#040822: The alarm clock goes

The mornings all go the same way these days — I wake up to what sounds like an alarm clock but it beeps only inside of my chest. Something is telling me I didn’t do what I was supposed to do the day or the week or the month before but as far as I know, the tasks are complete: the veggies are coming, the table is set, the bills have been paid, the story is scheduled. I turn over, breathe in, but the alarm is still going.

Until I get out of bed. Once I get out of bed and brush my teeth and take a look in the mirror — never for long lest I see on me the harrowing possibility that some great fear laying dormant will shoot out through the lines on my forehead — I forget what deeper longing set off the alarm, what longing sprung me out of bed.

Or, it’s not that I forget, but it fades back into its indelible corner, drawn out by the sound of a regular day, until the next time a blanket of silence covers my person and the alarm bell rings again.

Last night, Madeline started to scream from her room.

“Mom! It’s too quiet.”

I thought I was dreaming it at first but the shouting got louder and louder. “It’s too quiet!” I looked at the clock, 2:44 then went to her room and said, “You are safe.” I must have figured in my half-conscious state that this was the right thing to say — that for the first time ever she could hear silence and she’s right, it’s too quiet at first.

Then I couldn’t fall back asleep.

So I started to think, What is so quiet it’s become this loud? What am I trying to push away? You’re safe, I said to myself. And then I fell asleep.

This morning, the alarm went off again. I have been feeling uninspired lately — trying so hard to write because it feels like it needs to get out but then nothing comes out and I keep looking for the perk up: that jolt that comes with a fresh idea, a synapse linked, the thrill of uncovering some expansive new truth, and sometimes they — the perk ups — hide inside different garments, or the affections they make when mixed together but I can barely think much about that these days, I can barely think about anything.

This is the blessing, but also the curse of having demands outside of yourself: there is always something more urgent to respond to.

So I floated towards my kids room to wake them up after brushing my teeth and we went to the kitchen and I started to: chop strawberries to put in Madeline’s bowl, toast an English muffin upon which to smear cream cheese for Laura and I was wearing the same leggings, dirty with kid dust, and a navy blue pullover that I’d slept in the night before and I was finishing up the strawberry chopping and cream cheese smearing and Madeline asked: is Hashem your God?

Hashem means “the name” in Hebrew. This is how is many Orthodox Jews refer to God.

So I asked her, “as opposed to who else’s?”

“Moses,” she said, referring to when he realized, in the story of Exodus, that “Hashem” was his God.

As it goes by story, Moses’s life was saved after an edict was passed to kill all of the newborn Jewish baby boys when his mother sent him into the Nile by basket and he was found by Pharaoh’s daughter and ultimately raised in the Egyptian court. As he gets older, he starts getting these “signs,” having this hunch that there’s something more true out there for him. At some point, it’s too much so he runs away before ultimately returning to lead the exodus. It’s a gross simplification of a crazy dense story but the thing that occurred to me when I was talking to my daughter is that somewhere in this process, his own alarm bell starts ringing.

I had never thought about it this way until this morning — Exodus as the story of pursuing freedom from who you thought you were or who you thought you had to be or even who you wanted to become and settling into yourself. Who you actually are.

Sometimes I can’t wrap my head around how epically epic these stories can be. And who knows if they’re true, there’s a huge chance they’re not but I am convinced that the books that make up the Old Testament serve as the sort of legend from which all other stories are born — least not the ones that we tell ourselves.

The ones Joan Didion famously said that we speak in order to live.

How different are these stories from the stories our cultures tell us about how to live our lives, about what we deem right and what we deem wrong and what we deem true and what we deem not. About what we think we should want and what we actually want, about who we are when the day ends and the mask comes off and we slip into bed and begin to drift off until later that night when our eyes crack open and it’s too quiet and the alarm bell starts to ring.

Is it so scary to ask the alarm where it is trying to point you?

You know what’s funny is that I think I have internalized this idea from learning the stories and growing up as a kid of immigrants but also a product of New York that living a true life is about sacrifice, that whatever’s more true is also much harder and therefore more painful, so these sacrifices — this life — it’s really about suffering.

Which doesn’t sound right when I say it but let me explain how I got here: I think I have conflated discomfort with suffering. I do believe that discomfort’s progressive — that heeding the sound of one’s own alarm clock may well put us in positions that test and challenge the depth of what we think we know, often expanding our own senses of confidence or meaning. I also think that discomfort is sometimes painful. Not always, but sometimes.

Suffering meanwhile is different from that, and it’s actually not that useful.

I didn’t always believe this. I think I thought I needed to suffer in order to create anything that was any good, to feel anything of genuine substance throughout the majority of my 20’s and even into my 30’s because I thought suffering meant pain. That one should need pain to create is debatable too though for sure it brings with it a new kind of perspective, empathy, depth to ones understanding of their own human experience.

What I’m beginning to realize now is that suffering is the act of trying to push away pain. It’s not actually feeling the pain. And this pushing away is actually the thing that can you make you feel like you’ve been rendered inert. Like you can’t move, like there’s nowhere to go. It’s the feeling when the alarm clock rings that you have to, you have to, you must turn it off. Just make it shut up at any cost.

But now I wonder if that’s the reason the alarm clock seems so daunting, if running away is what makes it so scary because the alarm clock is actually trying to free you. What if instead of pushing away, you asked what it wanted to tell you.