Learning to Look
The best thing is to be alive - walking in the park, being with loving people, savoring the taste of language, art, garden tomatoes. Better yet is to know you’re alive, to know that you are the one who is inhaling the breath of the world. We are living in a time when the woundedness pressing down all around us can make it extremely difficult to stay present to the miracle of being right here, right now. My capacity to hold and calibrate the daily assault of the news alongside my own personal losses and challenges depends on the amount of interior space I make available. Some days I want to be present to addiction and Maui and Jacksonville, to look deeply at all that suffering, and some days I want to watch my back, take care of myself. I can feel my heart expanding and contracting like a bellows. I can feel myself opening to life and shutting down when it’s all just too much. When I close up like a day lily at sundown I just don’t want to see the news. I don’t want to know. But how can you take up residence in a new place without looking at the local newspaper?
Extra copies of the Minneapolis daily paper, The Star Tribune, are often left lying around on the counter opposite the elevator. At first, I wasn’t sure they were free for the taking, but after a while I decided that I could help myself to one and read it for research purposes. How are the Twins doing? They’re in first place, but also the only team playing over .500 in the AL Central, an abysmal division. Who died? I scan the obituaries even though I barely know a soul in Minnesota. I just really like the stories. Every obituary sprinkles the seeds of literature. And….what are the central issues facing the metro these days? Homelessness, crime, police misconduct, hungry children and women who cover their bruises with face make-up. How can I want to know and not want to know at the same time and how is this related to being alive and knowing you’re alive?
My stab at a provisional answer to these huge questions is that if I’m going to open myself to hurt, I want the slings and arrows to land on a soft cushion. I want to be protected, insulated by blankets of compassionate people I can share my concerns with. At 78, I am more porous and more vulnerable to toxicity than I used to be. Whatever I ingest, potato chips, vodka, domestic violence headlines, stays with me and gives me heartburn and heartache. I recall my mother way back in the Perry Como days refusing to watch anything that upset her and I remember my youthful disdain for that attitude. She didn’t want to leave her hot fudge sundae half eaten and climb down off the revolving stool at the Schrafft’s counter to face up to what was happening out on the street a few feet away. It was my opinion that she wasn’t tough enough to stand up to real life which I knew all about at twenty. Now I see that knowing I’m alive involves in the first instance knowing how to take care of myself. As I become a better advocate for myself, for my physical and spiritual wellbeing, the protective walls of Jericho that keep the world at bay begin to tumble down, the doors open some. A new friend told me today that we are all responsible for finding our own joy, finding what strengthens us and expands us so that we feel that we belong in the world, the suffering world. We are in it and of it.
Experiencing joy is like growing up in a secure, loving family. It doesn’t close off experience, it fortifies you so that you can look lovingly at the world. It stimulates your capacity for compassion. In Stockbridge, where high school basketball and the opening of the Tanglewood season ate up a lot of column inches in the local paper, I incubated for fifty years. I rested and prepared for returning to the city. After a while, some of my made-in-New York protective covering got washed off. I come to Minnesota with Norman Rockwell in the middle distance and Norman Mailer on his tail.
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Another great piece. You capture well the challenge of being engaged in the world while not being wiped out by sadness, worry and sometimes rage. It’s that “soft landing” we have to find. And like you have said beautifully in many ways, everything changes, everything’s in flux.
One of your best pieces. For self-care purposes, I recommend mixing in some Norman Lear with your Norman Rockwell and Norman Mailer.