happiness

inherent self-worth

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Dashing a lot of well-planned plans, I slipped on some melting ice this weekend falling right on my back and down a set of stairs. I’m in pain and trying my best to move as little as possible. I will eventually have to move to see if this pain is just soreness that I can overcome with some stretching and mild painkillers.

But in lying here in immobile self-pity I am thinking about a Twitter thread I read the other day in which a woman considered how her therapist asked her how she planned to reward herself for accomplishing something the woman should have done/needed to do anyway. This tweet received a tremendous response from people saying that they struggle with the same thing – beating themselves up for achieving less than perfection rather than rewarding themselves when they’d done something (well or not), regardless of whether that something was required.

I’m conflicted about this. I think most of us are too hard on ourselves a lot of the time and don’t stop to take a breath and think, awake with a moment of self-awareness, that we’ve done something – whatever it is. I think that would be enough. Someone responded to the tweet: “It’s called inherent self-worth”. I think they may have meant that someone who has inherent self-worth will reward him/herself. But I really believe that a true sense of grounded, inherent self-worth is reward enough itself. Why are we being pushed in a direction that we should be rewarded for everything we do? This is the other side of my conflict about this. Sure, I think people should set goals and perhaps reward themselves when they reach them or hit milestones or sometimes even when they fail because they tried. But rewarding yourself for every single thing seems like a bridge too far. Where is the line? And what is a ‘reward’ anyway? (A lot of people, in fairness, did not even know what a ‘reward’ might look like.) As I said, taking a moment to identify a job well done or getting something done that I’d been putting off – living in a quiet moment of self-awareness – should be enough.

What more does a person need? Does anyone have thoughts on this?

Consistency

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One of the biggest but toughest things I attempt in life is to remain consistent. But as I have written about (and thought about even more)…. Consistency isn’t perceived as consistent for everyone.

With some people, I am steadfast and completely consistent in my actions and words. With others, I come across as a total flake and don’t follow through on things – and even then it comes down to so many factors. Was it important to me in the first place? Probably less so than it was for the person who was expecting something from me. Was I in a place where I could deliver? Probably not.

“Someday is today”

But I am becoming more aware of my behaviors and the mismatches in what I say and do – and to whom I make statements that will come across as most inconsistent. Where I am particularly bad – and selfish – is when I tell people that things will calm down in a few weeks or months and then I will have time for them. This is flat-out wrong. It is possible that in a few weeks I will have more time because X will end. But I am 99.8% likely to take on something new in the intervening time, so by the time those weeks pass, I will – once again – not be free. And it is not as though I am prioritizing one friend over another. No, I am prioritizing work or study over the friend, and this all depends on where the friend is in the world. If seeing them would involve my having to travel, I don’t have the energy for it any more… so I don’t do it. It’s shitty – but this is just how and who I am now. I need to make my words match up with what I do and want to do.

And I need to do this now because, as one of those hopeless, simplistic, but nevertheless kind of thought-provoking, internet memes chides: “Someday is today”. Yes, all those things we postpone and put off – all those “somedays” need to happen right now. I am a master of “I’ll do it later”. There are so many ways I have fixed this, so many things I am willing to do or not do, let go of or hold onto now in a more decisive way than I ever thought I’d be capable of. But there are still plenty of gaps in my seizing today, particularly when it is uncomfortable to do so. Sure, some of it would be easy to remedy: do something uncomfortable and unlike myself. But some is not as easy, especially when it involves other people and potentially hurting them, confusing them. The alternative, though, is to slowly succumb to the erosion of having them in my life, letting them believe I am okay with how their presence and words affect me.

Percolating

“People would have fewer pains if – God knows why they are made this way – their imaginations were not so busily engaged in recalling past trials rather than bearing an indifferent present.” -Goethe

I thought a lot about the pervasive and persistent influence of the past, its people and its events recently because I have been confronted by words of anger, annoyance and frustration regarding distant and not-distant pasts, but I find I don’t believe that the anger or annoyance is as real or as fervent as claimed. The purported anger and annoyance leads to behaviors I myself might have engaged in at some point, following curiosities that are best left put to rest, leaving all options open… who knows why?

In some distant past, I didn’t love myself enough to leave the past well enough alone, opening the door wider to those elements that made me feel more alive, even if it was only because it was making me feel more annoyed. As though by knowingly inflicting pain and hurt I could at least pat myself on the back for feeling something. But that time in my life is long gone. Even if I understand it in others as viscerally and completely as though it were me living through these contradictions of words and action, I say if something is that annoying, close the door. Lock the door. Don’t open it and explore the knocking that keeps getting louder. Without going into details, which are irrelevant, it occurred to me finally that these deeply human but very dangerous questions have long been out of my life, so I don’t need them snaking their way into my life through someone else. I want to be able to know that when someone close to me tells me something, it is the unnuanced truth, not a sanitized version that will sound best for the therapist – that the actions following the words are not going to be completely contradictory. Ultimately I don’t have time – or trust – when faced with the mismatch.

Cheerleaders or bullies

A recent Tweet from an acquaintance posed the question: “What could we achieve if our inner voices were cheerleaders and not bullies?” and I pulled that out to retweet.

This question is applicable in so many phases of life, whether in love, in learning or in work, it is also applicable to how we live, what we accept as a part of our living, and the people we surround ourselves with. We can be bullied by our own inability to speak up for ourselves, by being silent when we are dissatisfied with or hurt by what we hear or receive (or don’t) from others.

And expecting consistency from others, and demanding it from oneself, is a place to start.

permission space

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Comfort is a strange and bizarrely entitled expectation. How did we arrive at this place where we feel angry, entitled, unreasonable and demanding when we must experience just moments of discomfort? I think about this a lot, but there are moments when it takes over entirely.

I was stepping off a train in Stockholm not so long ago when I saw an older woman descending the one or two very narrow and steep steps to disembark the train, and she slipped and fell, hard, her leg sliding between the train step and the platform. She screamed out, and her leg bent the wrong way completely. People gathered around to help. After wincing and thinking about what I could possibly do, I decided to just walk away, but the violence and suddenness of the moment stuck with me for days. What this has to do with comfort isn’t exactly clear. But such moments jar me from my walking cocoon and being in my own world to question all these things, like what right we think we have to being comfortable all the time.

 

 

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.

February action

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February has historically been a month of inaction and hibernation for me – this one has been no exception. Last year I did jump on a plane to Berlin on a whim just to see a movie, and ended up in a mild debate with someone about the Holocaust while I was having lunch in a Jewish restaurant. Hmm. Seriously. It was a cold but bright day, and I was glad I had broken out of my routine to do something completely different, unexpected and spontaneous.

I had no intention of doing anything similar this year, but today I happened to see that Belle & Sebastian is in Oslo, so I quickly bought a ticket, got a train ticket and head over to Oslo in the afternoon. It’s not quite the distance of Berlin or somewhere further afield, but it’s still something (a band) I’ve wanted to see forever, especially as I have Glasgow so much on my mind these days. Bonus: Jane Weaver opens! Brilliant. Two birds, you know…

Any other day I might have ignored this urge to go, but I had a dream last night in which I kept wanting to do things but kept putting them off, and I started writing a poem in the dream, which I never had a chance to finish before someone would interrupt and drag me off somewhere:

If I light a fire, I will stay warm.
If I light a fire around myself, there will be no way back.

In dreams, never going where I want to go, but always with a fistful of melting popsicles.

Photo by Lindsay Moe on Unsplash

in the hundreds

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When 2017 began I set out to read 26 books. I thought this was ambitious because I had essentially abandoned reading for most of the previous ten years. It must have been sometime in the spring, after topping well over 100 books, that I realized I would certainly read a record number of books (record for me, that is). I didn’t consciously set out until later in the year to finish 365 books but crossed that threshold in early-mid December, meaning that I did in the end get to read somewhere between 393 and 400 books (Goodreads, which I used to keep track of the reading, was a bit fidgety and unreliable in recording dates).

I’m a bit stunned by having read so much – feeling some of the material branded on my brain permanently, fresh in my mind since early in the year, while some things were almost forgettable. But it was, as I told a former colleague, enriching. It might not be the greatest accomplishment of the year, and it is certainly the quietest, but it gave each day a new meaning, a fresh story, a new palette on which language was painted in wholly different ways, and of course made, as Firewall likes to say, every day into a school day. In a good way, of course.

I was asked to select my favorite from among these books, but this is impossible. I read from such a wide breadth of topics and disciplines, from literary and scientific materials from around the world, that it could not even be done to say that one single book stood above the others. But among those that I loved, those that I didn’t want to end, those that I learned the most from, those that confounded or stayed with me the longest – making me turn my thoughts to them again and again – here is the rough list in no particular order:

*Advice for a Young Investigator – Santiago Ramón y Cajal

*The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell
Was not sure I would include this because I had mixed feelings, although by the end I was convinced/moved.

*The Master Butchers Singing Club – Louise Erdrich
Another one I was not sure I would include. I read most of Erdrich’s books this year and most were middle of the road, but this one stood out for some reason.

*The Yiddish Policeman’s Union – Michael Chabon
I read a bunch of Chabon and just like his style (even though it can be quite different in all his writing) and could recommend anything he has written, but this was somehow… the one I liked most.

*Time and Materials – Robert Hass
Poetry, which is not for everyone. This was superlative

*Edwin Morgan: Collected Poems – Edwin Morgan
More poetry; discovered Glaswegian Edwin Morgan this year and loved

*Reality is Not What It Seems: The Elusive Structure of the Universe and the Journey to Quantum Gravity – Carlo Rovelli

*Seven Brief Lessons on Physics – Carlo Rovelli

*Go, Went, Gone – Jenny Erpenbeck
Possibly overlooked by many; reminds me slightly of the film The Visitor. Deals with refugee crisis/asylum seekers in Germany with some interesting looks back at how things changed when Germany reunified

*Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
An old one I should have read ages ago but only got around to now. Enjoyed the hilarious absurdity

*The Noonday Demon – Andrew Solomon
A long book on depression – not sure why I started reading it but it was engrossing

*Evolution’s Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins – Peter S Ungar
Part of my obsession with teeth this year

*Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner
A surprising and moving book

*If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
A strange one – but the complexity of Calvino’s style makes me want to read everything he writes (he is listed again later/below)

*Broken April – Ismail Kadare
Albanian book that deals with the Kanun/blood feuds, etc.

*Secondhand Time: An Oral history of the Fall of the Soviet Union – Svetlana Alexievich

*The Solitude of Prime Numbers – Paolo Giordano
Surprising – not sure why this book (fiction, Italian) stuck with me – perhaps the descriptions of how people fool others and themselves living a version of themselves that cannot possibly be true

*Pretty much anything by Naomi Klein, of which I read all – very timely and important

*A General Theory of Oblivion – Jose Eduardo Agualusa
An unusual one from Angola

*Tram 83 – Fiston Mwanza Mujila
An interesting one from Congo

*The Sellout – Paul Beatty
Probably one of my very favorite ones this year

*A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara
Engrossing – just when you think things cannot get worse or more heartbreaking, they do. As my colleague put it “emotional porn” – a form of blackmail

*The Revolution of Everyday Life – Raoul Vaneigem
Abstract-ish philosophy but somehow resonated when I read it

*All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr
Fiction

*Before the Fall – Noah Hawley
Fiction from the guy who brought us the TV version of Fargo

*The Emperor of All Maladies – Siddhartha Mukherjee
A book on cancer – not uplifting but fascinating

*Karaoke Culture – Dubravka Ugresic
Because I pretty much love all of Ugresic’s observational essay work

*Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America – Mary Otto
More teeth!

*Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
More Calvino, whom I have quoted to death this year

*Pretty much any poetry book of works by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai and Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer

*The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa
This is one that kept me thinking all year long and to which I will return repeatedly

*A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America – Bruce Cannon Gibney
Brewing the Baby Boomer hate…

*The Sympathizer – Viet Thanh Nguyen
Another of my favorite works of fiction this year

2018…

My goal, again, is to read 26 books. The trick this time, though, is that none of them can be in English. I can read books in English, but they won’t count toward the goal.

outside the comfort zone: trials of marathoners

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“I’m not a human. I’m a piece of machinery. I don’t need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead. I repeat this like a mantra.” –What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami

When I was young – somewhere in the febrile netherworld between adolescent and teenager, I dreamt that I married a marathon runner, which seemed ludicrous at the time. Bookish and living in libraries, it seemed highly unlikely that I would ever meet a marathon runner, let alone have anything in common with one. (It may or may not be worth noting that this dream-world marriage took place when I was quite young, and the dream ended with the young marathoner husband’s premature death at 30, which led to my grieving by riding around in a car with a group of gay male friends.)

In the many, many years since I had this dream, I have never married. I am well beyond 30 myself now. I have, however, been involved with so many triathletes and long-distance runners, and lately I wonder, being as obsessed as I am with how things intersect and connect, why this thread has woven its way through my life. I have had my other phases, unconscious and unintentional, such as the French phase, the Microsoft employee phase, and so on (most likely these ‘trends’ happened because the people you end up meeting are all part of the ‘web’ in which you are woven and the circles in which you travel. Being with a French Microsoftie would probably lead you both to more French people and more Microsoft employees). But through all of the various phases, it seemed these people who chose to push and exploit their own bodies to extremes reappeared everywhere. I had always imagined I would have nothing in common with these human-endurance outliers, but I suppose there are aspects of personality I relate to: grit, solitude, being drawn to extremes, obsession with transformation.

Lately I have been trying to understand the desire and resolve to run in this way, to these distances and at such extremes of human capability or need. It was not a burning question, but things kept popping up to return the question to the forefront of my mind. First I read about a sedentary academic who eventually began to run 100-mile marathons. His article led me to read Scott Jurek’s book Eat & Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness. Not a great book nor high literature by any stretch of the imagination (one of my “filler” books really) but nevertheless peppered with cliché tidbits and the odd literary quotes that add some texture as well as a how-and-why journey to the motivation behind this kind of lifestyle:

  • “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” —ERNEST HEMINGWAY
  • “Not all pain is significant.” (from painscience.com: “It’s the difference between engine trouble and trouble with that light on your dashboard that says there’s engine trouble.”)
  • As Thoreau, an American practitioner (though he probably didn’t realize it) of bushido and a pretty good distance walker himself, wrote, “Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers . . . simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.”
  • Stotan sessions “beautiful and painful . . . underneath it all there was a sort of sound philosophy based on ‘Let’s improve ourselves as human beings, let’s become more compassionate, let’s become bigger, let’s become stronger, let’s become nicer people.’”
  • “You only ever grow as a human being if you’re outside your comfort zone.”

Then I thought, well, Haruki Murakami has written about his own running in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. His insights weren’t much different from any other long-distance runner’s except that he often creates parallels with his writing:

  • “Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.”
  • “In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”
  • “So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.”
  • “Each person has his own likes. Once when I had a chance to talk with a sales rep from Mizuno, he admitted, “Our shoes are kind of plain and don’t stand out. We stand by our quality, but they aren’t that attractive.” I know what he’s trying to say. They have no gimmicks, no sense of style, no catchy slogan. So to the average consumer, they have little appeal. (The Subaru of the shoe world, in other words.)” (I liked this one just because it highlights functionality and personal preference – what works versus what looks flashy. I have always, after all, driven Subarus.)

But eventually I get some clarity from these readings and others – everything from personal reflections and essays to the more scientific and clinical approaches, such as an article on whether or not ultra-marathoners feel less pain, thanks to the Twitter feed of Al Jazeera English news anchor Peter Dobbie (yes, this kind of stuff comes from everywhere, doesn’t it?). Of course they don’t feel less pain – it’s psychological really – so it comes down to brain over pain (as the article states: “theory of pain catastrophizing and how that might be translated into pain management when you are 40 miles in and everything feels bad”). It all ties together so that these symptoms, if not catastrophic or apt to do lasting damage, can be assessed as non-critical discomfort rather than critical pain, can be overcome with some of the psychology, the tying the effort into a greater good, a philosophical drive toward being greater.

Someone asked me the other day about why I think our mutual acquaintance runs in insane ultra-marathon-type events. (Sure, in this case, she just wanted to find excuses to talk to me about the acquaintance, but I treated it academically, as I do with most things.)

She asked: “Why do you think he does it?”

Impersonally, I replied, “I don’t think it’s something anyone who doesn’t do it can understand.”

I have recently read several books to try to gain insight into marathon and ultra-marathon “thinking”. I told this ‘interrogator’: “I cannot claim to understand the pathology.”

She exclaimed: “So you think it is a pathology!”

Me: (haltingly) “Not in the strictest sense, no. But as a deviation from what most people do, yes, it is a pathology in that sense.”

Some exchange/banter followed about the insanity of it, but I started outlining (at least for myself) what I think defines the reasons why (if we must understand or seek understanding):

  • The people who do this kind of running often also tend to think it is as crazy as non-runners do … in the sense that they push their bodies beyond the limits of what a body should be able to do. Pushing beyond physical limits. Feeling more alive than ever while also being almost dead. This drives the process, the motivation and desire to continue.
  • An ‘extreme’ runner is not doing it because s/he thinks it’s “normal” or “middle of the road” even if it becomes normal for her/him.
  • The opposing forces of isolation/solitude, as long-distance running is a solitary activity, and community/camaraderie built with a group of others who find this ‘insanity’ to be a worthwhile pursuit.
  • The opposing forces of feeling control while also feeling out of control (i.e. “I can undertake this unfathomable feat; I can’t feel my feet/hands/can’t stop vomiting – can I go on? Can I do this?”)
  • A unique/unusual sense of accomplishment from doing something that most other people cannot do, even if they did not find it insane to consider.
  • Added bonus if the running endeavor can be connected to some concept of “doing good in the world” (a charity component, etc.)

“…and I knew what the loneliness of the long-distance runner running across country felt like, realizing that as far as I was concerned this feeling was the only honesty and realness there was in the world.” -from The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner: Stories, Alan Sillitoe

I engage in my own form of marathon, which has nothing to do with running, and it tests resolve and endurance, too. It is my test for whether someone, in coming up against me, is built to last. The drive to run, but not running from something, cannot be entirely dissimilar – it is a constant test of tiring but continuing, reaching an outcome, elated and exhausted, but facing the demand to get up and do it again, insane or not.

Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash

Deflect – deflect – defect… Personal responsibility

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So maybe, just maybe, you could make a version of a relationship contract – only make it about the relationship with yourself first. The writer of this article claims that codifying the terms of her relationship made her finally feel that there was room for her in her own relationship. I am sure we have all been there – so eager to please, or so eager to be loved, or just to preserve harmony (or whatever our multitudes of reasons) that we would “consent to give a finger and then an arm” (Marge Piercy) to let the relationship, or the lie of the relationship, persist.

The writer explains, “Writing a relationship contract may sound calculating or unromantic, but every relationship is contractual; we’re just making the terms more explicit. It reminds us that love isn’t something that happens to us — it’s something we’re making together. After all, this approach brought us together in the first place.”

She could be right. But perhaps she is jumping the gun. It is not really possible to define your needs or yourself within a relationship without first figuring out what your own must-haves are. Sure, maybe you can come to these conclusions (or whatever sliding-scale needs you have) in conversation with another, but it would not hurt to do some self-reflection first. Maybe even draft a little contract with yourself: after all, you will have must-haves and some things you cannot live with and should create thresholds, things that will trigger a built-in kill switch.

Dreaded wishlist

Perhaps this self-involved contract would become something like a dreaded wishlist, but certainly there must be must-haves and makes-or-breaks for many people who feel they are on a determined life path or have specific things they want to achieve. Figuring out what those things are and making a semi-flexible promise to yourself to consider these things when you find yourself flailing … it couldn’t hurt, and could help hone some of the instincts a bit better (so you wouldn’t necessarily need this contract later).

Sure, I didn’t like being on someone’s to-do list as an abstract concept once I realized I was a means to an end – who would? But that is why you communicate and try to determine that you are on the same life path or want the same things. It won’t always work, but it’s a start. This is basic relationship 101 stuff… and people in their 30s probably should have some basic experience with this.

We know that people often enter relationships and quietly hope that their perseverance will lead to change in the other person. Or will secretly hope that, despite all signs pointing to the contrary, the two are somehow on the same page. Not all people, not all relationships. But for example, if you get involved with someone of another religious faith, can you reasonably assume (but then as a person of no faith, I don’t see reason attached to faith and the people who believe in and practice religion, so this is a rhetorical, (oxy)moronic question) that you will fill their heart with the light of your truth (or, much more likely, wear them down to begrudgingly tolerate your faith – making for a half-lived life of resentment – for both of you)?

Why try to sand and sculpt a reluctant person into what s/he isn’t when there are probably more than a few people who already believe what you do or who want what you do? Of course this is oversimplifying the complexity and desperation and pigheadedness of our world, filled as it is with farkakte schmucks and putzes, brimming with hopeful romantics and determined would-be breeders, feeders, leaders and seeders. With older people especially, the pool is limited. Time is of the essence, but this urgency is also what leads to coupling up and projecting traits and hopes that are not and will never be there. We know this but proceed anyway, even though it’s almost inevitably headed nowhere good.

Resentment: Take poison, expect other person to die

And despite how hurt or embittered we are by this (temporary, usually), feeling we were misled or that our time was wasted, shouldn’t we take a dose of our own medicine? Personal responsibility for what we failed to see or admit, our failure to look at the big picture or to look at the situation through the other person’s eyes? After all, as cliched and half-baked as this sounds, the longer you cling to the resentment, the longer you are putting off getting on with it – and finding whatever traits in another that you included your personal contract with yourself.

Bless the eyes and hands of experience

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“If thought is really to find a basis in lived experience, it has to be free. The way to ensure this is to think other in the register of the same. As you construct yourself, imagine another yourself that will one day construct you in its turn. Such is my conception of spontaneity: the highest possible level of self-consciousness that is still inseparable from the self and from the world.” –The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raoul Vaneigem

I cannot look at a lifetime of previous experience and find anything but something to be grateful for. How I could find fault with, judge or castigate someone for the things that made him who he is now, brought him to this point, where he feels, breathes, walks, runs, lives, sleeps, fucks, eats, moves in this way that is so precisely tuned to the ‘he’ that I know now?

What we should…

“You should never fall in love. Love will bring you unhappiness. If you must love, let it be when you are older, after you are thirty.” –The Setting Sun, Osamu Dazai

“The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.” –Middlemarch, George Eliot

Maybe the door has been opened, maybe my middle age has made my brain into mush. But we must use the time we have to absorb what is in books, to touch each other, to eat or revile coriander, to hear our voices reach each other and rise above the hubbub and cut through the chaotic din of our other lives to be able to say, do and be only the most uninhibited of things, to walk through the forest or along the river, to nurture and coax the best of each other, to lighten the dark path we each tread sometimes, to dare to be silly or mundane and find beauty in it, to watch a lone cat sit patiently and alert in the middle of an overgrown field before pouncing on its prey, to sing – however dumb we sound – songs that come into our heads, to fall in love (after 30 or even 40), to give and give and give until exhausted, sore and dizzy, to transform and be transformed. We can blink our eyes, and find suddenly that it is over.

Suffering is sweeter still

“but on days when I fear disappointment, I prefer to look on the dark side of things, it pulls me together and keeps me one step ahead of suffering” –So Much for that Winter, Dorthe Nors

And how sad that would be if we didn’t render our own off-key renditions of “Lover Man” while lying entangled in bed or let ourselves cry in the joy of simple closeness, in the tenderness and care of bringing a cup of coffee in the morning, or in the loss of some small thing we barely noticed when we had it, or in the beauty of how glossy and liquid fountain pen ink can look on a page (I noticed this most of all in a recent episode of American Gods – not at all surprised by the tantalizing visuals there). And how empty life could be if we (or I) only grabbed cheap ballpoint pens, cast books aside to watch Law & Order reruns, or as I was recently cautioned against doing – discarded the best person I ever knew just because I don’t know how to be with someone who is undamaged.

But where, indeed, does experience end and damage begin?

“It feels like nothing matters in our private universe.”

 

After this…

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Returning from the land of Pessoa some weeks ago, and now as I think about inertia and the desire to do anything/nothing, I can only borrow his words:

“From any trip, even a short one, I return as from a slumber full of dreams – in a dazed confusion, with one sensation stuck to another, drunk from what I saw. I can’t rest because my soul’s not well. I can’t move because something’s not right between my body and soul. What I lack isn’t mobility but the very desire to move.”

It’s always the statement, the promise – to oneself or to others – that “after this, I will do this…” or “once this is complete, things will go back to normal”. Is this just self-deception?

I crash into this promise again and again but have learned never to believe it. Usually, the chaos is the norm, and only in subsiding or disappearing would things feel abnormal. I don’t know if this approach is optimism or excuse-making. Either way, it’s not really my style, that is, being so out of touch with myself, my life and its patterns that I fool myself and others into thinking that things will be drastically different at some unknown point in the future “when things calm down”. Some people are not meant for calm, and they never will be.

I am not one of those people, even if I, too, find myself making excuses – as we all do. Some excuses more damaging than others. I reread Pessoa’s words, which he applies to returning from a short trip, but which could be any situation that feels like a “slumber full of dreams”. Initially it made me think of a moment in recent time, how someone else must have felt. Thinking that I could put words to or start to understand his confusion comforted me. Weeks later, I thought, though, that this was not entirely new to me: years and years earlier, the roles were reversed, and I was the confused one.

Even decades after a moment like that occurs, followed by the “dazed confusion”, the memory of the excuses that inevitably accompany the ‘aftermath’ sticks with me. Almost 20 years ago, a confessional evening spent with a friend, candlelight in a terrible storm: the moment, the evening, was “one sensation stuck to another”, sort of drunk from being caught up in the experience, in being enveloped completely by that immediate moment. But returning to reality from it, the very desire to move robbed from me – a swirl of conflicting emotion – including a kind of love and admiration for her, a guilty desire not to hurt her, but a much stronger feeling of needing to start concocting excuses for why this would never work.

In Gabor Maté’s book on addiction, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, he writes: “if you want to find liberation in your commitments, your word needs to be freely given or not given at all. Don’t make promises to reform out of a sense of duty or to appease someone else. If you don’t know how to say no to other people’s expectations, howsoever well meant or valid those may be, your yes has no authenticity. This is what I have learned.” This applies not just to addicts but to everyone, myself included.

In trying not to disappoint people or making ourselves appear superhuman, to be all things to all people, most of us overpromise and underdeliver. But shouldn’t we be striving to make promises (not to reform, in the case of the addict of the quote) that we freely commit to keep? The expectations of others can weigh heavy, but that inadvertent and slippery giving of false hope that making empty promises creates weighs much heavier and hurts more in the long run – for everyone involved. Perhaps, though, it is that people are unable to be honest with themselves (maybe it’s where the optimism comes in: “we’re doing our best” and “maybe things will change”).