How Is It We Are Here, Not There — and for How Long?

[Image: “Work in Progress,” by John E. Simpson.]

Now that it is — as they say — That Time of Year, I am looking for, and (even better) easily finding, reasons to smile even as I look out of this second-floor window to a forest of orange- and rusty-red-colored treetops, with the bare-barked finger bones of winter practically trembling, eager for a chance to shake off the hues of autumn.

I’m very glad to see that our friend over at whiskey river, whoever they may be, seems to have shaken off the bug which has bedeviled their posting schedule and, surely, their real life as well — like with this:

If you’re reading this, if there’s air in your lungs on this November day, then there is still hope for you. Your story is still going. And maybe some things are true for all of us. Perhaps we all relate to pain. Perhaps we all relate to fear and loss and questions. And perhaps we all deserve to be honest, all deserve whatever help we need. Our stories are all so many things: Heavy and light. Beautiful and difficult. Hopeful and uncertain. But our stories aren’t finished yet. There is still time, for things to heal and change and grow. There is still time to be surprised. We are still going, you and I. We are stories still going.

(Jamie Tworkowski [source])

…and, even better, adds (last stanza):

Linear Illusions

Some days seem significant.
Premature lacewings hatch in the house.
Crawling over vast wastes of plastic
they fly toward light.
Outside, snow is crusted. Inside,
insects programmed in perfection—
on the wrong side of the window.

This evening Cabernet Sauvignon,
mushroom omelet.
Outside, rain has brought up worms.
They lie exhausted in straight lines.
Some are drowned.
Narrow and pink at either end,
they cannot decide which direction.

I have decided on blank pages.
In them you can travel forever;
white flying toward your eyes;
as when driving through falling snow
you see only those snowflakes
you are cutting across;
relentlessly horizontal.

(Ruth Stone [source])

Over the last week I myself have encountered in my reading one grace note after another — clicking past like milestones unsought but glimpsed from a train car through the countryside. Like:

You can’t plant a forest, only a forest makes a forest, because a forest is not just a few trees. It’s a huge ecosystem of many related things that we can’t even begin to understand. It changes. Thoreau was writing about that on his deathbed. The life in the soil and everything begins to come back. There’s a point where it begins to take over and do it itself. That’s so moving when you begin to see that. Most people don’t even recognize that is what is happening, but that’s what’s happening. It’s there, the earth has it.

What I mean by our human arrogance is that we think the universe somehow owes us eternal life right here on earth, and that’s not so. The universe doesn’t owe us a damn thing; the universe doesn’t even notice us. This can sound like a depressing viewpoint, but I think it’s an exhilarating viewpoint. Accept your place in this incredible, incomprehensible richness of life, but also accept the unknown in the universe. We’re part of it and it’s miraculous. How did it ever happen that we should be here?

(William S. Merwin [source])

…and then, just yesterday, I read excerpts of an interview published under the title “Life Is Hard. And That’s Good.” This sample comes from a discussion about how the COVID-19 pandemic has distorted our sense of what’s important in day-to-day living:

There’s a distinction I make between telic and atelic activities. The jargon is from linguistics, but it comes from the Greek word telos, for end, where a telic activity is one that has a final end state, something you’re aiming to achieve, like getting a promotion at work or getting married or getting a job. The kind of things we’d think of as projects, and they have this structure where the thing that you want is always at a distance in the future, or the moment you achieve it, it’s in the past and it’s over…

Atelic activities are ones that don’t have a terminal endpoint. So, just as there is walking home, there’s just going for a walk. Or, just as there is having kids or making dinner for your kids, there’s the ongoing activity of parenting. When you’re engaged in an atelic activity that doesn’t aim at some end point in the future, you don’t have this problem that satisfaction is always in the future, or then immediately in the past. You don’t have the problem that what you’re doing is extinguishing or undermining your engagement with the activity, because there’s nothing inherent in your engagement with it that’s trying to extinguish it. A shift that it’s very helpful to make in relation to activities in our lives is to become less focused on telic activities, or projects, and redirect ourselves to the value of atelic activities, the value of the process.

(Kieran Setiya [source (note: site permits two free articles per month)]

…and finally, this:

It is part of the human experience that we are constantly gripping a good fellow by the shoulders and wishing him well, taking comfort from the notion that we will hear word of him soon enough. But experience is less likely to teach us how to bid our dearest possessions adieu. And if it were to? We wouldn’t welcome the education. For eventually, we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity—all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance. This armoire, we are prone to recall, is the very one in which we hid as a boy; and it was these silver candelabra that lined our table on Christmas Eve; and it was with this handkerchief that she once dried her tears, et cetera, et cetera. Until we imagine that these carefully preserved possessions might give us genuine solace in the face of a lost companion.

But, of course, a thing is just a thing.

And so, slipping his sister’s scissors into his pocket, the Count looked once more at what heirlooms remained and then expunged them from his heartache forever

(Amor Towles [source])