Introspective 26 | unobtrusive lucidity

Looking Different

There are these occasional moments in life that are simply and absolutely too surreal to ever just forget. They are the moments that are inscribed onto the parchment of our memories in permanent ink in the instant that they happen. You’ll never lose them, at least not normally, and you know that. Some of them are events that were momentous or tragic, and unexpected…you know, the ones to which you can immediately answer the question, “where were you when (fill in the blank)?” Others are things that you knew were coming, and that you were anticipating, but that you had no clue how they would cause your entire life to go sideways. As much as you sort of knew that you would never be able to wrap your brain around the rest of your life afterward, you just didn’t know to what extent that you wouldn’t be able to do so, or how little, in that instant, you would care that you couldn’t.

When Karen called me at my day job nine months ago as she was leaving her doctor’s office and told me we were expecting, something happened that rarely happens with me. I was speechless. I was, in fact, stupid for several minutes, unable to do basic tasks like talk on the phone with any sort of proficiency. I remember driving home that afternoon, and thinking that life literally looked different to me. As strange as it sounds, the vehicles in traffic around me looked differently, the people around me as well. And here any skills I have as a writer fail me, because I couldn’t describe how they looked different, only that they did.

Last Wednesday, after a long and arduous labor, I was sitting at Karen’s side, able only to see her face among all of the accoutrements of the operating room as a C-section was performed to deliver our little girl. I’ve jokingly told some friends since that night that, up until then, our daughter had sort of existed only in theory in my mind. That is, all the business and painstaking care of preparing for her arrival had busied our schedules, brought our friends rallying, and taxed our bank account, but, not only have I never had a child before, but neither have I spent any significant time around them in my life. Not only did I not know what to expect, but I didn’t even a referent for what this could be like, outside of the stories of others.

The cry came out of the blue that night, piercing the room while yet being melodious, and I saw my tiny little girl for the first time. I’ve experienced my share of moments in which I felt the Divine reach into my daily life, and certainly that was one of them. I was exhausted, with no more than three hours of sleep out of the last twenty four, and had honestly become emotionally flattened until that moment. Then, all at once, all of those months spent talking to my Karen’s stomach paid off, because my daughter knew my voice! Due to some complications, I went with our daughter for her physical, and stayed with her for the nearly three hours of recovery until Karen could join us. In that period of time, she came to trust my voice, to calm when she heard my voice, to focus her wide and inquisitive eyes on her daddy, to orient immediately to the sound of my voice. Since then, when no one else can console her, I can. As overwhelmed and maddening and stressful as the last few days have been, as poorly as I have coped with the chaos that has descended on the household despite my best attempts to curtail it, the protective instinct that I have for my daughter is at times overwhelming. I have had, and continue to have, moments in which I’m irrevocably convinced of my own ineptitude, as well as the knowledge that I cannot possibly continue this for another day. Yet, I know her face, I can discern her cries, I let her grasp my finger in her tiny hand, and I get to know her better daily.

For the rest of my life, I will be getting to know her. She isn’t just a theory anymore.

I don’t think I have to describe a faith metaphor about this…I think you can get there from here. I just know that while I knew my life would never be the same upon returning from the hospital as it had been when I left for it, I didn’t have any way of predicting that it would be this different. And, if I thought that everything looked different on the day I found out, that pales compared to the way things look today in a such an extreme as to be nonsensical.

I have a daughter. I’m a father. I’m not just married now, but I have a family of my own. There’s so much that goes with that, that I can’t even begin to unpack it yet. And I’m not sure that I ever will.

And, somehow, I’m beginning to be okay with that.

Intermission #1

In the last 24 hours, give or take, a lot has been going through my head. Bemusing at best, contradictory at worst, I’ve been looking for balance, that in-between place that covers the gap between what Karen calls “organic matter” and technology.

Working with people instead of gadgets, the latter of which is a hobby and semi-professional interest, and fascinated by the academic thoughts that this brings about.

Enjoying e-books, while missing paperbacks.

Astounded by new life, and how this whole process works, and comforting myself by buying new toys.

Wishing for missing dreams, and being disturbed when they return.

Sometimes you just need an intermission, you know?
A free-verse groove to alleviate the risk of entering a routine…
Not poetry, but not quiet prose,
Just to get this out of my head, to try something different, and see what happens.

Motivation for Muck

I’ve been thinking lately about something that Karen enjoys pointing out to me about writing. She’s very passionate about quoting (loosely) Jeffery Overstreet in saying that there are two reasons to jump into the muck in the story that you’re writing. One is to roll around in it and get dirty. The other is to clean it up. You have to decide which is your reason as you’re writing your story.

I was forced to re-visit this idea in a discussion after I wasted two hours of my life suffering through the cinematic chaos-fighting-chaos tragedy that was this year’s movie, The Green Hornet, in which a classic radio superhero is reduced to stereotypical American idiocy who gets his kicks from driving around and blowing everything up for narcissistic purposes (even in the end, whatever good he does is to better himself). While I could talk about the obvious snapshot of our culture that can be seen in this conglomeration of images that someone mistakenly called a film, I won’t give it the time it doesn’t deserve, because the commentary is unintentional.

In short, there was nothing redemptive about the movie. The entire two hours was one long jump into the muck in which everyone rolled around and got dirty. Destruction for destruction’s sake, disregard for good or evil in search of only the self, indiscriminate violence, 3rd grade humor. The darkness is glorified in this film, not portrayed for a reason.

I mention this movie not to review it, but to point out the opposite of what I hope to accomplish when I write…to sort of define by counter-example. Karen frequently points out that my writing is dark, and that she has a difficult time reading my fiction for partly that reason. She has difficulty finding a redemptive element, which is bothersome to me because that’s exactly what I want to make central in the writing. The darkness is there to show how amazing the light is when it takes over. We jump into the muck in order to show how much better it is to be clean than dirty, so to speak. That’s my goal in my fiction.

I also firmly believe Madeleine L’Engle when she said that the characters will tell the writer where they need to go, and that the writer’s job is to record the adventure. The protagonist in my current work-in-progress (the one for which I’m pushing so hard to make a self-imposed deadline of finishing Part I by mid-week) has experienced horrific trauma in her childhood. When I began imagining the story, and when this character appeared in my mind’s eye, it wasn’t like I had much choice to exercise in the matter. She is who she is at the time the novel takes place because of what happened to her in the past. Assuming that I can accurately record her journey, then there will be redemption of her situation as she explores relationships with others and her own sense of identity. Sometimes, though, its so difficult to write her flashbacks…because of the nature of the trauma…that I’m left struggling with exactly the problem I talked about above: I have to be so careful to not just get dirty when I jump into the muck, and so intentional to clean it out.

Because simply adding to the chaos, contributing to the noise, does no one any good, not even if all you’re aiming for is entertainment. As is so often the case, this choice is reflected in “real” life, as well. I’m in a professional situation currently that is really frustrating. In my mind, its too messy. My instinct is to withdraw from it, to pass it off as someone else’s problem, to compartmentalize my brain around it. I think, though, that if I were to choose to do that, that I would be rolling in the muck and just getting dirty. I’m not redeeming anything if that’s the choice I make. I’m not making anything better.

And, with a daughter preparing to join us any day now, I don’t want to leave any more of the world mired in muck than I absolutely have to. The more I try to take a hand in redeeming, the better a world she will inherit.

Photo Attribution: Sean MacEntee

The Walls Start Shakin’, Earth Was Quakin’

Something I’ve learned about Virginia since I moved here a few years ago is that everyone over-reacts to everything involving weather. I’ve joked a lot about how a bit of winter weather causes life to grind to a halt here. Thursday, as a thunderstorm that was a bit heavier than usual rolled through the area as a likely result of the most recent hurricane, people were jumping and moving about quite nervously. Several emergency vehicles flew through a nearby intersection. Anything other than sunshine brings about its share of chaos here.

The reason I’m able to distance myself from these reactions is that I’ve lived through a lot of severe thunderstorms in my life, and I grew up seeing winter weather the likes of which Virginia may never have experienced. Nothing that happens here concerns me, nothing causes me to be overly worried or concerned. My experience tells me it will be okay.

Tuesday of this week, while returning some comments on some recent posts here, I noticed a sound above me, as though someone were running around upstairs in the building that I was in. I thought it odd, but didn’t give it a lot more consideration. Except that it didn’t go away. It became louder. A colleague looked up from her phone call across the room to ask me what I thought the sound was. At that point, the room began to shake.

I’ve always done better at keeping very calm in real crisis situations than I do with minor things. For example, if someone gets injured and needs help, I’m very calm and composed, but if I drop my sunglasses, I start to hyperventilate. Tuesday was a calm and composed sort of crisis. I remember sitting still, looking around, and thinking, “was that an earthquake? Do we even get earthquakes in Virginia?”

When the building that I had been in was evacuated, I received a text from Karen, who was currently about 30 minutes away from where I was, asking, “Did you feel that?” That was the first that I became convinced that I had experienced an earthquake.

Now, West coast friends will tell me I’m a wimp, and that I need to deal. I suppose that, in the same way that winter weather doesn’t concern me because of my experience, earthquakes are too regular for them. When I was in grad school, an old girlfriend was doing an internship in Florida for the summer. I remember seeing that a hurricane was moving through her area, and calling her to see if she was okay. She laughed at me, and that anything under a Category 3 didn’t cause anyone to worry there. I thought of this when I read a tweet on Tuesday to the effect of, “Anything under a 6.0 doesn’t even get us out of bed” from someone on the West coast.

Prior to Tuesday, though, I had never experienced an earthquake. While I am glad to say I’ve had the experience in a way, and while I’m very aware that this was very minor as earthquakes go, the feeling of powerlessness I experienced for about 30 seconds that afternoon was something that I didn’t enjoy at all. I don’t exactly have a bucket list of natural disasters to experience, and I’m glad that this was the relatively minor event that it was.

Still, when a friend posted to the lyrics to the AC/DC song that I used to title this post on his Facebook feed, I couldn’t help but smile. I lived through my first earthquake this week. If its all the same, I’d just as soon avoid a second.

Photo Attribution: dbking

A Philosophy of Road-Rage

I have a confession to make.

Not that I’m trying to place you, my reader, in the role of priest in a virtual confessional, mind you. I just think that its important to point out that I’m dealing with the issue about which I’m about to express concern.

It went down like this: I had to run an unexpected errand to pick up some carpentry supplies on Monday night. I was driving my wife’s car. I was irritated because I had had one of those days. Virginia is not the place to drive if you’re having a bad day, because everyone who is native to Virginia seems to experience difficulty with this concept of driving. This was proven by the gentleman in front of me who, while on a major artery of traffic, felt it appropriate to come to what was nearly a complete stop at a green light in order to let the car in the right turn lane make the turn, because apparently it hadn’t occurred to him to get into that same lane in order to make the turn. As I abruptly found myself in a position to test the reliability of my wife’s brakes, I pounded in vain to locate the horn in the dim light of dusk. When that failed, and the gentleman in the car gave me an accusing look, I did it. I lost control.

I gave him finger.

In retrospect, I have no idea what that guy’s night had been like, or even if he was, in fact, a Virginia driver. Perhaps he was following the vehicle in the turn lane, unfamiliar with the city and trying to not get separated. Who knows what might have caused him to drive that way? Yet, I found myself without mercy in that moment. It took only minutes after for me to be able to find that mercy, to want to retract the rude hand gesture. No matter how bad of a day I had had, he could easily have had worse.

The concern that I’m expressing here is that of a loss of civility.

Friday night, I was out with some friends for dinner and drinks, and ended up having a great conversation with a new acquaintance about film and theatre and literature and society. Specifically, the girl we had just met was pining over the fact that she hadn’t grown up in the thirties, because things were so much different then, and different for the better. I agreed. We talked about how everyone dressed with class, about how women were sexual without being (her word) “trashy,” about how the music was better, about how we were just more civil as a society.

Now, in my personal opinion, I don’t think the U.S. has ever done too terribly well at this whole civility thing. I guess we chose to let that go in favor of functionality when we rebelled against the crown. In any case, and whatever the cause of this downward cultural spiral (which could be the topic of a good dissertation, but certainly can’t fit within a blog post), we’re not as civil now as we were then. We’re more prone to violence, to a sense of entitlement to retribution. We’re more inclined to scream at each other and refuse to consider any perspective other than our own (as witnessed in recent political deadlocks). We’re less tolerant, and more judgmental. We’ve shed stains of certain forms of racism, only to begin to fall into others. We hunger for warfare.

What we don’t do well is talk softly. Or listen. Or empathize. Or, for that matter, consider anyone before ourselves. We ignore the communities around us in order to defend our individualism, and to “stay out of it” if we think something is wrong that we don’t want to make our problem. That’s how people end up lying deceased in their homes for days before the neighbors bother to investigate. That’s why our politicians have forgotten that they were elected to practice the art of compromise. That’s why we call each other hurtful and bigoted names instead of seeking first to understand. That’s why we watch reality television programs to judge others who end up taking their own lives.

That’s why we give the finger to the car in front of us who made a simple driving mistake, one that we’ve likely all made at some point or another.

I need to remember that my actions have repercussions, not only for myself, but for others. There are concentric circles moving out from us, and they cause the ripples of our actions to move others through this pond of life in which we co-exist. If I focused on smiling and picking up someone else’s bill, for example, instead of visually expressing my displeasure at the driver in front of me, those ripples can cause good, instead of ill. And, if I am to take my faith seriously, then I should be motivated to do exactly that.

The term “civility” has a Latin etymology. I’ve never taken Latin, but I understand it to mean (loosely) “what is proper to a citizen.” I wish that those of us who live in the U.S. would re-discover the concept of behaving “properly.” We seem to be under the misconception that this would involve living prudishly, or forsaking freedoms. I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think it simply means considering others before ourselves, or at least at the same level that we consider ourselves.

We’re all human beings. We all have bad days and good opinions. We should all begin there in our interactions, use that as a staring point. I’m hoping I can model that for my daughter when she joins us soon.

I hope.

Photo Attribution: whereisat