kindness

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…Sometimes I Need a Witness

August 20, 2010 | View Comments

“Karma owes you a talking puppy, wings, and an extra birthday.”
- a friend, October 2009

“Sometimes I see myself fine, sometimes I need a witness.”
- Dar Williams

One day last fall a woman was waiting for me when I came home from walking with Sawyer. She used to be my neighbor but had moved away months prior, and we had seldom even exchanged pleasantries, though I did at one point jump-start her car. After an uncomfortably long stretch of small talk she asked if I’d drive with her to Raleigh to pick up a couch and bring it back to her new apartment. Right then. Now, I’m used to being asked to haul things in my truck, and I have trouble saying no when anyone asks for my help, but random and immediate solicitations by relative strangers pinged even my this-lady-might-be-crazy radar.

I declined, but offered to help on a day when this woman wasn’t showing up unannounced on my doorstep and making absurd requests. That’s how I found myself in a sketchy part of Durham at a perpetual yard sale, waiting on my former neighbor to show up (half an hour late), then waiting for her to pick a couch (the one she’d seen on Craigslist wasn’t up to snuff), then waiting for her to haggle in broken English (she borrowed the guy’s laptop to look for a better deal online), then watching her nearly walk away because she wasn’t sure she wanted any of the couches. I won’t say I was rewarded for my patience, but she did pop a button off her pants as we finally unloaded the couch at her apartment and tried for a comically long time to pretend nothing had happened. It’s hard, I noted, to hold up your end of a couch when one arm is preoccupied with holding your pants up.

When I tell this story, I am sometimes scolded for being too kind. It has been suggested, in jest and in earnest, that I am due some cosmic reward. I don’t like to think about karma because if there’s a Thumb on the scales I don’t want to end up resenting It. It’s hard enough figuring out the right thing to do without trying to keep an eye on a ledger that I have no hope of understanding. I don’t want to coast on the goodwill from good deeds any more than I want to ask “Why me?” when struck by random tragedy. Besides, by my own measure I tend to fall short of what it takes to be a decent human being, and that wouldn’t bode well for me in the karma department, would it?

Hold It High For Me

In January I applied for a job. The one I had was soul-crushing and had sapped just about all of the creative energy that I had to spare, and the one I applied for was forwarded to me by several friends, all saying how perfect a match I was for it. Even I had to admit that I was pretty amazingly qualified for it: the ideal candidate, according to the job description, “speaks geek as well as Chicago and is fond of both pencils and pixels.” I wrote a stirring cover letter, beginning a months-long courtship.

Four months, three interviews, two editorial tests, and about 5,000 words later, I was offered the job. It felt like winning the lottery. Like learning to fly. Like going to college all over again. Like I was in over my head. If there’s a jackpot, I hit it. Karma puppy has licked my face. I am lucky. I am blessed.

Maybe my last job took more out of me than I thought, or maybe The Sun puts something in the water, or maybe I was always deficient in certain vitamins of the spirit, but change is afoot beyond spending my days in a new office full of amazing people doing important work.

People say, “You look younger.” Or, “Have you met someone?” Or, “If you keep looking younger every time I see you it’s gonna get weird in a few years.” I don’t know what to tell them, except that it’s hard not to live a little more fully when you spend a lot of time with ideas that are begging you to do so. I don’t attribute this just to a change of workplace, however compelling; I don’t have a name for whatever else is at play, either. My engine was primed…there just wasn’t any gas in the tank.

I have always been, I think, the quiet, deliberative, self-effacing person you know (if you know me). The kind of engagement I crave has shaped the kinds of interactions I’m comfortable with–an intimate dinner party, yes; a rock concert, not so much. Establishing capital-R Relationships has also been tricky. I don’t go to church, and I find online dating a soulless prospect lacking the inherent mystery, beauty, and chaos of life (and of relationships). Nor am I going to approach someone in a bar: for one thing, it’s too loud to have a conversation; beyond that, I think the navigation of social expectations in that setting is lousy with the kind of potential misinterpretations that I find excruciating and excruciatingly boring. I resist putting people in a position where they have to say no to me. So I don’t ask for help a lot, or for things that I might really want. I can talk myself out of almost anything involving another person by persuading myself that there’s likely no reciprocity.

Of late, though, some of these anxieties have eased. I am more receptive to new opportunities than I’ve been since I started college in 1997. My life is joyous. It takes some getting used to. It’s discomfiting for an introvert to not find his inner workings familiar. With this comes a tremendous urge to share this energy, to be kinder to my friends, to share my happiness, to pay it forward, as they say. So I’ve been saying “yes” to every opportunity that’s offered–routine social engagements like dinner parties, or movies, or drinks with friends that I often felt too drained to participate in over the last couple years. All that activity feels like it’s a correction of balance, a restoration of equilibrium long out of whack. Like the mermaid sings, “I want to be where the people are.” It seems I’ve figured out how to short-circuit the habit of second-guessing myself that usually keeps me confined to a teensier box.

It is exhilarating, of course, but it also feels a little more unrestrained than I am typically comfortable with. I’m not really worried about myself–I’m due a few lumps, and to maintain balance this joy has to be leavened with some new pain. But because I have become somewhat unpredictable to myself, I worry that I might be more capable of doing or saying things that could harm other people. It’s foolproof to be the wallflower, always observing, never engaging; it’s risky to reach out and touch people without knowing how fragile they are or how a twitch of my finger might inflict unintentional harm.

I realize I’m describing the way humans interact as if it’s a new and unique condition: late-onset humanity, maybe. I’ll get used to it. For several weeks I suspected that this is all just the first blush of a new job, a new opportunity, and that I’d settle back into a routine, maybe a little perkier for my trouble but not significantly changed. But I’m beginning to think of it all as a pipe that got unclogged and now flows with a fiercely won, indomitable energy, not a box whose clasp got broken and could be re-sealed.

penumbra
Creative Commons License photo credit: darkmatter

I don’t know whether this is all a long-building wave of good intention that finally crested or just a random point in a random cycle. The thing about mystery is once you try to name it, it’s a little less magic. In my new boss’s office is a sign that says “Be Kinder Than Necessary.” If this is a wave, I’m trying to do my part to help the next person catch it. All I know is, it’s nice to see you again, world. I’ll try to keep my head above water.

Acoustic footnotes:

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Sometimes I See Myself Fine…

March 23, 2010 | View Comments

Note: Let’s call this one “by request,” sort of. Some people with whom I’ve been corresponding wanted to know how my brain works and how it got that way. My response is an attempted abbreviation. For a fuller account, I refer you to the complete archives and all future posts of this very blog.

Everything is broken. We have ravaged the planet in ways that all but assure our own demise. In case somehow our gluttony does not eradicate us and we sidestep the many small accidents that could crush our frail forms, we tirelessly invent new and exciting ways to kill each other on purpose. Our ability to communicate is hampered by a shortage of meaningful public discourse and a dwindling attention span. The few who can still find beauty and respond to it are crushed by the many who are held rapt by modern bread and circuses, who perceive any challenge to this unsustainable way of life as an absolute indictment. Every move we make is checkmate. Every conscientious act requires a battered but willful optimism. Cormac McCarthy describes this world beautifully in Blood Meridian: “The truth about the world…is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it from birth and thereby bled it of all its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.” My preoccupation is with how to live in such a world.

I am broken too. Empathy in the face of our precarious position feels like the only recourse, but it is crippling to expose myself to both the pain and the apathy of other people. Kurt Vonnegut seems to concur: “There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind” (from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater). For those of us to whom the impulse toward kindness comes easily, the reward is a generative energy that smooths the bumpy road. Those of us who mistrust the motives of other people’s kindness carry a constant, taxing wariness. I need all the energy I can muster.

We cannot make our way alone, and I look to the companions in my life for many strengths. The songwriter Dar Williams says “I act like I have faith, and like that faith never ends, but I really just have friends.” I come from a large family, but I am not comfortable among them. Their fundamentalist world has no room for faith in anything other than God (or even other ways of worshiping the God they do accept), but I hold my friends as dear as any spiritual guide. Dar also says, in the same song, “Sometimes I see myself fine, sometimes I need a witness.” However well I may think I know myself, it is important to me that the people with whom I share my life also know me. We cannot give each other the solace of kindness until we have tried to understand ourselves and each other.

It is a kindness to share our stories, to help each other piece together our own meager truths. This is why we write. Annie Dillard warns us: ”[T]he impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.” This may be why we burrow into memory, not to hide in the sand, but for clues that tell us how we should live. We have nothing else to share.

Knowing each other isn’t as simple as sharing our stories. We get lost in the translation, as Marilynne Robinson observes in Gilead: “Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.” Though perception is fallible, even with someone as articulate as Robinson telling the story, I choose to welcome my people ‘round my own sputtering campfire instead of holding them, suspect, at arm’s length.

Since misperception is inevitable, any of my actions can have any meaning, depending on who perceives them. What is truth to me might be anathema to someone else. This does not stop any of us from seeking universal answers to the big questions, often with results as absurd as the questions themselves. Douglas Adams had a particular flair for demonstrating this absurdity. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to the great question of life, the universe, and everything is revealed to be “forty-two.” The problem, of course, is that we don’t know what the Great Question is.

Eric Taylor, a songwriter from Texas, thought the Great Question might be whether or not God exists, and he went looking for Him in the desert. Miles from civilization, alone and still godless at the end of his quest, one night he dug a fire pit and unearthed a baby blue Donald Duck diaper pin buried in the sand. Is the diaper pin God? He is unwilling to deny the possibility. I wouldn’t like to guess either. Eric is prone to exaggeration, and I’m not certain any part of his story ever even took place. It wouldn’t matter if it hadn’t. We still need fables, too. So much of the information I receive is deliberately misleading–processed through filters of advertising or partisan politics or false piety–that I think it becomes habitual to assume all information is misleading. Those who seek to share something true with me have to work around this almost unconscious suspiscion, skirting the facts, if there are such things, to make another kind of point. “Trust me,” pleads Jeanette Winterson in The Passion, “I’m telling you stories.” Like Eric, she then tells an absurd story in which the metaphorical becomes real—the narrator is asked to reclaim a lover’s heart, which is in a literal jar on a literal shelf in the home of a former lover. I trust stories that are as askew as our off-kilter world. I don’t trust anyone claiming to have access to absolute truth.

It doesn’t help that the answers don’t have to make any sense. Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself” issues this challenge: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; (I am large—I contain multitudes.)” I’d like to be so comfortable with contradictions. In many ways I am, but I wonder: if I were truly at peace with the multitudes, would I still be searching for answers? I think so—I think each new answer joins a chorus, which unlike those of Greek theater is unchoreographed and incoherent, some members juggling fire, some shouting Tourettic from the stage, and some sitting with their knees pulled to their chests and blankets over their heads, rocking back and forth under the nearest tree.

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