I’ve felt combative recently whenever a new view or idea that differed from my own was presented to me. I’d catch myself feeling this way but would then be too preoccupied with the residue of my self-frustration to course correct in real time. The result was that I learned and contributed less than I could have had my stance been more open and curious, less debate-y, more dialogic.
Maybe this is a consequence of my brief stint as an academic. In constantly having to defend and justify my research, I learned that it’s easier to break things down than to build them up. Regardless, it’s not the most pleasant or fruitful way of being. It tends to leave you with a bitter taste in your mouth, a sense of what’s wrong and problematic but no clarity as to what could be.
Ode to the guitar
Is it the harsh grief
that pours out of you,
your thrumming beats, or the
buzzing of wings:
is this what I’ll recall?
Or are you
more thoroughly thrilling
in silence,
the dove schematized
or a woman’s hip,
a pattern that emerges
from its foam
and reappears: a turgid, tumbled
and resurrected rose.
from Odes to Common Things, Pablo Neruda
Two years ago, while visiting my parents for the holidays, I noticed an acoustic guitar in my brother's room. This is new, I thought. "Dad got it for me," he said in a disinterested tone. Curious, I took it back to my room, looked up some guitar basics, and began to play with it. My fingers pulsed with pain and self-hatred by the end of the hour, but a new world had opened up for me.
When I think about the past year, I see a child clad in the slowness of seasons, walking the same path by the same lake in the same woods over and over again, searching for something solid to hang onto, comfort in the familiarity of dirt roads, dressed trees, and footsteps perhaps, certainly meaning, in the face of a reality that has just turned dream-like. Sometimes he stops to skip rocks across the water, hoping they will carry his worries with them. He doesn’t know where he’s going, only that he must keep going.
Feelings are fleeting by nature, like the passage of clouds on a warm summer day.
Though too often we wear them like immutable masks and declare, “This is me. This is all I will ever be.” Sad. Resentful. Despondent. Happy. In truth they are masks, transient facades that hide a more true and vulnerable sense of self.
We put these masks on when we’re scared, when we’re too afraid to ask for attention and love; when we’re on the verge of breaking, but don’t know how to ask for help. When we’re in search of something solid in the face of groundlessness. Even happiness is something we try too hard to hold onto, strangling it of all significance in the process.