way in which I think makes this peacock Fonz remind me of my conversations with a younger colleague, to whom I often explain old (mostly American) cultural references. I don’t know how or why I was explaining Happy Days one day, but ended up explaining “The Fonz” and asking her if she’d heard the term “jump the shark”. She hadn’t. But even if she had, maybe it would not make sense or it would not even have registered with her. In fact when I mentioned this conversation to someone else (my own age), his first response was, “But how can she understand ‘jump the shark’ without understanding The Fonz and Happy Days?”

It’s interesting how the smallest references, so indelibly branded on our brains, disappear – or never existed to those who came later and never experienced them. A group of colleagues and I were discussing someone’s gaudy fake fingernails, and I referenced the famous FloJo fingernails. But Florence Griffith Joyner is a now-deceased former Olympic champion and 1980s relic star of track and field. But there are a lot of people my own age (and those older and slightly younger) who immediately understand what I am talking about when I say “FloJo” or, more specifically, “FloJo nails”.

And these things… these pieces of shorthand… come and go the same way beauty fades. It’s there one day and gone the next. Even a peacock doesn’t live forever.

waiting room

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“’You got the good heart. Underneath all the other stuff. Good heart is eighty-five percent of everything in life.’” –Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon

But… what about the other 15 percent? A mess? Evil? An eternal waiting room.

Cold never bothers me, but the snow. My god, the snow. Watching each morning dawn earlier, light filtering in before 6 in the morning, I want to squeal with delight. Even if it’s -20C. It’s bright! Is anything sweeter than the combination of early, ever-lengthening light and the slow promise of warmer days? Just a matter of waiting for it to change completely.

I keep thinking of something I want to write, but the thought slips away from me before I write it down. So I wait.

I keep finding myself having to say to people, who ask me supposedly simple questions about myself, “We are people. Not elevator pitches.” Yet, every day we are asked in one way or another to reduce ourselves to 30 seconds or less. Take up less space and speak fewer words. I patiently wait my turn, only to be told to hurry it up or be interrupted; no one has time for more than 20 seconds of your face and words.

Presence is, after all, just waiting. I am just waiting.

“…’isn’t it strange that we don’t know who we are? I mean, we know so little about ourselves it’s shocking. We tell ourselves a story and we go along believing in it, and then, it turns out, it’s the wrong story, which means we’ve lived the wrong life.’” –The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt

I am waiting (waste of time) to see if I have lived the wrong life by choosing never to decide anything. Never to involve anyone else in the decisions I have made. I am waiting to declare that my prime has passed (“‘One’s prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognise your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full’.” –The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark).

Perhaps there never was a ‘prime’ – and even if there were, I lived it within the wrong confines, the wrong story or context, afraid to embrace it and afraid even of myself. Until a cascade of waiting rooms and endless waiting became the definition of life. Was the prime of life eaten away slowly by waiting – for something to happen, for something to go away, for something or someone that could never fit into the context I was hiding myself in? Waiting, still waiting, be present. It’s only later, in some new reality, that this waiting feels as though it was tedious. The waiting, as it happens, feels full of questions, urgency, anxiety, imbuing each moment with the feeling that something is happening, – or will, any second now – good or bad. Only much later, if I make it, does the perception change.

“‘Why are things as they are? Must they be as they are? What might they be like if they were otherwise?’ To ask these questions is to admit the contingency of reality, or at least to allow that our perception of reality may be incomplete, our interpretation of it arbitrary or mistaken.” –No Time to Spare – Thinking About What Matters, Ursula K. LeGuin

Photo by Martha Dominguez on Unsplash

“It sucks to be reliable”

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“It sucks to be reliable”: This is the dubious title of the 200+ page document where I make copious, obsessive notes about everything. It is here that I collect my thoughts, quotations from books I read and various other stuff. It’s odd to go back to things I collected but never used from the past, even from something as recently as a year ago. It never feels, as time creeps along, as though things are really changing. But in the drip-drip-drip of the slow-brewing days, change has happened silently in the background. But what never changes? That it often sucks to be reliable. To be the person who must always be stable, who is never allowed to fall apart or seek solace outside oneself. It may suck, but one can also not do otherwise because it is just the nature of who s/he is.

These thoughts have clearly stuck with me for a long time, but I never gave them much bulk or created cohesive resistance until recently – mostly because of a few conversations on the topic. Oddly because I told someone else that I felt relief with him because I didn’t feel like he was always going to crumble in my hands, before my eyes, that he was “emotionally stable”. Because he is so like me in so many ways, it should not have surprised me that he replied with something like, “I have not had any choice but to be stable.” I felt like I was paying him a compliment, and maybe at any other time or on another day, he would have taken it that way. But on the vulnerable edge we may slide along, it is sometimes irksome to hear such things, as though someone else is dumping their own emotional baggage on you, expecting you to carry it. I know this feeling because, well, I titled this document “It sucks to be reliable” a year ago – one of the many times I have superficially and informally given voice to this sad truth: being stable and secure can itself be a kind of baggage one cannot shed, even if s/he wanted to (and it tends to accumulate and get heavier as you go along).

Despite the resentment it might create, I mostly feel I would not want this to be otherwise (making the resentment little more than an immature tantrum). After all, when have I ever not wanted to be in control… and doesn’t that extend to being in control when other people’s stuff spirals out of control? This is not to say that it is always a burden to be reliable. Sometimes I am grateful for it – both that I myself am unsinkable and that I am strong enough to help keep others afloat. But there are those tired, empty moments when it would feel freeing to let go of that, even if, like a magnet, I would be drawn back in without necessarily realizing.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash