Things That Make Sense

You ever had one of those years, the sort that turns everything upside down? Mornings you can’t really lay in bed, even on a Sunday, because your mind is going to find its way down the drain-of-no-return, and soon you’ll be thinking about all your carefully laid plans, the trips you meant to take, where you thought you’d be by now in your career, or your dreams of fitness–so you hop out of bed and put the coffee on, maybe get going on a hike or a work out, and you get through the day and then, by god, you wake up the next morning and there it all is, waiting for you, a heartbeat, a tide, a glassy-eyed moon watching you while you sleep?

I’m going to proceed as if you know what I’m talking about; everybody does. It isn’t always that interesting to know what kind of disastrous events have lined up for someone else. Suffice it to say that for me it started with the Tennessee fires last December, which dredged up a part of my past I had long since put away–the happy part, I’m afraid, the last time my family of origin was intact and, well, happy. The last time, for a long, long time, the world made any sense. Other goodies have been thrown into the existential blender since then, ingredients I won’t list  (you don’t want this recipe) except to say that several recent events were caused by stupid accident.

You can go crazy contemplating the role of accident in your life, both the near misses and the sad bull’s-eyes. I mean, the amount of self-delusion it takes to get through a single day is staggering, if you think about it, which most of us don’t because we wouldn’t. Get through the day, I mean. If you’ve got kids the danger is that much more steady, and the level of deception that much deeper.

Delusion, self-deception, and outright denial are generally thought of as negative concepts but this particular year has got me thinking of all the ways lies get us through something as simple as a trip to the grocery store. I feel assured that no drunk fiend is going to blind side me on the road; the cashier is not going to charge me for stuff I didn’t buy; a tree is not going to fall on my house in a sudden windstorm; the food I buy isn’t going to contain an airborne nasty that sickens me for weeks or months.

In the aftermath of one such accident, the one that came closest to me, I wandered about in a daze for four days, not sleeping, incoherent in my mind. I did yoga, I took walks, I practiced Dan Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness Meditation, always a direct route back to the self. And still, on the fifth day I saw that nothing that used to make sense, made sense.

Wait, I thought. That is exaggerated. Surely something made sense. So I sat down with an index card and a pen and wrote it down. At the top: Things That Make Sense. I recommend this exercise. Keep it short. You want it small, so you can fold it up and put it in your pocket; when your mind starts wigging out on you, and it will, you simply pull out your folded list, stop in your tracks and go over it. You can do this at the grocery store, at a stoplight, on an airplane, walking downtown, even shopping at Target.

Here is my list, the one I made that day. If I made one today, it would be a different list, but on that day, this is what I wrote, only without the brief explanations; I knew what I meant:

1. The dog. When we hike, she trots ahead of me, tail held up, head aloft, ready to cover some ground. I get that.  Oh, I do.
2. The tops of trees in summer. The way they sway and bend in the wind with their leaves whipping back and forth like hair. Since early June, I’ve spent a lot of time standing still, gazing up at the treetops.
3. My garden. It isn’t big or particularly showy. Something ate every one of the zinnias I planted and the bee balm has also been chewed. But tending these flowers, along with my lettuce and cucumbers, the few beets I managed to get above ground, watering the boxes, opening and closing the metal gate, marking the sweet peas’ progress up my homemade trellis, pulling weeds, harvesting raspberries, watching the bumblebees moving over my lavender, all of this makes good, delicious sense to me.
4. Frogs. We spent a weekend on the Wise River fishing and catching frogs. The best was standing above and seeing them put their front legs next to their bodies, allowing themselves to be rocketed through the clear water by their sleek, powerful back legs. They are a miracle.
5. Reading novels. I’ve always nursed a slight shame for my pleasure in fiction. I used to proclaim to students, I’m no reading snob! It all counts!  Hiding in my fierce defiance was an inferiority complex (always true of fierce defiance, idn’t it?). I’ve been riddled with doubt. Fiction is often accused of frivolity, a way to hide or escape. In light of recent events, I’m going to go ahead and proclaim a core belief: Nothing but good can come from reading fiction. The attention to language alone makes us better people. And there is something about the witnessing involved, the author expresses herself, her characters express themselves but of course they are doing so through the care and craft of the author’s expert hand, that incubates wisdom. The bond is so personal, even intimate. Sometimes people triumph, but also readers watch people break down, face destruction and grief.  There is no better way to learn, to practice and prepare. Reading is done alone; the reader is both teacher and student. It can keep loneliness at bay.  I am grateful for books and all the people who write them.

Here is one that recently brought me great relief:

The Widow Nash, by Jamie Harrison. A riveting historical novel set in Livingston, Montana. The young woman protagonist is a victim yet not once did I pity her. I rooted for her, cheered at her triumphs and worried when she was in danger. I loved her ingenuity (she fakes her own death!), her devotion to her very flawed father, and her respect for the world as it is, not how she wishes it could be. You get a history of mining all over the world, and earthquakes, and Yellowstone. You’ll learn about syphilis and the Boiling River plays a large role. There is even hidden gold.