I’m starting this post far too late in the morning for it to be done (well) by the time I have to go to work. I’m trying to be a bit more zen about this and be self-forgiving for waking up later than I had wanted. My plan was to get up, exercise, have breakfast, read/write, get ready, and go to work. In order to do all of those things, I probably needed to get up at 5:00. Instead, I woke up at 6:30. That’s still plenty of time to do some of those things (see this post), but with that comes the stress and disappointment of choice. Throughout this blog, I have lamented being bound by time. I have yearned to be more free so that I might loaf and pursue more things of interest…. I woke up late because I stayed up late. I started texting and getting to know a woman from Brentwood… the zen side of me says getting to know another is a worthy use of time. My dad would disagree – he has very little use for other people.
Last night, between reading, writing, cooking, and responding to a comment posted on this blog, I had set aside an article, The Myth of Self-Reliance, by Jenny Odell published in The Paris Review. Years ago, as a publishing consultant I worked out an agreement with The Paris Review in which their writers would write “officially sanctioned” introductions to our books of literary criticism, and they would provide an archival interview to compliment the book. I went to their big fundraising gala in New York, I sat next to a lovely poet and writer Eliza Griswold, we all drank scotch, Moby was at the table next to us, and luminaries like Salman Rushdie and EL Doctorow were there, as was Michael Bloomburg. It was the fanciest event I had attended – I think they raised close to a million dollars that night. Long aside aside, I read Odell’s article with the interest of a writer still learning to write. She follows the format…. small personal experience of visiting the coffee shop and it’s neighboring bookstore by Walden Pond, she writes about a transformative hike out in California, she writes about going home for Thanksgiving, she reflects on some of the criticism of her book How to Do Nothing, she ties it all together with an appreciation for Emerson and a yin and yang view of self reliance and reliance.
The tensions between agency and situation, between the individual and the collective, have never been easy to resolve. I’m trying to learn to live in the messy space between. Here, you can be both your own and not your own, responsible to communities without exhibiting the dreaded groupthink, and bound by one commitment: to examine your commitments, forever.
Jenny Odell
This morning, as I write, I’m examining my commitments – past, present, and future. My commitments to meeting new people, my commitments to the friends I’m starting to make, my commitments to work and play, my commitments to myself. This morning I’m thinking a bit about the comment I received yesterday and the response I had posted. My initial thought was that it was posted by my ex-fiancee, B – an anonymous third person acceptance of her role in the implosion. While I can’t rule it out, I had to consider my initial reading as a projection of how I imagined our reconciliation – what I wanted to hear. This morning I’m thinking a bit about B’s re-examining of her commitments, her absolute right to do so, her right to stick by those choices or circle back.
As I was flying the other other day and the plane approached Dallas, we flew over a river. The bends were dramatic and at one point, the river had almost completely circled back on itself. This is the wandering beauty of nature. No right or wrong, no efficiency in “progress” – just flow. Life is a whole lot of grey. It’s the squiggly line of a path through the woods or a river or just big spaces where the elements of land and water and air mix – no clear delineation of where one begins and the other ends. We’re all trying to learn to live in the messy space between. I remember a conversation with co-worker a few years back. I was talking about yin yang, push pull type of stuff and said if I were to redraw the iconic symbol, it would have a wide grey band down the middle, maybe less of a curved line and more of a gradient.
When I started this post, I had copied this quote down – sure I’d find a way to work it in. Time-bound, I’m looking at how it’s hanging here. I’m shifting my attention… I’m going to leave it as the closing, and try to approach the day with the gratitude of attention… to my writing, to my work, to the others that I encounter, to the details of memory, to the privilege of ability.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Simone Weil