How to Be Idle and Blessed
I would like to start off this newsletter with a light, casual conversation about death. Go with me here.
As a child, my first memory of having a nightmare was when, at age 5 or 6, I dreamed that I died. My dream brain was apparently a little fuzzy on how death actually worked, and so what happened was that I lay down in the flower bed in front of my house at the time and was carried up in the air in it, to eventually be deposited on the roof, where I died. The actual death process wasn't made clear, but I had a disembodied voice who narrated many of my dreams and it said, just before I woke up, "And there she died," which clued me in to what had happened to me.
As you might imagine, this was a lot for my child brain to process, so I woke up crying and called for my mom. I don't have any specific memory of what happened after that, but I assume she came in to comfort me and was horrified by my recounting of the dream. Because really, what child who has lived less than 7 years on this earth is already dreaming about leaving it?
This could have been a precursor to the anxiety I lived with for most of my childhood, teenage, and 20s years, a kind of sample of what was to come, but I think it was also a precursor to my preoccupation with death. Not in a morbid way--I was less interested in what happened to the body after death or in what manner I would be dispatched as I was in whether I would have lived a worthwhile life before shuffling off this mortal coil. It frequently kept me up at night. There was also some fear of being forgotten mixed in, of ceasing to exist and thereby no longer occupying any space in the minds or hearts of those who had known me in life, but more than anything else, I was afraid of feeling like I hadn't accomplished anything. I tried to logic myself out of this obsession by telling myself that it wouldn't matter at that point because I would no longer be around to care, but, much like my deep and unshakable home invasion fear, logic was not very effective when put up against the scenarios I built up in my mind.
I make jokes about this because I don't know what else to do with it, but it's a very terrifying feeling. I want to matter. I'm not unique in this, I know, we all want to matter. For me, though, it's less about mattering to individual people on an interpersonal level and more about mattering to the world. I want to do something that counts, something that makes a difference, something that outlasts the minuscule amount of time we're given to be alive. There aren't many ways in which I relate to Alexander Hamilton in the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, but one of the few is that I, too, want to leave a legacy. I'm just not willing to grind relentlessly and forego meaningful relationships with loved ones to achieve that goal. And the legacy I want to leave isn't a contribution to the capitalist system that leaves us all feeling worthless unless we spend the majority of our time making and spending money.
I want to make people feel better than they did before they knew me. I want to work toward a world where those who are marginalized and oppressed are able to live freely and happily and where they can breathe without the weight of boots on their necks. I want to make art, in whatever form I feel like using, and I want to move people with it. I want to have a creative body of work I can point to and say, "Here, look, I made this. It didn't exist before me, but it will exist after me and it belongs to anyone who feels something as a result of it." I want to love and laugh and eat good food and experience places and cultures that aren't the stifling box I grew up in. I want to heal and be healed. I want to feel beautiful because I love myself exactly as I am in any given moment, because I believe firmly and without apology that I am the person I've always wished to be, because I know without a doubt that I am alive and real and whole and I have the whole world inside me.
These are all very reasonable and achievable goals, I think. The fervor with which I long for them makes them feel unattainable to me, but that's not reality unless I let it be. I sit frozen on my couch more often than not because I'm so afraid to fail that I would rather not even try, as though those are the only options. My therapist is always gently scolding me for my all or nothing attitude, what he calls my pass-fail mentality. I either succeed or I don't and there's no room in between for trying, for making messes that could lead to something even better than what I imagined when I started out, for showing other people that there's beauty in the messy, imperfect, authentic journey. I am either flawless perfection or an abject failure, when really, no one is ever fully either.
In writing this, I was reminded of one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems, titled simply The Summer Day. In it, she writes:
Those last lines are quoted everywhere, but rarely in what I consider to be the right context. Poetry is subjective, of course, and everyone is free to interpret it however they like, but it feels awful and absurd to turn this particular poem into a rallying cry for grind culture, a call to productivity. To me, it reads as just the opposite. If all you do is observe grasshoppers and lie idle in fields, isn't that living? Isn't that deserving of poetry? Isn't that beautiful? I think so, and it's a necessary reminder for me that I don't have to do the biggest or best thing. I don't have to be at the top of any game. I don't have to outrank the competition. I don't even have to be in competition with anyone, or with myself. I just have to live, to notice the magic all around me every day of my life, to wonder and wander and experiment and experience. I just have to be open, a conduit for life to flow through, and if I make some art along the way, or if I learn a new trade or fall in love or adopt more cats or drink a really nice cup of coffee, it's all part of it. I don't need to feel so afraid of dying without living, because every second I'm alive is living. This feels so obvious to say, but it's not always obvious in the midst of the anxiety. Sometimes I need to state it plainly to calm myself down, and maybe doing so here will help you, too. Maybe you're also scared and maybe sometimes you also feel so small and insignificant that you wonder if you're even visible, and maybe you also look around at all the amazing, shiny, life-altering things people are doing all around you every day and feel a deep despair at your inability to do anything close to that. I see you, and I'm right there with you, and we're going to be okay because we're here on this earth at this moment and that's not an accident. Even if the entirety of our purpose is to exclaim over what a nice day it is today or hug someone who means something to us, that's so much more than nothing and so are we. At the end of the day, what else should we have done with our one wild and precious life? |