Month: February 2012

Being conscious of all of life

I loved Mariam Gates’ post last weekend, Brave Heart, about her son’s broken arm.  Mariam’s recounting of her conversation with her son – when he tells her he was not brave because he scared and was cried – is heartfelt, and the reflections she shares about what bravery really means are stirring and thought-provoking.  She writes that she is “not interested in bravery that is synonymous with fearlessness” and while I’ve never thought of it so clearly and compellingly, I find myself nodding.  Yes, yes, yes.  Fearlessness seems like a defense mechanism, doesn’t it?  An over-simplification of this life?  Mariam calls it disconnection, and I think that’s right.  I’ve never been fearless; if anything, I’m often consumed with fears.  Fears run through my veins along with hope and wonder and memory, sometimes making my heart skip a beat, sometimes clouding my vision so I can’t see anything other than that which I dread.

So maybe fear is not fearlessness.  But then what is it? Well, I like Mariam’s definition:

I think bravery is about being conscious of all of life.

Why yes.  Yes, that’s it.  Isn’t she utterly right?  Isn’t true bravery about remaining open to the fear, about letting the fear permeate you, even, and not running away from it?  Of course you could call this a self-interested response, since I think one of the central themes of this blog is being aware of everything, of all of life.  But truthfully I hadn’t thought of it this way before, and when I read Mariam’s post I found myself agreeing absolutely.

Bravery is staring into the sun, even when the brightness of life – and the brightness is precisely because life’s minutes are burning in front of us – is painful.  Bravery is not flinching and not looking away, even when the emotion of a moment overwhelms us.  Bravery is not hiding, in a thousand ways little and big, from our own lives.  Bravery is letting heartbreak gouge your spirit, because you know that that leaves a deeper well for joy.

Bravery is about being conscious of all of life.

Thank you, Mariam, for putting it so beautifully.

 

Air thick with both wonder and loss

Last Friday the 1st grade performed their annual movement and music assembly, which this year was called the Arctic Blast.  It seems like moments ago that I sat in the audience watching Grace in her 1st grade assembly (Musicians of the Sun), the morning after I threw a surprise birthday dinner for Matt.  We sat in the same gym, our heads telling the story of the night before’s raucous toasts, and while I remember feeling sentimental I was surely not as crushingly overwhelmed with time’s passage was this time.

Probably it’s because Whit is my last baby.  Perhaps part of it is that with each year, each week, each day, I seem to grow more porous, my awareness of life’s beauty and heartbreak.  Maybe it was just the afternoon.  I don’t know, but I sat there on the metal folding chair with tears rolling down my cheeks.  It’s as though the passage of time was in the room with us.

The air was so thick with both wonder and loss that I almost couldn’t breathe.  I marveled at my son.  My son, who just two seconds ago was one of those tiny almost-babies in the pre-K class who sat restlessly on mats on the floor.  My son, who just two days ago was born, his blond hair, his blue eyes, and his boy-ness all shocking me in equal measure.

I am a broken record, these days, I know.  But I cannot stop my astonishment at how swiftly it’s flying, at how vivid the colors of this life are as they blur past my eyes.

You know what else, though?  I don’t want to.

Lonely

I’ve learned via a couple of channels that my post last week about friendship made some others lonely.  This makes me feel terrible, because one thing I am – extremely often – is lonely.  I know the emotion intimately, and I hate knowing that I have contributed to others feeling it.  I am so familiar with loneliness, in fact, that I wrote a post a few years ago called Flavors of Loneliness.  Sometimes the reaction people have to what I write here makes me feel misunderstood, and this is one of those times.

How is it that I can be certain that I am hugely blessed with wonderful friends and, at the same time, often, profoundly lonely?   It’s actually not only not a paradox, it is absolutely at the root of what I consider the most toxic and icy kind of loneliness: loneliness when surrounded by people.  It is true that in the last many years (and even since November 2009, when I wrote Flavors of Loneliness) I’ve become increasingly aware of how wonderful my friends are.  For sure.  I would go further: I am more aware of everything.

But I still feel lonely.  Very.  Often.  I still gaze out at the sumptuous riches of my ordinary life and feel like I’m staring at them through glass, from a cold place where the temperature is turned down too low.  Yet, somehow, maybe because the glass is clear, nobody else can tell how isolated I am.  I suspect that this loneliness has its roots in my cognizance of our essential unknowability, which, while I believe it firmly, I continue to agitate restlessly against.  I want to be known – don’t we all?  I also want to really know those I love best.

I am writing this post sitting in an airport alone on a Saturday evening, after having gotten up at 4:30 to start my day.  I can assure you I feel lonely.  But as I’ve noted this kind of loneliness is precisely because of the fullness of my life; if I didn’t feel so much love and joy (and, sure, pain) in my regular life I wouldn’t ache for it when I was away.  While I dislike this loneliness, it’s nothing compared to that sense of being alone even when surrounded by people, to that creeping, shadowy consciousness of how fundamentally alone I am that follows me through my days.  That loneliness is corrosive, and, unfortunately, for me it’s also a relatively common feeling.

As I’ve mentioned, lately I’ve been particularly noticing the moon.  Specifically, the shadow of the rest of the moon in the night sky, even when only a sliver is bright.  Maybe that’s what this is – the changingly visible but omnipresent remainder of the whole, even when only part is bright.  It’s part of the deal.  Loneliness is an integral part of my life, simply one manifestation of the dark that is both inextricable from the light and crucial to its meaning.

Loss, failure, or unwelcome change

“If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such difficulty recognizing and accepting it? Maybe it’s because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.”

– Kathleen Norris

First impressions, and fertile friend-making periods

Matt and I were talking about first impressions last week.  We met 14 years ago, but the first things we thought of each other – and of other people we’ve met since – remain vivid.  We talked about the major categories of impressions, the things that carry weight when you are first getting to know someone.

“Your friends,” he started, with a smile.  “Well, your friends were, from the very first, awesome.”  I’ve written before about how even if he got rid of me, I’m pretty sure Matt would insist on continuing to go to my college reunions.  He loves those women almost as devoutly as I do (and with good reason).

“Yes, they are.”

“I think you can tell a lot – maybe the most of all – about someone by who their best friends are.”

And I agree with him.  My closest friends are a small group of people for whom I feel fierce loyalty and untrammeled pride.  I feel lucky every single time I think of this handful of people who have, for some mysterious reason, decided to bestow their love on me.  Matt’s and my conversation got me thinking, again, about which friends have stuck with me through life’s unanticipated perambulations, about how some grow nearer even as others ebb away.

There have been three fertile periods of friend-making in my life. The first was my childhood friends, my “family friends,”who really functioned more as siblings than anything else in my early life. These friends flanked me through those first important years, though the relationships were driven as much by our parents’ friendships as by anything individual to us. I am not in daily touch with any of those friend-siblings these days, but they remain close to me in the way of people who have shared formative life experiences. Like, perhaps, people who went through trench warfare together. I also had dear friends from my grade school (one of whom I saw last week and realized that Grace is about to be the age we were when we met – holy holy holy!).

The second was college. High school, fractured as it was between England and New Hampshire, was quite fraught for me. I had some good friends in London but we have dropped out of touch, proving to me that the weight of different cultures and the ocean was too heavy for the fragile bonds we shared. At boarding school I pulled into myself for a variety of reasons, and I remember those two years as some of the loneliest of my life. Yes, I had friends, and people with whom I shared the long cold days; one of my very best friends now I met there though it was really in college that our friendship blossomed into what it is now. But I spent a lot of time alone, too, running endless miles in the snowy woods, black trees silhouetted against gray sky, and writing essays and reading books in my tiny bedroom.

College changed all of that. I arrived at Princeton desperately lonely, full of insecurities and fears (yes, believe it, even more than now). I don’t think I had realized the extent to which those two years in New Hampshire saddened me. I was desperate for a place to call home, a group of friends into whose embrace I could relax. Oh, and how I found it. To this day, Princeton remains the place I was happiest. There was standard college drama, of course: sadness, frustration, embarassment, heartbreak. But oh, my friends. I was and am still surprised that such extraordinary women wanted to be my friends. Some of this was, of course, in reaction to the cold years at Exeter. For sure. But it mostly just my lonely heart gratefully opening to the warmth of Princeton, to the spring sky riotously full of magnolia blossoms, to orange tee shirts and mardi gras beads, to young women singing “oh what a night” at the top of their lungs at a dive Chinese restaurant.

Those four years were healing, and the friends I made there will always be the dearest of my life. Anne Patchett writes about how true friends are “native speakers,” and I find myself recalling how at Princeton we basically invented our own language. We were teased for abbreviating everything, and indeed, we did. Abbrevs, T and a P, TDF, the chalice, DTR … I could go on. Those of you who know what all of those things mean know who you are. And you speak my language.

And many of these college friendships have endured, grown thicker and stronger and more sustaining even as we move further away from Princeton. We have passed through early professional choices, graduate school, weddings, divorces, more weddings, babies. I’m not sure I can say it better than I did, in a letter addressed to these wonderful women, several years ago:

“There will be and are other incredibly special friends, but as a community you all are ground zero: yardstick and safe haven, the people who knew me when I was becoming who I am.”

The third rich period of friendship in my life was around pregnancy, delivery, and the transition into motherhood. This passage is so complex, the particular dilemmas and issues of life with a newborn so detailed and specific, that the people I shared it with have become dear friends. These friendships developed in the context of family and children, and the women I have grown close to in that fecund place full of abundant concerns and anxious questions are deeply special to me.

It strikes me that it is not an accident that our truest and most lasting friendships are forged during times of life transition; we are closest to those who have shared experiences that changed who we are. Whether it was childhood, college, or becoming mothers, this is true for me. There are other examples, individuals who have shared things with me that contributed indelibly to who I am. In this way, a very few other people have become a part of my own self, their voices permanently embedded into my private narrative.

There are a few sustaining threads in my life, people whose story I know will always run next to mine, friendships whose sturdy support I lean on routinely.  And how fortunate I am that these people were impressive enough to my husband when he met them that he decided, too, to stick around.

Do you agree that people’s close friends are a significant indicator of who they are?  Are there phases in your life that have yielded particularly close or lasting friendships?  What did you think the first time you met your spouse?

(parts of this are reposted from September 2009)