"the hardest thing in this world is to live in it"
Do you guys remember the treason tshirts? Apparently they literally made treason tee’s with the label printed on the front – the message resonating with people worldwide, under various presidents – and Bihn donated all proceeds to the Seattle Vet Center for their Homeless Vet Program.
They raised total of $18,480.00 for the center, which is a truly amazing (and sniffles inducing) amount of money.
One of the silly things that has always vaguely bothered me has been how little I look like my mother, especially given that my sister really is a carbon copy of Mom. I’ve often been tempted to photoshop that image to the left, since receiving it, to put my sister’s glasses and hair on Mom, just to prove the point.
Me, I look like my aunt, Mom’s older sister. In fact, as much as my sister is a spitting image of my mother, I am a spitting image of my aunt. My aunt and mother didn’t have a good relationship, and I’ve always wondered if that fed, subconsciously, into my own relationship with Mom. And I’ve always wished that there was something visible of her in me, moreso this last year than ever.
A friend has recently had a new addition to his family, that addition being about the same age as I am in this photo of me with Mom. Because I created the slide show we used at Mom’s funeral, I have about 350 pictures of Mom scanned into my computer, and I was thinking about the ones of me as a newborn, and offered to send the pictures along after resizing. He was pleased at the idea, and so after we finished talking I pulled up the photos to resize and upload them.
It wasn’t until then, literally that 20 minutes ago, that I realized I do share one prominent feature with Mom, it’s just not something I’d ever specifically thought about her having – or, for that matter, me having. (Folks who were around when I chopped my hair off might have already guessed where I’m going.) Unfortunately, I don’t have any good pictures of myself that highlight my dimples, but I do have them.
And they match Mom’s.
One of the things people always comment on, when talking about Mom, looking at her photos, is her beautiful smile and laugh. And it’s one of my strongest and most pervasive memories, one of the first things I remember, one of the things woven most strongly through my life. It’s one of my last memories. The sound of her laughter, the shape of her smile, the gentle creasing of the dimples. I used to sit on her lap and poke my fingers in those dimples, poking her face up into a smile, and laughing when she did.
It’s something small, it might be something only I can see. But now I see a small, visible part of her in me.
Unfortunately, I have overheard this exact conversation before. The first half, anyhow. The second half went a bit differently. Same gist, though.
I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen ”” I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visted by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
-Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Another surprisingly good day. I did something that can be a bit hard for me (as I am, regardless of the fact that no one believes me, quite shy and introverted), and sought out several people I’ve specifically had problems with in the past year to clear the air, apologize for not talking to them immediately when something bothered me, and in one case, spent quite a while quietly talking and thinking about what factored into the perfect storm that threw us off the rails.
For all I write, and talk, I actually find it very difficult to say, clearly and calmly, “I feel [whatever]” about a subject. I admit it’s my big area of broken; I don’t have the best social skills, and I play my feelings very close to my chest. I have a hard time opening up to people; I will happily chatter for days about any number of things, but if we start in on how I feel, or why, or what, I’ll clam up.
It’s a matter of trust. And trust is a tricky thing, because you have to trust in order to move through life. Trust is what allows us to narrow our options for the future; if we have no trust, it’s very difficult to make choices; our options become limitless and we have no way to make judgment on those options. Trust is a filter on the endless potentialities of the future, and it allows us to not become stuck in the present, turned to past, but continue moving through present to future ((I wrote about this several years ago, for a project that turned into an art book titled Trust Bound:
to free ourselves from being stuck, we have to take a risk. we have to look at the future potentialities and guess, choose blindly, choose based on what other people offer you. trust is a multiperson experience, and if someone extends you their trust, they do so on the basis of their experience, and what they think of you. what they think you will do.
the options become filtered through the actions of another. it is up to us, whether or not we accept that external filter. it is up to us to make the decision that a single anomalic event does not mean we always have bad judgement.
to become unstuck, you must trust.
)). But to give trust is a risk. Because, to paraphrase Alfonso Lingis, the more you know about someone, the more clearly you sees that every act of loyalty, of trust, opens an opportunity for disloyalty and broken trust.
It’s easy to get hurt. It’s easy to lose faith. But it is hard to live life without trusting those around you; you become truly alone.
Still, you can be an academic, you can know a subject intellectually inside and out – that doesn’t mean you’re going to be a genius at applying it to your own life, and this is definitely an area I need to work on. Bad experiences, insecurity, a shitty year – a great combination to fold me into my shell and shut down any thoughts about saying “so, hey, I have this problem…” (Not to mention, as was pointed out to me, when someone is feeling excluded and discriminated against, expecting them to step forward and take action on it does become a bit close to blaming the victim/expecting them to take steps to fix a problem.)
The thing is though, when you’re stuck in the now and unable to trust, it’s because something has made you doubt your abilities to use trust as a filter. The only real way to “get over it” is to just take a deep breath and jump – take a leap of faith, hand someone your trust, open yourself up to them, and then give them to chance to reciprocate.
To say that is hard is an understatement. Then again, I walked into it with nothing to lose; I had hit the bottom, and realized this wasn’t how I wanted to live life. I wasn’t, haven’t, been living life. I’ve been mimicking, and going through the motions, but that’s not going to get me what I want – to, as Thoreau said, live deep and suck the marrow of life. Certainly wasn’t going to help me make actual connections and friends with the people in my department.
I think that it’s necessary to trust to live life, truly live a full and vibrant life, to fully engage with the world and those in it. At the same time, trusting when time and again we will find our trust broken is one of the hardest things to do; to paraphrase another wise modern philosopher, the hardest thing we will do in this life is live it.
Sometimes you have to take that leap of faith. You have to give yourself permission to have been wrong, and you have to override your instinctual reactions to protect yourself, even in that wrongness, and reach out to someone else and tell them the same. To place your trust into the world, into the hands of someone else, and give them the option to reciprocate.
