In a machine world, things break. They break and sometimes we can fix them. There is a saying that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond. Another accurate breakdown could be that life is 10% what you do in the world and 90% maintenance. Some things we fix–maybe the dishwasher had an error code because the filter needed to be cleaned or maybe we actually know how to change a tire–but other things are beyond our abilities and because they require specialized people to fix them, they sit in said broken state waiting–out of order. There will be a sign, sometimes formal, sometimes hastily written by management, usually with a warning or apology – caution or sorry… but sometimes just the obvious, notice. Yes, we do.
What about lives? Must they too be in order merely so that they are not out of order? According to convention, my life has certainly been out of order. I had a child before getting married, which I then summarily never proceeded to do. My career, if one could call it that, has wobbled along and instead of climbing rungs, I have swung along the monkey bars of job security, financial stability, and self-care with just enough rigor to keep moving, always knowing the hard dirt lies just a fingertip’s slip beneath.
I am in the middle of my life and, career-wise, it often feels as if I am at the beginning, fighting my way in, yet simultaneously I feel way too old and experienced for that.
Is there something fundamentally dysfunctional about my life? Or is it just that there are never good moments for life to happen and sometimes, it can derail the other parts of your life that seemed set on solid ground? Every once in a while, in my weaker or lonelier or more self-doubting moments, I long for the more proper order–the job that leads forward and upward, the romance, the honeymoon period, the announced and celebrated wedding, the children that come a few years later, two to three years apart, and then the onward march towards…towards what? Do I really want this? Did I ever? Is it just the chasm between the order of others and the muddled nature of my life, my being that echoes with constant vibration rather than Hegelian teleology? What is the frame for this notion of life’s proper order and where does it come from?
I rejoined my childhood church many years ago...and have since lapsed once again. I did it completely for my first son. I wanted to offer him an awareness of religion and more, the opportunity of a supportive community–one of many I wanted to expose him to and then allow him to choose of his own accord. At his young age he became attached, it is true, but the more I went, the more it began to take on a shape and a meaning for me too. During services, I took the time to sit with my thoughts…all of them, even the painful ones that I was so often pushing away. I began to think about what it would mean in practice to forgive those who had caused me the greatest pain. And the strangest thing started to happen. People started to reach out to me. One of the pastors invited me to join an Ekklesia group during Lent for parents with younger children. I was invited to join one of the church ministries. I never involve myself in things like that. But something about me changed that year. With the loss of my job, my son becoming suddenly and frighteningly sick with a rare medical condition, and his father fighting for custody out of the blue, I felt irreparably broken. But with all the new cracks showing, I somehow let more people in.
There is a Japanese practice called kintsugi. Rather than throwing away a broken bowl or vase, it is repaired using liquid gold, thus highlighting the scars of the piece. The metaphorical suggestions are legion: to be broken is not to be useless, value can be added through breaking, scars create beauty in a wholeness built through a process of remaking. What I presented to others that year–which feels eons ago–was my brokenness…and I found more genuine connection with others than ever before.
I revise my earlier question. I feel quite certain in stating that I never wanted the right order of life. I railed against choosing a well-worn career path and falling in line with established footprints. I felt such a life to be empty of meaning…whatever that was. I felt that, if I were to choose that path, I would die a little on each step. I never had dreams of a big wedding or even of having children. And I did choose otherwise. I wandered my way through my twenties, pushing away from my family in the only way I knew how–through geographical distance and career choices of which they had little to no knowledge. I could be a field biologist. Or an environmental lawyer. Or a painter. Or an anthropology professor. These things I could own. They would be my footprints alone. Alone in the wilderness. I simultaneously pushed away from most human connections, thinking and feeling that I was not yet “perfect” enough. In hindsight, I can see that, as much as I struggled against the conventions of society, they still defined my sense of identity and success. And my willingness to open up and engage.
But I did dream of someone finally seeing my “pilgrim soul,” “the sorrows of my changing face” as Yeats once wrote, and finding recognition there. But everywhere I went to make my new footprints, I found myself confronted with myself and my struggles once again. As I have aged, I have often second-guessed my own choices–to attend painting school in France, for example, when I could have been making my way through law school into a secure and lucrative career. I kept a journal at the time, though, and I see myself working through so many difficult issues. On Wednesday, February 14, 2001 (ironically), I wrote:
How strange a thing is happiness. I don’t even know if I know what it is – sometimes it feels like I can barely tickle it with my fingertips and that’s an incredible feeling. But here I am–at painting school in Provence…and everyone from back home tells me how jealous they are of me, how lucky I am to be here, and how happy I must be. Happy? I certainly realize and acknowledge that I am unusually lucky to have the luxuries of money and time to be able to come here. That is undeniable…but happy? No, it is hard being here–every day is trying just in the sense of needing to speak a different language or having to live in a family and culture that isn’t yours…And, of course, people who say they are jealous never think of these everyday realities…but more that that even, they don’t realize that when you have an experience like this that is so foreign to everything you know that you–or at least I do–spend so much of my time searching and re-searching my values, my goals, my being, my soul. God, these thoughts occupy my mind all day–and it’s exhausting…and you also feel really lonely a lot–not terrible, painful, crying lonely, but just alone–that no one really knows you.
When I am able to put my current self back into the mind of my younger self, I feel much more compassion. Oh, dear sweet self and your struggles. And how you wanted to figure all of life out before living it. I once had a professor who must have sensed some of himself in me and who told me a story of how when he was attending UC-Berkeley he used to go sit on some rocks above the ocean and try to think through the answers to all of his questions…and then one day he realized he just needed to act and figure it out as he went along. Similarly, Leslie Jamison has written of an alternative to the modern notion that our lives must be shaped by and built upon deep insight about the self. She writes: “I’d come to worship self-awareness…[this] brand of secular humanism [urging us to] Know thyself, and act accordingly. [But] what if you reversed this? Act, and know thyself differently.“ Or as James Taylor wrote about the songs we keep in our back pockets to structure our lives and pull out for reassurance on difficult moments of the journey: “Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep / but singing works just fine for me.”
We live in a human world. Machines may break and be done for, but we live…often in the mud…usually breaking once, twice…perhaps a whole host of times. Some of us break more than others. I recall reading in Tobias Wolff’s In Pharaoh’s Army that he originally joined the army so that he could have as many experiences in life as possible, because that was the way he felt he could become a truly good writer. From my early twenties when I read that, for about a decade following, that was my feeling too. I felt brave enough, strong enough to withstand any and all of it…and I felt experiences would give me the most human experience possible. Now, on the other side of abortions and abuse and loss and estrangement from family and financial struggles, my feelings have changed. I feel guilty and naive for ever asking for so much experience. I would now like a bit less. Because there can be so many cracks that you don’t even know where to begin to put the bowl back together.
Simple complex simple–I have been fascinated by and pondered this mantra as long as I can remember, but I have always thought about it temporally. It fits with the theory of the happiness curve. Life begins in simplicity, becomes often overwhelmingly complex in the middle, and then returns to simplicity as we (hopefully) let go of all we do not need and cherish what really matters. However, I had never thought about flipping this mantra on its head, quite literally, to form geological layers where superficiality sits on top (simple), the mire of problems we struggle with and the solutions that must be found suffocate in the middle (complex), and a radical morality rests at the bottom (simple.) Listening to two recent conversations with Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new book, The Message, however, helped me turn this idea on its side.
Perhaps sometimes, underneath the complexities that genuinely do exist in conflict, in potential solution, in values, in misbegotten and misapplied frameworks, there is a moral clarity ringing out. To get to those bare bones of humanity, Coates sees
a figure standing at the edge of a sprawling forest tasked with mapping that forest with such precision that anyone who sees the map will feel themselves transported into the territory. The figure can see the snowy peaks in the distance and might conjure some theories as to what lies between them and those peaks–pine trees, foothills, a ravine with a stream running through it. The figure is you, the writer, an idea in hand, notes scribbled on loose-lead, maybe an early draft of an outline. But to write, to draw that map, to pull us into the wilderness, you cannot merely stand at the edge. You have to walk the land. You have to see the elevation for yourself, the color of the soil. You have to discover that the ravine is really a valley and that the stream is in fact a river winding south from a glacier in the mountains. You can’t know any of this beforehand. You can’t “logic” your way through it or retreat to your innate genius.
You don’t need to be a writer to know deep inside that we all should be walking the land and not “logic-ing” our path from a distance.
Coates posits many of us are living according to “dead stories,” stories we have heard, stories that have been reported and re-reported until they become like the songs in our back pockets, stories that have become embedded so deeply into our political or cultural landscapes that we cannot see the elevation and contour lines surveyed and reported to us in this form, not by nature itself, but by other people. The maps we live by are so often surveyed by others and not by those following them. More specifically, on a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show, Coates brought up the myth of an ancient American democratic past that so many of us unwittingly accept as our story, the order to our history: “Americans understand themselves as this ancient democracy. And then that affects how they see the rest of the world. That affects how they interact with the rest of the world. That erases whole populations as though their narrative doesn’t matter. Because Black people say, well, what about my mother or my grandmother? Like she just — like, I know the person that just got the right to vote. And so suddenly they’re not part of the narrative?”
I am not against planning for life whose order will always be a sequence of steps. I certainly don’t want to, nor do I think I have lived reactively. But I do think it is worth asking what am I or we planning for? And even before that, have we thought to question the implicit order that we are applying to our lives? In a recent Andrew Huberman podcast, guest Ari Wallach distinguishes “present-ism” from being present. Ari explains that "present-ism" refers to our frenetic lives in today's culture, where we're conditioned to operate on short-term goals with frequent rewards, while being present is more akin to mindfulness–a deliberate state of awareness. In so many ways, we live too much in the now, distracted by the many and often antagonistic pulls on our attention and time. In this culture of present-ism, we often organize our lives around externalities and metrics without examining them closely. But do we ever pause to consider how this imposed order affects us, both as individuals and as a society? With all that has been out of order in my own life, am I more broken than any other? If so, to whom should I apologize?
The shards we create can come from the order we apply. Someone once said to me recently that freedom bears a heavy cost. The truth is that all paths have costs and will leave brokenness in their wake. But we can’t see the wake if we never lift our heads up to see where the boat is taking us and whence we came. The wake will recede, though, and the seas calm and the boats we travel independently will take us to an end–either peered towards curiously while making notes on a new map or steered blindly at in the dead of night.
The fact remains, I don’t want to be a perfect bowl. Those pieces of china sit idly in a cupboard never to participate in the messy experience of life. I don’t want to break until I am mere dust either. My “out of order-ness” are the cracks in my bowl. You don’t need to be cautious around me or sorry. You should take notice, though, as should we all. As Paul B says in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, we can gather each other and gain an order we didn’t know, gifted to us externally from such compassionate companionship: “The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” Here I stand. Here I stand hoping to “walk the land” without preconceived notions, without an order prescribed for my life that I never choose or understood the logic of. Here I stand in front of you with my cracks glued delicately back together in order to ask you how you are, how you really are. And you can tell me, in no particular order.
Your fellow seeker,
Katie