Last Sunday featured one of those gorgeously damp spring mornings when the sky is dull and just light enough to cast a breathtaking clarity in the air. It’s easy to miss when you’re looking at clouds.
I took a walk in Central Park that morning and didn’t listen to anything. Not music, not a podcast. I realized recently that a sort of juvenile thrill -- this sensation that makes me feel like a kid -- starts to emerge when I’m engulfed in the moment, and most often these moments take place in nature. You can imagine my surprise to have learned this because just last week, I was repeating an oft-recited declaration I’ve come to make on my own behalf: “I don’t care for tree-lined streets,” I will say. “My preference is a gated bicycle, chain wrapped around a city sign pole.”
I think it’s still true -- two things can be at once -- but when I was walking towards the park on Sunday, I noticed stalks and stalks of tulips and branches full of tree leaves covered in raindrops. I kept bending down or tip-toeing up to get a closer look and found myself thinking so much about my daughters. How beautiful it is to be inside of a mind so young and fertile it can’t help but see the extraordinary pleasures of nothingness. How beautiful to find my own mind seeing. I could have cried! The juvenile thrill.
For most of this month I have been thinking that, gosh, it -- life -- is so dull. Being is so dull. It’s like, when you stop judging everything as good or bad or right or wrong or smart or dumb or malicious or kind, when you get out of your own way, when you stop caring how much he or she or they don’t like you, it just is. All of it just is! No one is out to support or to get you, nothing is for or against you. Can you imagine that? Sometimes, it’s too much. It’s like, well if I don’t have to react to what is being said or thought about me, what do I do?
What are any of us supposed to do with all that freedom? Where do you go? What story do you write?
My kids transitioned to proper beds like two weeks ago. On the morning after the first night they slept in, I went to their room to wake them up and it was upside down in there. No basket unturned, no sock set unpaired, no t-shirt still folded.
The Adult who has learned through Process and Discipline and Rules, who has Embodied a Script and knows how to Recite It wanted to be like, “What in the horrifying name of unfounded shame have you done!” But it seemed softer to laugh. So that’s what I did. “Please don’t do this again tomorrow,” I offered gently. Then I took a deep breath and started to clean up.
The same shit happened the next day. And the one after that, and I just kept laughing and cleaning and on like, the 4th or 5th day, they started to help and by the end of the week, they stopped turning shit over completely. I think they just needed to explore, you know? To understand the boundaries of their new freedom because at first, when you get it or realize you have it, you almost can’t help but indulge in pushing up against its corners. Isn’t that a basic human impulse?
Ugh, impulse. It’s on my mind! I have been coming in and out of anger a lot lately, especially for the past few months, and impulse is an incredibly seductive inclination to give into when you’re there. That’s true of sheer joy, too, but the outcome of impulsive joy tends to net out less regrettably than the outcome of impulsive anger. This is when it’s helpful to ask: what would my highest self do?
Maybe she would laugh -- start to clean up the mess. Fold the shirts, pair the socks, un-turn the baskets.
The man who killed a 65-year-old woman in 2017 for being Jewish was pronounced unfit for trial because, at the time of his crime, he was “under the influence of cannabis.” I thought of a snarky comment after I read the headline, which really upset me (it was, “Recently, two of my brothers and I were high at dinner with our family and if you can believe it none of us tried to murder anyone else at the table”) but I realized I didn’t respect the sentiment I was relaying, or identify with what it represented, which was judgmentalism.
I have no idea what that guy’s situation was like, how he got to love who he did and hate who he did, and think how he did and so forth, and making that comment -- I mean, really claiming it, not just relaying it for this passage -- would have built a callus around this very soft part of me that’s always been there, but which I am lately coming to really appreciate. I get why people say it’s hard to live with an open heart. There is no act more vulnerable but I’ve tried the alternative and I don’t prefer it. Safeguard what’s yours, absolutely, but don’t kill it completely.
Once I asked a dear friend whether she ever wonders about the early childhood wounding of an anti-Semite. The specific character I had in mind was Haman, from the story of Purim, but any person who aligns themselves as part of a group that is bound together by mutual hate could be applied to the question. She told me it’s not my job to dignify hate, especially when it’s directed at me but that’s not what I was doing. Dignifying hate seems actually to affirm it. Trying to understand where it comes from though — how it got there, how a person got to be the way they are — I think that might actually be a less-traveled way to try and disarm it. More idealistic, no question, but still also less-traveled.
I almost bought a small bottle of clam juice from the supermarket on Monday because I thought it looked good. I’d never use it -- in fact, I keep a kosher home, which is why I didn’t get it, but lately, indulging in aesthetic pleasure doesn’t feel very indulgent at all. It just feels good. Not even good, it feels right.
Like getting dressed or thinking about the transformative quality of a garment. Clothes can actually help you change how you feel about yourself. They can’t do it for you but they can really support you.
Have you ever felt like you were indulging in something when actually, you were just enjoying it? I’m not even sure if there is a difference, but it’s a good question to ask yourself.
I wonder, in fact, if for all of my career so far, I felt that being in fashion wasn’t enough because I liked it too much -- because it was so much fun and I had this idea that work is supposed to crush you. It’s supposed to be harder!
I made it harder, that is for sure. And then started to hate it and myself. I made a mess because I thought it would teach me. What a silly and misguided but tenderly genuine way to forge an attempt at growth.
Sometimes I wish I could hug her — that 21-year-old girl trying to prove herself and her worth and her smarts and how honest her curiosity is. Funny thing about trying to prove yourself to anyone, including yourself: it’s not really an invitation to prove a thing, just one to sink in a bit deeper.
The sun came out around 4 p.m. on that gorgeously damp Sunday. By 5 o’clock it was like it had never been grey. The trees were so green and the tulips were red. The sun glistened on the cobblestones that line Horatio street and I swear to god, I could have cried. It was fucking breathtaking. Breathtakingly clear.
Not better or worse than it had been that morning but thrilling in that juvenile way.
#043021: What does it take to feel like a kid again?