SJ: Balancing Act

When Michael and I embarked on this little project, my mother wondered aloud how we would possibly come up with a failure for every month. Wouldn’t we run out? I assured her we were more likely to have the opposite problem, as in, “How will we ever winnow our rich collection down to a measly 12?”

Unsurprisingly, as the months roll on, Mom has proven to be at least a little bit right (as we all know, this is usually the case when it comes to moms). Part of the difficulty is the criteria to which Mike and I adhere – specifically that whatever we write about can’t be too depressing, a requirement that ends up disqualifying a lot of our finer achievements. We share the belief that some failures are, in fact, not really appropriate for the blogosphere, a belief that I suppose could be seen as a kind of cowardly dodge, but which we choose to see as a reflection of our impeccable discretion and restraint.

Anyway, we were a little stumped about where to focus our attention this month. We ticked off possible themes, we tried to recount Thanksgiving disasters, or general cooking screw-ups, or holiday-season mishaps, and on and on, but couldn’t land on anything, which was frustrating. I mean, we are misfits, we have undersold ourselves, failed to live up to our potential, grasped defeat from the jaws of victory time and time again, we have a huge arsenal of failure tales – it’s our brand for god’s sake. We couldn’t be so easily out of material, right?

I rooted through memories, wondering why I was running into so much, you know, neutral to good stuff instead of bang-up screw-ups. There was just so much… pleasantry to sift through in the search for potentially amusing train wrecks. And that’s when the penny dropped. There I was, grousing about all the good stuff in my life getting in the way of my hilarious failure narrative - I was suffering from a failure of gratitude! And just in time for Thanksgiving, no less!

Oh my god, I thought, I have totally failed at gratitude! I am so bad at gratitude! I am failing at it right now! By believing I’m such a failure! And by beating up on myself for failing to come up with further failure for my failure themed blog! This is so meta! Failure meta! Mind blown!

Ok, ok, ok. It wasn’t that exciting. But it did get me thinking about gratitude and my relationship to it, which is what we’re all supposed to be thinking about this week anyway, right? I do try to remind myself to be thankful in and for my life, I try every day. It’s been well beaten in as an Important Part of a Meaningful Life thanks to years of watching Oprah while on the treadmill (keep a gratitude diary!), or reading Self Magazine on the elliptical machine (practicing thanks lowers blood pressure and reduces belly fat!), or watching reality TV in my sweatpants (thank Christ my life isn’t like these people’s!). I get it. Gratitude matters. So I make sure to count my blessings. Trouble is, when I‘m really honest about it, I’m pretty sure that’s not the same thing.

This is semantics a bit, this is subjective, sure, but somehow the idea of “counting blessings” always strikes me as something done or suggested in opposition to some disaster, as in “I was worried it might be cancer but it turns out it’s just a bad ulcer, so I’d better count my blessings,” or “I’m sorry you skidded into the guardrail and totaled the uninsured Ferrari you rented, but no one was hurt, so count your blessings.” As though counting blessings means loading them on one side of a scale to prove they outweigh the load of crappy trouble on the other side, all to enable a sigh of relief that things aren’t so bad after all.

I do this a lot in times of distress, I’m ashamed to say, haul out the old scale and measure things to be thankful for against things to complain about. I can remember, in some darker moments, really scraping the barrel to load up the blessings side of the balance, chalking up inane things like “Most of my jeans fit right now,” or “I when I fell down the subway stairs, it didn’t hurt that much.” Another strategy might be to go really broad, adding things to the list like, “I have indoor plumbing” or “I know I won’t be killed by an armed militia in my sleep tonight” all in an effort to compete with the not-blessings side, which invariably contained lead sinkers like “Total professional disaster,” “Dead broke,” and “Love-less.”

Now, to be sure, the safety from militias and the plumbing and even the jeans and the not being hurt on the stair fall are things to be thankful for, but there’s something in the accounting for them this way that doesn’t quite feel like an expression of gratitude. It feels like the “It could be worse” version of gratefulness, like a wicked kind of comparison game where there’s no way to win. After all, what if the bad side is just… bigger? It will be sometimes. Does that mean the blessings just lose? Is one excused from gratitude if the curses list is longer?

The answer is No, of course, which exposes the sizing up one’s life this way as a pretty useless – and possibly destructive - exercise. Even so, it is so easy to fall into this thinking, to feel that gratitude is something you have for all the good stuff you get in life, and that the amount of gratitude you experience is connected to the quantity of goodies you’ve worked up or lucked into. But isn’t gratitude something that should run deeper than that, something that is less tied to the fickle changes of fortune we all go through every year, even every day?

This is kind of woo-woo stuff for me, if you know what I mean. I’m a person who likes evidence, and arguments, and proving things. But gratitude is a gossamer kind of notion, and I’m talking about it in as wispy as way as I’ll talk about anything, which doesn’t make me all that comfortable. That said, it does seem to me that genuine gratitude isn’t connected to any scale or score card, and isn’t something we get to feel when the going is good, that it is instead something that we can always contact if we allow ourselves, and that it isn’t something we simply feel, but something we practice and something we give. Something that is, in the end, connected to the simple thought, the simple awareness, “I am here, I am here, I am here.” On this earth, in this life, breathing this air. “I am here, I am here, I am here.”

I don’t pretend this is an original thought. It’s a dumbed-down derivative, surely. I mean, I’ve already copped to watching all that Oprah, and obviously that’s gonna leave a mark. But still, it’s a nice thing to articulate and remind oneself of now and then. It helps, I think.

And it’s good, too, just to think about how exactly one is taking stock of these lives of ours. This idea of comparison making, whether the comparison is being made self to self, or self to other, ties rather neatly into the theme of this little blog of ours. What are most of our notions of success and failure except another opportunity to put that balance to use, to pit where we are against where we think we should be, or where that guy we went to college is, setting ourselves up against whatever impossible ideal is smirking at us from the other side of scale? Just like the gratitude balance, we know this is a false and foolish metric, but we fall for it nonetheless. Or I do, anyway. Probably because I like evidence, arguments, proving things, and I want a cool measurement to give definitive answers where, in fact, there are none. Just as with gratitude, success isn’t about the goodies one’s accrued or the marks one’s hit, it is something less tangible and more meaningful. And losing sight of that – that is, I think it is, a kind of failure.

So this month’s failure is about purging a failure – no more failures of gratitude! It’s Thanksgiving, after all. I’m going to put away the scales, all of them, resist the urge to balance accounts, give in to the urge to have a second piece of pie, look around me, and listen to the voice inside me saying, “I am here.”

It’s a start.

Happy holidays, everyone.

MD: Thank Things Through

Thanksgiving. The giving of thank. (Thank being the past participle of think. I sink, I sank. I drink, I drank. I think, I thank.) So now is a great time to consider all the things I thank about over the past year. Working on this blog, I thank a lot about my past failures and challenges. I suppose that could be therapeutic, but it just feels awkward and embarrassing to chronicle all the ways in which I’ve managed to fall short of the grace and dignity I assume comes natural to everyone else. In this way, it feels like I’m polishing my collection of factory-seconds Hummel figurines. Sure, the glaze work might be smooth, but that little-boy-groom has a lazy eye and his little-girl-bride has a hump on her back. Are these the things that I keep dust-free, high on a shelf in my mind? And if so, then what might be hidden in the crawlspace where I shove all the stuff I can’t bear to toss, but won’t take the time to look at? Let’s see!

Last month, I went back to New Jersey for my 20th high school reunion. I dug into the stuff that I keep stored at my parents’ house: junior high, high school and college yearbooks; essays written from high school through college; important academic books like The Freud Reader and William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that I have no desire to revisit; trinkets and gifts from friends whom I can no longer identify; photos of events deemed important enough to capture and wait five days (or pay an exorbitant fee for one hour prints) for the film to be developed; and letters, cards and notes.

I have always been loath to throw away any written correspondence. Birthday cards, holiday greetings and thank you notes. It feels unkind and ungrateful to toss penned sentiments, unlucky even. So I was not surprised to find a thick pile of them tucked in a trunk. What was surprising was to rediscover, like an amnesiac, intimacies that those pieces referenced.

I found two letters from my sister, the dates corresponding to the fall of her freshman year of college. I was only ten at the time and am sure I enjoyed then, as I do now, the Boynton stationery depicting a maudlin hippo and the caption, “Things are getting worse. Please send chocolate.” My sister asks how I’m doing with karate and lacrosse. Did I ever do either of those things? She tells me about the girl on her hall that never showers and how she needs posters to decorate her room. I should have made a scan of those letters before I sent them to my sister who has my written responses tucked away in her own crawlspace. But it felt crass to duplicate a thing that’s value is its personal singularity.

I found a note from a guy who I met while taking creative writing course one summer. I immediately felt a pang of remorse for forgetting this guy that I liked very much. I’m sure the Germans have a word for this, something like “bestfriendfornevernostalgiabadpersoniam.” In his card, he tells me that he’s going to Berkeley next year for college and signs the card, “Your friend, Dave Lee.” I trolled Facebook looking for him, hoping to reconnect and use this card as evidence of a shared affection, but it turns out that there are a lot of Asian guys name David Lee who have gone to UC Berkeley. Oh well.

I also found a note from a girl who I may have met that same summer, through my church or somewhere else entirely. I don’t know because I have no recollection her or what experience we might have shared together. Her note is warm and friendly, easy and open, but remarkably unexceptional and unspecific. She reveals no clue as to her personal affinities, why or in what way we bonded. She writes like a pal and in a way that would not seem unordinary until you are divining for context. What is so striking about this mystery woman is that she shares the same name as my soon to be sister-in-law. It’s a satisfying sensation to experience this twitch of the time and space continuum, when the primary relationship of your adult life has been seeded early on in the hesitant scrawl of a teenager. As if that first Christina were a placeholder, purposefully vague, set to transverse my trajectory and reserve a spot for my fiancé to claim later; as if David Lynch had made a movie for the Hallmark Channel.

My reunion was fun and I was not the drunkest person there; so that’s an unqualified success. I immediately fell into easy chats with classmates that I had not seen in two decades: reconstructing the seating chart of fifth period French class as if the code could rematerialize that world and us in it; my first girlfriend elated that as she stood in heels I was still taller than her, unlike in eighth grade when I had not yet reached five feet tall; even the oddness of recalling memories of classmates like my friend Kelly who passed away and whose remembrances could not be substantiated by their presence.

The reunion ended, but the party continued at a bar down the road. When we closed that place down, I climbed into one of the few taxis available with as many drunken Blue Devils as could find their way into it. I was the final drop off, so I got to see everyone edge their way out, South-siders first on our journey north. Next to me sat a classmate who I never knew well and obviously never knew me because he asked over the duration of the ride, “Sssso, who you here with,” “Whatcha name?” and “Wha’ year d’ya graduate?” He was so drunk that he kept forgetting when I repeatedly told him, I’m Mike Doyle, I graduated with you. He was none the wiser as he stumbled out of the taxi. When I was dropped off, the driver told me that there was no need to pay, that everyone else had more than covered the fare along the way. I gave him twenty bucks anyway.

I’ve given a lot of thank to this and I think the only failure in life is not showing up for the next thing; and being unappreciative that there is a next thing. The next thing is coming. It may be at the end of a long night and a long drive across town, but when it comes, who knows, someone may have already paid your way. And as you step out into the darkness in front of your sister’s house on the northern edge of Westfield, New Jersey in the early hours of the morning, be comforted that now you’ve got more stories to tell.