65 things I want to say but never have

When I was 15, I was in the French Alps on a skiing trip as part of my private school's French exchange program during spring vacation. We were staying in a hostel coincidentally at the same time as a group of young French agricultural students who were college-aged and gregarious. There was one of them whom, peering at several times when I thought he wasn't looking, I had identified to be quite cute.

I was an awkward 15 as so many girls are - suddenly filled with hormones that swelled my body from its straight athleticism to a curved femininity that I worked to hide by wearing my older brother's hand-me-down jeans and large flannel shirts. While so many of the girls in my class, or so it seemed, knew exactly what to do with their hair and clothes, with their gestures and speech, I constantly felt lost and so I shied away from social interaction beyond my small reliable group of friends. My friends were that rare breed of high schoolers who could interact with peers from all of the other class cliques and not be 'marked down' for it in the eyes of the most popular kids. So when my friends were invited to the popular kids' weekend parties, I too would sometimes go, though I mostly stood with them or by myself, and looked for opportunities to pick up beer cans and clean up at the end of the night so I would have something to do.

Of course I wanted to be desired. I wanted to be seen as pretty. I wanted to laugh and talk and be at ease like the most popular girls who, by doing so, seemed even more alluring. I wanted to be chosen by one of the boys in our class, but after some awkward school dances where I gently tested out whether a crush I had was mutual, I came to the conclusion that I was not any of these things and slunk further into the social shadows.

Being in another country divides self from self. I was very nervous about the quality of my French, but I also felt freed from the person I was back in high school and the way I assumed I was perceived by my peers. So when the hostel hosted a dance party one night and the French farmers decided to join, I let loose dancing to Kiss' "Rock and Roll All Nite" as I never would have back home. The cute farmer I'd noticed earlier smiled and danced closer to me and I felt on top of the world.

The next day I found out that the agricultural students were going to be staying in the hostel all day and I somehow informed my teachers that I would not be going skiing that day. I can't recall if I said I was sick or injured or what, but I remember the lie because I was not the type of girl, the type of student, the type of daughter to do so.

I sat in my room reading and listening on my walkman to the Led Zeppelin mix tape I had brought. I even skipped meals to make sure I was there and didn't miss any visitors. At some point there was a knock on my door and when I opened it, the cute farmer stood in the doorway. It was like magic. And in my naive teenage brain, it felt like magic was possible here, away from all I knew and all that knew me, in the snow-filled, sun-glinting spiked Alps where French women sat at lunch halfway up the ski slope with their Bogner ski overalls zipped down to their waists, bikini tops bared, reveling in the spring sun that bounced off the ice and sky melting snow and clothing and conversation. Yes, magic seemed like it could happen...even to me.

And so I let him sit on my bottom bunk and close the door. And so I tried to speak with him in halting French and then halting English. And so I let him start to kiss me and then push me down on the bed and then force his hand down my pants and then inside of me. I don't remember if I tried to say no. I don't know if I was too scared or too surprised or too seemingly ungrateful. But, to this day, I remember how wrong it felt, how wrong it was, only recognizing this fact many decades later as an adult after other violations and abuse.

I was naive. I also wanted to be so many things at once - the proper upright daughter, the soft-spoken acquiescent girl, and also the girl who a boy just might choose. I was so naive that, after returning home to the U.S., I called the French farmer. God, I was terrified. I did not call boys, certainly not boys thousands of miles away who hardly spoke the same language...but I thought that what had happened meant that he cared for me deeply in some way, that perhaps he even loved me and we might have a future together. The ridiculousness of this thought is hard for me to comprehend now, but I believed his violation of me could not be wrong. I believed that I was too inexperienced and too afraid and finally, most painfully for me to think about now, that a young man would never touch a girl that way unless there were deeper, more meaningful feelings that lay beneath.

No, there were not. Our one-time crackling phone line conversation, where I first had to work my way past his mother, felt like a first-year French lesson. "Quel temps faut-il?" "Frais." "Comment ça-va?" "Bien bien..." Pause, pause, pause. "Tu te manques." "Le même."

I hung up with an emptiness. I told him to call me, but he never called back. Neither did I.

This week, with the Kavanaugh hearings, with the broadcast of the once-silenced voice of Dr. Blasey Ford, I have felt beaten, broken, and dismissed. I have questioned what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a woman in this country. I have peered into the murk of my own past and found, despite my strength, my bravery, my independence, there is much that I have never said. This is not about the narcissism of me me me or an argument that every thought I've ever had is momentous and worthy enough of speaking to the world. This is about the things I have not said because I have been silenced, because - so many times - I have silenced myself, so well-inculcated I was to the expectations of what it meant to grow up as a girl and then a woman of my era - to be restrained, controlled, deferring, yielding, accepting. This is about speaking what I should have said but never have.

1. You are wrong, Dad, I am not reaching for a snack because I am upset I didn't make the Varsity soccer team, I am eating because I have not eaten all day and I have the right to basic sustenance.

2. Dr. Vinton, yes I weight too little but it is not going to help to see a nutritionist and make a food journal. I know what to eat, I know what is healthy. I am not eating because I want to melt away, I want to avoid having to be heard, I am afraid of having a voice and making a stir.

3. Mom, lots of the girls in our high school are having sex and I don't know if that is okay and I don't know what to think about that really. I don't know if I am supposed to want that too, or if it is too soon, or how I should feel since no one seems to want to do it with me anyway.

4. I would like to make a comment in this class, but the interrupting and raised voices of the boys makes it nearly impossible.

5. It is not okay for you to grab my arm when I get up to leave the table, Dad; I am allowed to choose to leave because I don't want to listen anymore to you rage with your frankly racist disapproval at my Haitian boyfriend. And who are you to say he is not 'good enough' for me?

6. In de Kooning, Mr. Pollans, I do see violence towards women. It scares me and whether that is because it is truly there or because of the position I am in in the world, I do not know. But I know that it still matters.

7. Yes, Grandma, I am too thin. Don't you see it? It is still frightening to be a girl in the world. Maybe if I turn sideways, no one will notice me.

8. I am uncomfortable at this college because the social life centers on fraternities and binge drinking and the hope of a guy 'hooking up' with you and I am afraid of that.

9. I am going away, not because I do not love my family, nor because I am not serious about a life path, but because I am having so much trouble finding my voice. I do not know what I want, what I think, or how I feel. I need to understand these things in order to move forward in my life with any meaning.

10. I am 27 years old and I have never had sex, but I have been violated before.

11. You are an undocumented immigrant and my family does not approve of me seeing you, but I am choosing you to have sex with because you are gentle and loving towards me and I know the experience will be one of tenderness and shared understanding.

12. Thank you for showing me sex can be sweet and soft and not always full of domination and submission.

13. You do not need to apologize, you do not need to feel ashamed for not being able to keep an erection. Giving me great sex is not the most important thing to me in our relationship.

14. You have not earned the right to anal sex with me just because you paid for dinner and drove me home.

15. Just because we are dating, you do not have the right to ask me about how many sexual partners I have had and judge whether or not I am a 'whore' based on the answer.

16. I do not want to be called 'your little whore' in bed.

17. Stop forcing my head onto your penis.

18. I do not like being choked. It does not turn me on. It scares me because I can't breathe.

19. You do not 'own' me just because we had sex more than once.

20. I told you no, you pushed me forward and forced yourself into me anyway. You raped me. That is rape.

21. It makes me feel dirty and demeaned when you rub cum on my face.

22. When I come to visit your apartment, and first thing in the door, you force me onto my knees and make me give you head, I do not like it.

23. Thank you for not having sex with me that one night we spent together. I think you may have thought about trying, but you didn't and I cherish your respect for me.

24. I called the police when we got back to the hotel, but I should have come right up to you on that dark night as you appeared to be yelling and pinned down by a man. I should tried to intervene or to help you somehow in the moment, at least to see if you were okay.

25. I am going for a run and it is not okay for you to yell 'fucking hot' from your car as you anonymously drive by. It may be funny to you, but it's frightening and I lose my breath and I cannot start to run again for a time. And then when I do start to run, it is a full-out sprint until I can get home and lock my door.

26. It is just as much a violation of me when you break into my email and social media accounts as when you force yourself into my body against my will.

27. There is a reason my face looks so bitchy when I work out in the gym or when I travel the subway  alone at night. It is protection, not irritation or annoyance.

28. You do not have the right to grab me and kiss me just because we are alone in the book room and you are attracted to me.

29. Thank you for saying that what you meant to do in our relationship was show me how a man can treat a woman, but what you showed me is that a man can use a woman for sex for an extended period of time and still have no interest in cultivating anything deeper with her.

30. No, yours is not the biggest dick I have ever had and frankly it doesn't matter so lose the insecurity.

31. I will never forget that the only thing that made you want our child is that he turned out to be a boy.

32. No

33. No

34. No

35. No

36. No

37. No

38. No

39. No

40. No no no no no no no no no no NO NO NO NO NO!

41. There is no police report, Judge, because I was newly pregnant and scared and alone. I was scared of escalating his violent behavior. And I didn't want to cause trouble. And I just wanted him to go away. And no one taught me that going to the police would be the right choice of action in this scenario.

42. Mom, I am alone in New York and pregnant and I do not want this baby. I am going to have an abortion and I hope you will be able to support me in this choice.

43. I had an abortion and I know it was the right choice, but I still feel the trauma of loss.

44. Planned parenthood on Bleecker Street, I felt like a cog in your machine of abortion. Impersonal, no explanations, a room packed with women, not knowing what is coming next, being treated like a name on a listed that needs to be checked off. I think the process of the abortion traumatized me more than my decision to have one. And you let me go home alone.

45. To the courts of the world, to the men of the world, emotional and psychological abuse are just as destructive as physical abuse.

46. My whole life I have worked to assert control over my own body - in high school through starving myself, in my adult life through achieving a toned muscular physique in the gym...but I have not yet achieved the feeling that it is mine and mine alone to assert rights over.

47. My voice is connected to my body.

48. Don't yell at me with irritation and frustration in your voice, doctor, and tell me just to get the baby out of me. Even though this is my body, I have no idea how to do this, it is frightening, and I cannot feel the lower half of my body because of the epidural. And you are making it more stressful rather than less.

49. Just because you saw it in porn does not mean I want it or that I like it. And it doesn't make you 'better' at sex just because you replicate it.

50. Even though I am in my thirties now and even though I have had sex many times at this point, you still need to ask me if it's okay to touch me. You still need my consent.

51. You having an affair and lying about it to Mom and lying about trying to work on your marriage to us, your kids, does reinforce negative stereotypes about men, Dad. It does and you lost my respect. You had choices.

52. I am lying to you when I say that I am okay with this abortion. I am lying to you that it is because of our financial situation. You are not really counseling me in this situation nor are you really looking for anything more than my acquiescence to a lie so you can write down on a piece of paper that I received appropriate counseling. Can't you see that I am lying? I want this baby but I am scared of the man who got me pregnant and I am being forced into having this abortion by him.

53. I heard your sigh, doctor, when you confirmed that I want this abortion. I felt your judgment as I am older and educated. I felt you wondering why I am making this choice. I am not, but I am already lying on a table in hospital dressing and there doesn't seem to be any way back from here.

54. You do not get to say you have the 'right' to a second date just because you want one and I am saying no.

55. I just had a baby less than 24 hours ago. I do not want to give you fellatio. I cannot even believe you are asking. I cannot believe I am agreeing.

56. You think our sex was good, but mostly I was just scared and trying to please you.

57. I have written poems about men I have loved and about men that disgusted me. I never wrote you a love poem - you never inspired me.

58. I am a single mother by choice. There is no father.

59. I am a also a single mother not by choice. Stop saying things to my son like 'you can ask Daddy when he gets home' or 'your Dad will know' and listen to him as he so bravely and without shame explains, 'my Daddy does not live with me.'

60. I would like to be invited even though I am not part of a couple. I can still have intellectual, interesting conversations and I would like to be included. Maybe we could even become friends.

61. I felt so much shame going to WIC and needing that kind of help that I was never able to use the coupons that I so badly needed.

62. On our first date, we ended up in my bed with most of our clothes off and you on top of me. At that moment, I said, "I don't think we should have sex," which meant 'no' but was the politest way I could think of to say no. You said, "I am practically already inside of you, there's no turning back now" and proceeded to insert yourself in me. I remember after you were done, I told you you needed to leave, that I had to get up early. What I wanted to say was fuck you, I didn't want to have sex with you and I tried to tell you that. Later in our relationship, you would refer to me having sex with you on a first date, insinuating that I was a whore underneath all my 'proper' exterior. I should have recognized that as abusive.

63. Stop abusing me. Stop trying to assert control over me. I am not yours, we are not family, and the hurt you brought upon me has turned into anger has turned into action and will continue to be something I use for empowerment rather than victimization.

64. I did not know I was traumatized by the men in my life. I did not want to believe that could happen to me. I did not want to think I have been afraid to say things, but I have been. I am working on it.

65. I am just one small voice. But my voice is important and powerful and when I speak, I want to be believed. Remember, I hate drawing attention to myself.

66. I have a son. I do not want him to be 'one of those men.' I intend to speak to him now and in the future about sexual ethics, consent, emotional intimacy. I intend to tell him he never has the 'right' to have sex with another person. I intend to tell him about healthy relationships and gender dynamics and I hope I can guide him to be a man of integrity and genuine respect for women and men.

67. I intend to continue speaking truth to the world, truth to power, truth to all. I intend to lift up my voice, to make it loud when necessary, to be heard even if there are those who still will not believe me. I have more than 65 things I want to say but never have...and they keep coming and I will keep speaking...whether or not I am heard, whether or not I am believed or even listened to. Martin Luther King Jr. once said to be silent is to be an accomplice. I want to be better than that. And even though I say this and I do intend to do so, it is still scary. I still feel scared.

quiet in the silence

A thick falling snow always quiets the world. Even the howls of wind outside are muffled. This is our fourth or fifth, actually I don't remember how many at this point, blizzard of this winter. I am up early - well not actually. It is 7am and I was up a little before 6am. That has been my normal ever since my son started sleeping through the night. Up until he turned two, he was up at around 5am every day...and so was I. Now he is sleeping a bit longer, usually closer to 6am. But today he is asleep, along with my mother, and the house spread with quiet.

It must have been a long time since I have immersed myself in quiet. This uninterrupted, unbroken morning comes as such a relief, and yet a foreign one. I am so distanced from my former self, the one who moved through the world but not of it, for days, weeks at a time. I remember quite vividly my sorrowful year at a prestigious, yet isolated college in the northern hinterlands of New England. Yes, full of sorrow, and the interiority of loss built an enclosed space around me. I walked around as if in a tomb, going for days without speaking a word or interacting with another human being. When you step apart from the world, mute, everything does become quiet. Yet sorrow for what? There was no particular reason, no particular event. There was one boy with whom I had been close who was struggling with his own depression; he had withdrawn from the world and from me. But was that enough to cause the extreme sort of removal that I myself had initiated?

-----

I wrote the above two paragraphs two or three years ago when quiet was indeed a rarity. Now I sit, once again, worlds apart from a past me, under the weight of silence. My now 6-year old is spending his first weekend away from me with his father under a court order which came on abruptly and painfully. It is not truly silent - as usual, I hear the cars pass on the state highway outside our house; the air conditioner buzzes on and off; the hum of heat rising into the day vibrates itself through the closed windows; robins and chickadees sing their morning rounds.

No, it is the silence of oblivion, of absence, of what is but is not. I do not know this world without my son bumping around in his room when he wakes and then calling mellifluously down the stairs "Mommy?" It is the silence of you wake up and there you are, still alive, yet without all that you would call life.

I may seem melodramatic. Perhaps I am. The emotional anguish is the moment, though, building outward to fill the silence. I have twinges of what it would be like to lose a child. Their toys and papers from school and small pieces of string and tiny clothing all around, underfoot, within view...their voice never in earshot, the amplitude of their calls and laughter displacing none of your space. The composer Samuel Barber is quoted in an article in The New York Times (Oct. 3, 1971) as saying that "I can also tell you that one of the physical nurturing components that make my music sound as it does as that I live mostly in the country. I like being surrounded by nature. I have always believed I need a circumference of silence." In his case, he is filling the silence with music. The space of silence to create. The roundness of the shape of his silence embraces him and opens up, circling around from end to beginning, like the earth or the solar system. My silence is not a circumference unless it is a noose. The weight of silence already bursting with creation missing, with space like sky to atmospherically echo all you no longer have.

I wrote some untranslatable notes from my previously unfinished post - the weight of future pain, that of being a spectator...something about the recognition of my struggle making me feel a sense of loss. Oh me me me. The old me could entirely fill the silence with my own pain. The current me can too, yet now the pain feels valid, feels equally external and connected as it does interiorized whereas my sense of my older ineffable sorrow feels Werther-like, manufactured in order to romanticize the space of sorrow itself. The child I grew inside my body is gone - it is easy to pinpoint the silence now.

I admit that I was jealous of others' silence once. I wrote years ago: "It is so quiet this morning that I can hear others - my bachelor friend painting all weekend in one of the previous blizzards, the scratch of the brush on the canvas, the struggle of his self-expression, the space of making and doing, the sound of me making silence in his presence. And now they begin to destroy the quiet: my son coughing, the water rushing through the pipes, the floor creaking with the weight of my mother's footfalls upstairs." Now it is the silence that destroys. Friends have recommended I take its offerings, hold its hand again, let my own voice pulsate its thickened air. Can you find yourself amidst silence?

There is a room in Minneapolis which has taken the title of 'the quietest place on earth.' Away from the notifications, the headphones, the outside tainted by traffic, airplanes, and leaf blowers, the anechoic chamber allows for a space where noise is measured in negative decibel levels. Though some find the deactivation the room enables therapeutic, others become anxious or disoriented in less than an hour. If noise has been identified as a threat by the World Health Organization, why am I so terrified of the silence?

Steve Orfield who is the president of Orfield Laboratories explains: "Silence is the ability to step out of the world and to be passive." When you take away all of the noise, all of the stimulus, what returns is the opportunity for one to clarify oneself. This 'stepping into myself' is the silence I am afraid of, the silence that hurts. It is the me that is afraid of losing my son's need for me. It is the me that is not yet sure what I am again without constantly being a mother. It is the me who is so used to giving and interrupting myself that I am unacquainted with who I have become. It is the me ready to continue pouring me into every open glass rather than submerge into my own bath, feel the cool of the water on my soul, and begin to swim again. "The highest order thing we can give ourselves, we already own." In this case, Mr. Orfield means peace. For me, I am going to try to sit with the quiet in the silence, because it is the quiet of my own sorrow...once as again. It is the quiet of my fears and my deepest love. The gift of knowing myself is terrifying. I once sought it constantly and it was more terrifying then...because I could never find it; I could never nail it down. I am ultimately unknowable even to myself, a shifting, raw movement within the silence. I am not my son. I am not only his mother. I am sorrow, I am silence, and I am the noise, the voice I can make and the one that might be able to encompass the opposite poles of gentle and powerful. As Jason Rosenthal writes in his piece, "My Wife Said You Want to Marry Me," "loss is loss is loss" and when those of us prepare our loved ones for it in a way that invites new life, they can use that empty space to write a new story. As I prepare my son for a life that doesn't always include me, and prepare him with gentleness, support, and encouragement, my new story begins.

out of order

In a machine world, things break. They break and, because there are only specialized people who can fix them, they sit in said broken state, 'out of order.' There will be a sign, sometimes formal, sometimes hastily written by management, usually with a warning or apology - 'caution' or 'sorry'... but sometimes just the obvious, 'notice.' Yes we do.

But this was the secondary thought I had of the phrase. It first came into my head because of my life, the way my life has been out of order. I had a child before getting married. My career life is not stable and I am in the middle of my life. In fact, it feels as if I am at the beginning, fighting my way in, yet I feel way too old and experienced for that.

Is there something fundamentally dysfunctional about my life? Or is it just that there are never good moments for life to happen and sometimes, they can derail other parts of your life? I long for the more proper order - the job that leads forward, the romance, the honeymoon period, the announced and celebrated wedding, the children that come a few years later, two to three years apart, and then the onward march towards...towards what? Do I want this? Did I ever? Is it just the chasm between the order of others and the muddled nature of my life, my being my soul that echoes with constant vibration?

I don't know that I want the right order. I may carry less pain, it is true, but I also don't think I would reflect as much on life or have as much drive to leave behind a mark. The question remains though, with all that is out of order in my life, am I broken? If so, to whom should I apologize?

I rejoined my childhood church about a year ago. I did it completely for my son. I wanted to offer him the awareness of religion and more, the possibility of a supportive community if he so chooses it in the future. He has become attached, it is true, but the more I went, the more it began to take on a shape and a meaning for me. I took the time to sit with my thoughts...with the painful ones that I was so often pushing away. I began to think about what it would mean in practice to forgive those who have caused me the greatest pain. And the strangest thing started to happen. People started to reach out to me. One of the pastors invited me to join an Ekklesia group during Lent for parents with younger children. I never involve myself in things like that. But something has changed about me this year. With the losing of my job, my son getting sick with a sudden medical condition, and his father suddenly fighting for custody out of the blue, I have broken irreparably. With all the new cracks now showing, I am letting people in more.

There is a Japanese practice called kintsugi. Rather than throwing away a broken bowl or vase, it is repaired using liquid gold, thus highlighting the scars of the piece. The metaphorical suggestions are legion: to be broken is not to be useless, value can be added through breaking, scars create beauty in a wholeness built through resilience. What I have been presenting to others this past year is my brokenness...and I have found more genuine connection with others than ever before.

I revise my earlier question. I quite certainly know that I never wanted the right order of life. I railed against choosing a well-worn career path and falling in line with the established footprints. I felt such a life to be empty of meaning...whatever that was. I felt that, if I were to choose that path, I would die a little on each step. I never had dreams of a big wedding or even of having children. And I did choose otherwise. I wandered my way through my twenties, pushing away from my family in the only way I knew how - through distance and career possibilities of which they had little to no knowledge. I could be a field biologist. Or an environmental lawyer. Or an anthropology professor. These things I could own. They would be my footprints alone. Alone in the wilderness. I simultaneously pushed away from most human connections, thinking and feeling that I was not yet 'perfect' enough. In hindsight, I can see that, as much as I struggled against the conventions of society, they still defined my sense of identity and success. And my willingness to open up and engage.

But I did dream of someone finally seeing my "pilgrim soul," "the sorrows of my changing face" as Yeats once wrote. But everywhere I went to make my new footprints, I found myself and my struggles. As I have aged, I have often second-guessed my own choices - to attend painting school in France, for example, when I could have been making my way through law school into a secure career. I kept a journal at the time, though, and I see myself working through so many difficult issues. On Wednesday, February 14, 2001 (ironically), I wrote: "How strange a thing is happiness. I don't even know if I know what it is - sometimes it feels like I can barely tickle it with my fingertips and that's an incredible feeling. But here I am - at painting school in Provence...and everyone from back home tells me how jealous they are of me, how lucky I am to be here, and how happy I must be. Happy? I certainly realize and acknowledge that I am unusually lucky to have the luxuries of money and time to be able to come here. That is undeniable...but happy? No, it is hard being here - every day is trying just in the sense of needing to speak a different language or having to live in a family and culture that isn't yours...And, of course, people who say they are jealous never think of these everyday realities...but more that that even, they don't realize that when you have an experience like this that is so foreign to everything you know that you - or at least I do - spend so much of my time searching and re-searching my values, my goals, my being, my soul. God, these thoughts occupy my mind all day - and it's exhausting...and you also feel really lonely a lot - not terrible, painful, crying lonely, but just alone - that no one really knows you."

When I am able to put my current self back into the mind of my younger self, I feel much more compassion. Oh dear sweet self and your struggles. And how you wanted to figure all of life out before living it. I once had a professor who must have sensed some of himself in me who told me a story of how when he was attending UC, Berkeley he used to go sit on some rocks above the ocean and hope he could think through all the answers...and then one day he realized he just needed to act and figure it out as he went along. Similarly, Leslie Jamison has written of an alternative to the modern notion that our lives must be shaped by and built upon deep insight about the 'self.' She writes: "I'd come to worship self-awareness...[this] brand of secular humanism [urging us to] Know thyself, and act accordingly. [But] what if you reversed this? Act, and know thyself differently."

We live in a human world. Machines may break and be done for, but we live...often in the mud...usually breaking once, twice...perhaps a whole host of times. Some of us break more than others. I recall reading in Tobias Wolff's In Pharaoh's Army that he originally joined the army so that he could have as many experiences in life as possible...because that was the way he felt he could become a truly good writer. From my early twenties when I read that, until recently, that was my feeling too. I felt brave enough, strong enough...and I felt experiences would give me the most human experience possible. Now, on the other side of abortions and abuse and loss and estrangement from family and financial struggles, my feelings have changed. I feel guilty and naive for ever asking for so much experience. I would now like a bit less. Because there can be so many cracks that you don't even know where to begin with the bowl.

The fact remains, I don't want to be a perfect bowl. Those pieces of china sit idly in a cupboard missing out on life. I don't want to break into dust either. My 'out of order-ness' are the cracks in my bowl. You don't need to be cautious around me or sorry. You should take notice, as should we all. But I will stand in front of you with my cracks glued back together in gold in order to ask you how you are, how you really are. And you can tell me, in no particular order.

self-reflection: the upside-down now of stepping through the looking-glass

I stirred the pot. I churned up the dregs of my existence. And with my insides turning over and over, the agitation brought the past into my present, the fractured pieces of memory back into my ongoing consciousness. I greeted this other me with anguish. I both knew it was impossible to be simultaneous with that past self as I also knew that this other me was crashing down upon my present being like a thunderclap silencing my world and my word.

We do not always make choices we like. Our choices do not always gratify, though sometimes -- with the remoteness of time stretching us farther and farther away and making the consequences clearer -- we can appreciate the decision made. Other times, the ache of decisions is a weight. Or perhaps the weight of decision not made...though, in truth, a non-decision is its own kind of decision, if a passive one. Just as there is no innocent bystander, there is no virtuous suspension of subjectivity while bearing witness to our own lives. We are enmeshed, often painfully so. Even in memory. Especially in memory.

For "all consciousness is self-consciousness" as Kathleen Wider writes in her book on Sartre and consciousness as rooted in the body. Was this where my anguish churned the most? Was it precisely because I could not remove myself to see objective reality -- or indeed any reality -- that this uncalled-for-reflection was tormenting me? I know I wanted to. I wanted to see what they saw: those others who shared that moment with me and now were buried in time's sands. I wanted to understand why what struck me as one thing, struck them as another. People would say I am highly empathetic. I tried to see things from their side. I thought about where they were coming from, what each of us did and said, how it could be perceived...every angle I could think of, I looked into, through, around. But still my darned self blurred the view.

Walter Benjamin knew that memory can evict reality from the rooms of our reflection. In "A Berlin Chronicle," (in Reflections) he writes of his reminiscences of the various spaces of the city that still highlight his memory. With the goal of evoking the form and atmosphere of a city, it is not time with which he is concerned. Time is more properly the structure for an autobiography and here, "I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities." (28) Still, Benjamin appears and disappears from his perceptions of the city because they are just that -- his perceptions -- just as images "constantly detach themselves from things and determine our perception of them." (29) Early in the essay, he speaks of reflection a la Proust as a fan in whose folds one endlessly seeks the truth -- smaller and smaller one dissects as "these microcosms grow ever mightier." (6) Thus, the danger of any exercise of self-reflection lies in the request of memory itself, which is "the capacity for endless interpolations into what has been." (16) And how could this not be? I could not and can not look back with any other than my eyes and thereby into that past, I continually insert (and assert) my new self. Oh, muddy existence.

The use of the third person is an awkward exercise, but perhaps gets one closer to the removal of self from memory. Or does it? Patty tries this approach in her autobiography within the pages of Franzen's novel, Freedom. She uses no "I" and instead speaks only of 'the autobiographer' (her current self) and Patty (her remembered self). Yet, in her attempt at self-removal, her removal of her own eye ("I"), her memories repeat and reaffirm the same insistent labeling voices of those from the original moments: "She was notably Larger than everybody else, also Less Unusual, also measurably Dumber" (29) Patty writes in the second paragraph of the first chapter of her autobiography. She not only recalls the insulting labels with which her family outcast her, they have become a capitalized aspect of her permanent self-definition. In doing so, she names herself as this specific entity (the definition of a capitalized proper noun) or maybe even attributes a Platonic (un)ideal to these qualities which she, once named, sought to embody. Plato's Beauty is changeless and eternal and so perhaps Patty's self-understanding as Less Unusual.

In writing of herself in the third person, Patty succeeds in recalling more than reflecting. "Looking back now, the autobiographer sees her younger self as one of those miserable adolescents so angry at her parents that she needed to join a cult where she could be nicer and friendlier and more generous and subservient than she could bring herself to be at home anymore." (50) She does recognize a different person in the past, but she also describes rather than reflects upon this person attempting to fulfill the desires of her family for herself in any way possible, however extreme. And, it seems, she does little more than recall this frustrated person whose later 'freedoms' may have been illusory. Perhaps because the exercise in self-reflection was requested by her therapist, there is a resistance to introspection that brings new insight. What is undeniable about the autobiography is Patty's sarcasm. Her chapters are titled tongue-in-cheek names like "Agreeable" and "Best Friends" to describe chapters respectively about a rape she was forced by her parents not to prosecute and a mentally unstable friend who stalked her. Her third person usage and her sarcasm appear as both detachment and narcissism. For, we do not really see Patty 'interpolating' her current self into her past or even extrapolating her past self into her present. It is all anger and bitterness and in the waves of witty sarcasm, everything drowns except for Patty's passive-aggressive resentment and her ongoing vulnerability. "Sarcastic people protect themselves by only letting the world see a superficial part of who they are," therapist Steven Stosny is quoted as saying in Psychology Today. Indeed, the Greek origin of the word sarcasm is 'sarkazein' whose literal definition is 'to strip off the flesh.' If Patty is stripping off her own flesh, the interior at which she arrives most nakedly is the self she defined in contradistinction to the dumb, large girl she did not want to be -- negative space with no real freedom in sight.

Personally, I realized that I needed to know why I was reflecting. What was my purpose? Without one, it would be an exercise in futility. Was it to heal past wounds, to measure my growth, to forgive my past self, or to see the past with new eyes? All of the above, I think. Though the more I sunk into reflection, the more I felt my goal was to speak to that past self: to tell her of consequences, of personal changes, of things lost. I wanted to save her from herself. And so, to step through my own looking-glass, I would break through the hindrance of my current self-reflection and maybe find a world flipped inside-out. But the fragments I would find would all be dead and gone, inert and inanimate, everyone real having moved on, my present self greeting that past self as Michelangelo's face on the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew hanging from the altar in the Sistine Chapel.

I cannot find her. I cannot save her. She is not really even lost, but the pain is there. I need to make choices, not all of which should depend on her healing. There must be a balance. Scientists have found that people who reflect upon their decisions have more gray matter in their anterior prefrontal cortex. And yet...the same researchers have found that those who delve too deeply into themselves are prone to depression and, in fact, possess poorer memories. Memory is already such a poor tool. Most of my current choices should depend on the me I have become in the meantime. For too much time in our own memory may diminish our ability to function in the world. As Jane Austen wrote in Mansfield Park, "There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences."

I can recall a me and a time when I was closest to my own soul. Suffering from an eating disorder and terribly unhappy, I simultaneously felt most intimate with my own soul and with the essence of a shared humanity. Everything weighted so heavily upon me, I was practically two-dimensional. Perhaps I was...as a person. The more my own body withered, the more fluid I was with my feelings, my thoughts, my memory. And yet, this very fluidity ironically deadened me. Though it was as if I could experience emotions, for example, the most strongly, I also recall the difficulty I found in anything bringing me to tears. And now, now that I am a mother and, indeed, a most physical being, I cry most easily -- at a moving documentary or when my son puckers his lips and invites me closer with "Kiss, Mama." And so I wonder if some healthy separation from my own interiority, from the interiority of the world, in fact makes me a more empathetic, loving, and generous person in the present.

And so I will look back...and look back without fear...and then take off the veil. And I will hope to step forward with something learned, something understood while dropping the weight of the mirror. Not all reflection is a curse; it is also our singular gift to see with our own unique eyes and to share in the joy that we cannot understand anything as an individual. And that we cannot quite see as anyone else either. Perhaps therein lies the incomprehensibility of the infinite universe and the smallest microcosm.

where comfort lies

She is thirteen years old. She is in great emotional pain. Her small frame shakes under its weight. She walks up to each of the adults who are lined up waiting for her. She cannot contain her tears; her face is twisted with contortions of grief. As she moves from person to person, each of them kisses her cheek. Then the other cheek. Each of them holds her close. Each of them pats her back. Each of them gently pulls her back to look into the pain she cannot mask. They offer a brief smile of understanding, of encouragement, of strength really. Some of them pull her close again, their cheeks touching the wetness on hers, soaking up what she sheds. They comfort her.

And yet, they are the ones who carry the pain. They are all survivors of the Holocaust who have just shared their stories with a roomful of students who have been studying the tragedy. What I have just described is a scene from the moving documentary "Paper Clips" about a Tennessee middle school that tries to grapple with the magnitude of deaths in and the legacy of pain wrought by the Holocaust by collecting paper clips, each one representing a single life lost.

Sam, one of the survivors tells of his arrival at the concentration camp: "Future generations," he begins, "will have to learn about the Holocaust from textbooks. We are the eyewitnesses that can, to a certain degree, tell you what took place. I was with my brother. My brother was three years old at the time." Sam explains how they went to see the 'doctor' whose job it was to decide in which direction each person would be sent. His mother and brother were sent to the left, he to the right. After they went through the showers, he found a guard. "...and I asked him, 'please tell me...we arrived last night. I arrived with my mother and brother. Where are they? What happened to them?' and that man showed me smoke coming out of a chimney. I did not understand what that means. Until I found out that the chimney is from a crematorium." The still air begins to shake with the quiver in his voice. He speaks with an eerie certainly of the inexplicable. Everything in that room breaks...forever. Things break open and in and through. Things break inside the listeners. And what struck me is that it ends up being the survivors who do the comforting and the comfortable listeners who need and accept the comfort.

Comfort is a strange beast. Often when we need it -- and need it from others -- we find a space in which to be alone. Often those who give it are the ones in the most pain -- the ones who, we would think, would be in the most need.

I remember going to the wake for the mother of a close childhood friend of mine. Her mother had died unexpectedly and suddenly, far far too young, hit by a car while out for an afternoon walk on a beautiful spring day. As the sun descended slowly and held its light to lengthen the day, highlighting the world with slants of brilliance, it simultaneously blinded a driver who did not see the women walking on the side of the road. Her death was an event that you didn't know what to do with because it shouldn't have happened. And even though we know and understand that the world is not fair and does not proceed by 'shoulds' or logic, the sense of injustice was so strong that it was overwhelming.

As I waited in line at the wake, I shook with fear. I was terrified of seeing my friend. In my head, I went over and over various things I could potentially say to her. "I am so sorry." Too trite. "I was so shocked and saddened to hear of your mother's passing." Too focused on me. "Everything happens for a reason." No way! I didn't believe that at all. Why would I even think of saying such a thing to someone else. Finally I settled upon: "Your mom was a beautiful person and she will be deeply missed. I am here if you want to talk or just have company." At least, I think that is what I decided to say. I honestly do not remember - that is how scared I was and how much is blocked out in my memory because of the preeminence of my own emotional experience. What I do remember is my friend holding me close and saying "Thank you so much for coming. It means so much to me." I remember that she looked tired and shaken, but not weak. She looked strong. And her strength was a comfort.

My aunt died in her early thirties. Similar to my friend's mother, the event was a shock. She was in a mountain biking accident. During the mourning period, and long after, my grandmother kept an article posted on her fridge. It was a list of what not to say to those who are grieving. I looked at it and read it, but thereafter I tried to skirt by it without acknowledgement. It was uncomfortable for me to see it there. It felt as though I would never be able to comfort my grandmother, that I was completely incapable, that everyone was. And that was painful. When I think about it though, it was probably true. There was no comfort or reassurance to give to her. And it was not what she wanted anyway.

We speak of comfort like a drug. There is comfort food. Each of us has his own comfort zone. Sometimes we desire to be comfortably numb. Is comfort just the absence of anxiety and pain? Roger Waters, who wrote the lyrics for the Pink Floyd song, might say so. One interpretation of the song is that it depicts his experience of being sick with high fever as a child. In that state (one which he is able to revisit through memory or perhaps other means as an adult), he becomes 'comfortably numb.' Yet "I can't explain; you would not understand. This is not how I am." For him, a state of comfort is diametrically opposed to his experience of life and to who he is. It cannot be shared. Life is not comfortable, but delirium can bring us there -- to that place where you can't hear anyone, are not even sure if they are there, and where the pain is eased. I can't recall who said it now, but I recently read or heard someone say that happiness is not so much a state of being as it is one of absence. Happiness is the absence of pain. Similarly, Buddhist thought posits that life is pain and that the goal of life is the attainment of nirvana. (And yes, I realize that this is an utterly simplistic reading of Buddhism.) Thus, I finally realized, after many years of reading Buddhist texts and considering the philosophy, that nirvana is the absence of pain. That makes so much sense to me. Our moments of ease coincide with an ability to breathe deeply. Deep breath only comes to a body relaxed, unrestricted, and open. And to be open, to be able to receive, one must be free of pain. For pain locks us in our own physicality, in our own lives, in our own selves. Pain, though so very real, is -- in that way -- an illusion. An illusion of life wherein the self exists divorced from our connection to others.

Pain is likewise debilitating. I recently read a New Yorker article about the over-prescribing of opiods, especially at medical centers in rural, socio-economically struggling communities. The doctor, who was ultimately jailed for what was deemed to be reckless and irresponsible behavior and unlawful distribution of controlled substances, seems alternately lost and naive. It turns out that many of his patients were misusing and abusing the drugs he prescribed. However, he does not come across as inherently immoral or malicious. With the possibility of being released, Schneider (the doctor) and his wife decide to become missionaries. The desire echoes the mission he felt he had in his previous life. Indeed, the author writes that "Schneider missed his conviction that he was alleviating people's suffering." And, in his own words, he tells her: "It was gratifying to help those people who really needed me -- people who I thought needed my help," he said, correcting myself. "I probably needed them more than they needed me. What a humbling experience." His ability to comfort was an integral aspect of his own identity.

He found comfort in helping (comforting) others. Indeed, recent findings have suggested that volunteering may do more for the volunteer than the recipients (e.g. increased happiness, 20% lower risk of death). Yet, in the above case, the doctor's own sense of comfort was, as the article is titled, a "Prescription for Disaster." And his own demise. So where does comfort lie? Perhaps it lies in the hands of others. Though we may seek solace alone, true comfort may arise from another's heart. It may lie in the 'true love and brotherhood' announced in 'tidings of comfort and joy'. It is only with the guidance of others that we will no longer go astray. I am not religious and yet the sentiment rings true.

And so I return to Sam and the middle school girl who listened to his story, who -- perhaps for the first time -- bore witness to the reality of evil in the world. In this, her sense of safety was threatened. In this, her secure self was somehow violated. Just as when I was first broken by the world -- when the 1990 Gulf War was announced on television and I fell apart, wracked by the knowledge that brutality was to exist in my world and in my future, not just in the past or in a textbook.

A mother who attended the event with the Holocaust survivors in the documentary spoke of her reaction: "As a mother, I kept trying to imagine what that would be like to have my kids taken away from me like that. And just not to know where they were. I think that struck me about as hard as anything." The violence of the world does strike us. It hits us with unimaginable blows. Some of us remain more sheltered, just by chance. But in the presence of those who have suffered and also in the presence of those who have suffered and endured, the world can crack and open -- frighteningly so -- and yet, there is comfort to be found. Another survivor, Joe, spoke of the importance of personal connection in the face of darkness: "I will tell you one thing. Every survivor had a story. And there is not enough paper in the whole world, and not enough pens, to write down what each survivor went through." No, never. We can never understand. But we can find comfort in the strength that remains and perseveres.

The Holocaust survivors in the documentary came to visit the children's school to see their project. More of them spoke that day. One of them spoke of the day the Americans came to the camp and how he was a free person thereafter. "I'm still here," he emphasized persistence and survival. "That's the main thing. I want you to know. I came here to the United States in 1948 and I've been the happiest ever." At this moment in the documentary, he begins to break down. He can hardly finish speaking, but he manages to say, "I want you to know happiness makes me cry more than anything else."

Happiness is the absence of pain, though pain never quite leaves. The pain strikes a stark contrast, painting the rest of one's life in shades measured against the darkness. The pain never leaves, but it can be shared. And perhaps this is where comfort lies. Not in the absence of anything, but in the sharing of pain. To counteract despair, we remain in the light of hope. And the giving of comfort may simply lie in the presence of others. And in listening to their stories.

the purity of inspiration, the impurity of self as filter

Agnes Martin

 Agnes Martin, one of my long-time favorite artists, spoke about inspiration in the following way:

"The best things in life happen to you when you are alone. You know, all of the revelations. Every day for twenty years, I've been saying 'What am I going to do next?' That's how I ask for an inspiration. I don't have any ideas myself. I have a vacant mind in order to do exactly what the inspiration calls for. And I don't start to paint until after I have an inspiration. And after I have it, I make up my mind that I'm not going to interfere... not have any ideas. That's really the trouble with art today. It seems to me that artists have the inspiration, but before they can get on the canvas, they've had about 50 ideas. And the inspiration disappears." (Martin, 1997)

Books can inspire... art, music, poetry. The view from a mountaintop after a long hike can be inspiring. People can inspire by their courage, their dedication, their heart, or their words of hope in the face of adversity. This is a different sort of inspiration from what Martin speaks of above. The former is an encouragement, an injection of spirit, a reason to continue to believe in others and in the promise of the world. The latter, Martin's sort, is an incitement to "do," a stimulus which produces something new. It is this sort of inspiration on which I would like to focus this entry.

I think that for a lot of people who create, the source of inspiration is hard to define. I've heard it described starting as an "internal churn" and then this restlessness builds to the point where someone must begin. And it is in beginning, that the inspiration continues to unfold. I know this is true for me. As Martin suggests, when I am writing at my best, I am merely a conduit for something else. Rather than being most full of myself and my own ideas, I am most empty... so that something else can travel through me. Now, where does this "something else" come from and what is it?

The word 'inspiration' comes from ancient Greek in which it meant more directly "breathed upon" and usually by a god. It came to mean the imitation of this blowing into or onto something and maintained its sense of motion towards even as it took on the sense of creative power with which we now associate it. Much, in fact, has to do with breath -- aspire (rough breathing), conspire (breathing together), respire (breathe again), transpire (breathe across). Breath is the most basic action of life. With his first breath, a newborn often cries -- needing to force the air out with a sort of violence... life begun with shock and force. And so, either way the word is taken, we are breathed into and we breathe out again. The inspiration is a force moving through us, but in so transformed.

Van Gogh painted five versions of his famous "Sunflowers," the most challenging perhaps being the one below with its yellow-on yellow-on yellow composition that nonetheless resonates with life.

Van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1889, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Was it the same force that inspired these paintings as inspired the incident with his ear? Is the restlessness that produces true greatness something that must also be, by definition, destructive?

And why did Van Gogh envision this painting as being part of a triptych -- two sunflower paintings flanking La Berceuse (Lullaby). An old woman sits rocking a cradle (indicated by the rope she holds). In this, she presents a source of solace, though the painting itself is dark and lonely. And her gaze drifts wistfully away from the viewer and the cradle (it seems). Lost in her own thoughts, the woman appears NOT in fact the archetype of motherhood that so many posit this painting to be... unless motherhood is taken to be complicated, weighty, esoteric, and somber. And perhaps there is accuracy in that portrait -- not as the entirety of motherhood, but as one particular angle of it.

Van Gogh, La Berceuse, 1889

Van Gogh was inspired not only to paint these three paintings, but to conceive of them as being displayed together -- the sunflowers acting as candles to illuminate the darkness of La Berceuse. "I don't want to paint the walls of cathedrals, but the gazes of men," said Van Gogh. "With red and yellow I want to paint all the miseries of society." Did painting bring Van Gogh a kind of peace? With the 1889 Sunflowers painting, he was apparently very satisfied... but this was the exception. Rather, his inspiration to paint, his need to create brought him continued suffering. His restlessness increased a restlessness and perhaps his anxiety. Inspiration is not a solace. It can indeed be a heavy burden.

Van Gogh himself felt that his work put his life at risk. But the inspiration that made him see and want to express the suffering he witnessed all around him never ceased. It seems there is something in that which connects us which is part of this thing called inspiration, but in its expression it becomes its own personal truth... of which there are an infinite number. As Picasso once said, "If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvasses on the same theme." Or as some English teachers will tell you, there are only 8 basic storylines in the world... but there are millions of stories... even if we take only one of these themes. (The 8 basic plots: The Cinderella story = unrecognized virtue is finally recognized; The Achilles story = fatal flaw leads to tragedy; The Orpheus story = good fortune is removed and result is examined; The Romeo & Juliet story = all love stories; The Irrepressible Hero story = protagonist confronts obstacles and finally succeeds; The Circe story = main character becomes entangled in devious plot planned by the villain; The Tristan story = love triangle; The Faust story = pact with the devil)

And so back to Martin. For she has explained how she painted "with my back to the world." Through this separation, she found she could listen more clearly to 'inspiration.'

"I think we don't deserve any credit. I think the inspiration comes to you, tells you exactly what to do, even when you are painting, tells you every brushstroke... I do take the blame though. With no credit, you'd think there'd be no blame but... You get shaken between inspiration and the finished product and you have to take the blame for that." (Martin, 1997)

The self can become an interference, according to Martin, between inspiration and its manifestation into something which the rest of the world can consume. Whatever inspiration is -- the divine, the supernatural, the supra-conscious -- there is a need to be open and receptive in order to receive it in the first place. In my humble opinion, I don't think inspiration has anything to do with divinity. I think it has to do with our personal connection with a certain truth, and perhaps there is a spirituality in the universal beginnings of that truth. But, because I believe that all truth is relative... or because inspiration must pass through each of us in order to be re-presented to others as its own truth, I think that the purity of inspiration as a force is lost through our personal interaction with it. We present a 'truth'... but in its impurity and imperfection. For that is the best that we can do. We can feel and sense something greater, but all we do can is reveal our personal (and very small) angle of perspective upon that 'truth.' Taking Picasso's quote as a starting point, one could say that if you took every person in the world to exist, to have existed, to exist in the future, and combined all of their painted canvasses depicting one particular cypress tree at a single point in time, for example, then perhaps we could come to the 'truth' of the matter. Perhaps we could touch again the fullness and purity of inspiration, but only through this combined effort. And therein lies the impossibility of it all... of course. And inspiration remains distant and inexplicable... and all the more wondrous because of it.

You don't have to like the paintings of Agnes Martin... or Picasso... or Van Gogh. Liking is not the point in art. The point is seeing. And perhaps trying to see both the self that produced this finality, and the inspiration that incited it. Your hand would not produce a square grid in quite the same way. No one's hand would. Therein lies a certain magic.

finding your thoughts in the onslaught of information

In the middle of the night, there are thoughts. Thoughts that are completely my own. They wake me up and keep me awake. They circle around and manifest into new thoughts and bigger problems until they make my heart race. Sometimes I lay there listening to my heart and wishing it would just shut up so I could rest. Thank god not all wishes are granted.

These are original thoughts. They are thoughts of things to do, of things about which I fear and worry, of things of which I am unsure and do not know how to resolve. Every now and then, they are beautiful thoughts too. Something phrased in just the right way for a poem. An image of me and my son playing on the beach in a summer to come. The way my mother took my hand and squeezed it tight when my emotions got the best of me. I'm here, she said without speaking. And the thoughts come in waves, over and over, washing over me to make me feel like I'm drowning, and then rinsing me clean with notions of what can be... and finally I sleep.

The other day I was on Yahoo's main page clicking through their "news" items. I read about the best ways to lose holiday weight gain, about an NFL player's reaction to losing his beloved wife, about the top 10 gaming smartphones. I watched a video of Britney Spears' son showing off his dance moves. Did I care? No. Did I, in fact, really not care? Yes. What was I doing then? I stood up from the computer 15-20 minutes later, after perusing what Yahoo thought I needed to know, and felt stupider... and empty, almost dirty. Trashy, that was it. Something about the whole process felt cheap and empty and flimsy.

Guess when I started trying to sort this all out? Yup, in the middle of the night. And I began thinking about how this wrap-up of everything important by Yahoo was personally meaningless to me. My head was BEING filled, passively, with many things, most of which I moved away from not feeling any the better, the smarter, or the more enlightened for knowing. Perhaps I felt more 'on top' of the hype. But that was it.

I know someone who, whenever I see him, will ask me, "Did you hear about the historic tree that caught fire in Florida?" or "Can you believe this thing with the cruise ship sinking off the coast of Italy?" I've recently realized that he seems to feel a need to not only be on top of this gossip, but to spread it as if he discovered the story on some obscure website that is getting only 9 hits, rather than on the front page of Yahoo. This is also a person that can't seem to reconcile his 'empathy' for those who died in the cruise ship disaster ("it's terrible; people died!") with his lack of empathy for a family he has betrayed and deeply wounded.

Do we think our own thoughts anymore? At times other than 2 and 3am in the morning? Certainly, but it gets harder. It gets harder when one of our jobs as modern human beings is to always be on top of everything, including ALL of the news in the world, even the trash. For things are not pre-filtered for us, but rather poured on top of us and we must climb through the pile of trash... and sometimes that alone feels like a victory. So, in some small way, I can understand the person above... shouting his newly-found freedom from the top of the trash heap.

I remember when I was a senior in high school and I started reading the New York Times in the mornings. I'm a slow methodical reader (and other things) and I never got much further than the first few pages before I needed to rush to get off to school. I probably read three stories. I felt behind, as many of my classmates would come in mentioning articles from EVERY section. Not only had they read the whole paper, it seemed to me at the time, they had memorized it. And my father revealed to me how the headmaster at my brothers' school read through four whole papers every morning. FOUR WHOLE PAPERS?? I couldn't even comprehend it.

Nonetheless, I remembered the stories I had read. They stayed with me through the day. They brought up questions in my mind. They revealed to me that there were parts of the world whose geography I didn't even know. And because I only read two or three articles a day, I could go home later and pursue these questions, or look up the country on a map... and spend time thinking new thoughts. For that was the other thing these articles did for me. They made me think new thoughts... without overwhelming me with so much information that I just shut down completely.

I worry. I worry about too many things probably. But I do worry about how the overflow of information and our need to stay abreast of "everything" shuts out our ability to think new thoughts. We need that extra space in our heads. But habits become habitual so easily. And so we read what Yahoo believes we should know. And we read the updates of our friends and family on Facebook. And then we have had enough. Because we want to get to other things. We want to get back to life. But are we returning there thoughtlessly? Literally and figuratively?

Life will not move without new thoughts... original thoughts... sometimes ridiculous thoughts. If it is true that, as Marcus Aurelius once said, "The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts," then we must do a better job of thinking our own thoughts. Improve the quality, not the quantity. For thoughts make the world and thoughts make us. And I would rather be full of a single thought, labored over and rewritten and reworked and produced from a pen in my hand on a single blank sheet of paper -- my very own thought -- than be master of every news item to appear that day... but lost as to the direction of my very own life.