It takes me a long time to process. I sit with things for weeks, for months, and sometimes for years before I feel like I begin to understand them. When I first met Mary, she told me that when she doesn’t know what to do, she does nothing. At the time, I thought that was madness, but the truth is that it’s an incredibly healthy response. And it’s hard. It’s hard to wait until you know what to do. It’s difficult to be patient, to problem-solve for the long term.
For years, I would have told you that I’m an ethical person rather than a moral one, but I see now that I have been wrong about that. I’m a moral person as well, though I recognize the limitations of morality. The danger of seeing the world in simplistic terms of THIS IS RIGHT and THIS IS WRONG. There are too many things that are both and neither. We are. Humans. We are both and neither. We are failing spectacularly and doing our best. Good parenting is making the correct choice every third time. That’s a tough one, man. It’s hard to admit how often we are incorrect, unkind, out of resources, overwhelmed, ignorant or judgmental.
Our lives are hard. If we’re honest, if we’re showing up for the work of being in families, being parents, being partners, being friends — it’s hard. People fuck us over because they’re weak. And we do the same to them more often than we intend. We watch them drive away in cars on fire and we think, There they go. Same as ever.
It’s grueling to use language effectively. To communicate without injury. It’s hard to be alive. It hurts to feel things. To be disappointed. To fuck up when we’re trying our best.
We have so much to do, and so little light. Winter is nearly here.
Autumn is how we fortify, isn’t it? How we reinforce ourselves for barren months. Why have we come to see prosperity as our due? We are here to work. Here to think. Here to play. All this is possible even as the leaves fall. We are both and neither. Old enough to understand that isn’t even the question. Is it?
Later we’ll tell a story about this time, and it’ll be like the rest of our stories: it’ll mean different things each time we tell it.
It’s so very strange to be an ever evolving thing. It’s even stranger to comment on that. To be in the place you are and to think of it and talk about it with any context. For a long time, now, I have been dissecting less, and letting myself sort of happen more. Marveling at it, even. Doing nothing. And maybe that’s the product of being mid thirties, of now having just a little bit of landscape to look back upon (though, in truth, I remember things so poorly). Or maybe it’s what it has always seemed: fear of the next thing.
What I fight now, though, is apathy. I’ve never been very black and white, but I am now bleeding gray. What I struggle for is a sense of things being important, not because I need them now, but because they need me. Because they are things worth loving. Because I know I’ll feel different. Later. That’s a sort of awful feeling, and senseless. Like knowing you’ll go to hell, because you just can’t believe in God.
But I do get it. Doing nothing, being yourself, just now. And the OK-ness of that. Only, sometimes, it does, it does feel like complete failure.
Patience is so hard for me. And I worry I’ll never have the right answer and I’ll just have to wait FOREVER. It feels like losing. Like not making a choice. Like being stuck. None of that is good, but flailing is just busy work. That’s how I comfort myself. Would you rather be doing busy work? (Sometimes.) (Probably not.) (Maybe?)
I finally get that a lot of these things just stop being a problem. Not that they work themselves out exactly but that over time, things that seemed urgent or significant or meaningful in some way actually weren’t. And so why spend all that time anticipating problems and talking through solutions to a bunch of shit that comes to nothing when it’s so pretty out and the dogs love walks?
It’s true that I don’t often worry about worrying enough. And the dogs do love walks…