Category: life

Hi Kelley —

Found my way into some of the comments in your Virtual Pint and felt inclined to comment. First that article on Joshua Bell’™s experience was fascinating. I was thinking that if they had tried it at the end of the day instead of at the beginning when people had more time — it would be different, but then there were the people standing in line for the lottery tickets with time to spare. What that says about our society is kind of frightening really. On the flip side, I found the lack of the public’™s appreciation for him mitigated by the $40/hr he took in. Not so bad really. I wonder what percentage of the number of people who passed through appreciated him vs the percentage of the number of people in our general population who would appreciate him if placed in context for them. That is to ask is that percentage any different than how many people in our culture appreciate classical music? than how many people can see through their own crap and appreciate beauty for beauty’™s sake? Reading that article did not make me feel hopeful.

Then one post led me to another and I read the discussions on hope, that lead me here and here. My first reaction when reading about the Goss book you mentioned was to vehemently disagree, but on reflection, I’™ve about decided that I’™m going to order a copy. (I already checked and my local library doesn’™t have it) I really think the reason I (we) continue on is because of hope. Otherwise, at some point or another it just wouldn’™t be worth it anymore.

While I do agree with what she says about acceptance and about life not turning out the way it ‘˜should’™, I think that’™s more a matter of accepting that life is not ‘˜fair,’™ and not a matter of giving up our hopes, dreams, plans, and/or goals. The idea being acceptance rather than resistance; resistance gives a thing more power and takes the energy away from the solution. Maybe my issue is just that I would probably define hope differently than she does.

As for the question of what is hope? I think it what helps us conquer fear. I don’™t believe we can expel fear from our lives. I think it will always be there, but what I can do is continue on despite the fear. Hope helps me to do that. I wouldn’™t call it the opposite of fear, but I would say it’™s the conqueror of fear (along with action). One could say that actions conquer fear, but how can one act without hope? Call it hope or faith (in myself, my loved ones, the universe), belief, vision, or even goals. It is what keeps the human race going isn’™t it? I understand the argument that accepting failure would negate the fear of it, but I’™m not buying it. Where does the motivation come from? It sounds like she’™s saying that failure is a foregone conclusion. Well, ok, I accept that there will be (have to be) failures along the way, but not that the ultimate outcome will be failure. Maybe we have to change our concept of what that ultimate goal is because of the things we learn from our failures, but if the path has heart, so will the end and so will we. Maybe hope is part of having heart.

That doesn’™t mean that I believe in false hope. I think I understand what you mean about not hoping for a cure for MS. I have faced the loss of hope of a cure for ovarian cancer a loved one facing a recurrence of that. There is a difference between facts and possibilities. It’™s a hard line to draw. Doctors these days are reluctant to give out statistics and predictions for terminally ill patients. The reason for that is they have seen what the results of doing that are; patients who are told they have 2 months to live are more likely to die in two months than those who aren’™t told that. I have seen this happen for myself. Holding out hope (hoping against hope) for a miracle could prevent one from making the most of what is in this moment. I’™ve faced that choice and had to let my lover know that I faced it with her. Maybe if I’™d faced it sooner, I could’™ve supported her better. Or… maybe when she saw that I had given up hope, she deteriorated more rapidly than necessary. It’™s something I still wonder about these 9 years later. I watched another close relative experience a very similar path with the same disease with a different attitude; one of denial. She was much older, yet lived longer. Who can say why, but it makes me wonder.

Belief/attitude/hope is a powerful force.

Can’™t say I have any answers. This is something that’™s definitely been weighing on my mind lately. Forced into thinking about it as I try to decide if I need to re-work my Plan B or come up with a Plan C…..

I realize this discussion is several months old now; I’™d be interested to hear if you’™re still in the same place with it.

I too loved that quote you had from M L King.

Then this quote from you is why I’™ll read/watch anything you ever write:

“I don’t just want to show you things: I want to put them so far inside you that you have to dig them out with a spoon.”

Blah, blah, blah. Way too much out of me. Feel free to edit this if you put it up.

Best —

Jennifer

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No editing necessary. I don’t think I can respond to every point right now, because there are baked potatoes in the oven and a beer in the fridge with my name on it (and I don’t mean that to be flip, just that I’ve been thinking about your comments a long time and could think about them longer, but then you would never have a response). I appreciate the conversation and that you’re willing to take so much time to continue it.

It’s been a wee while since you sent me this (my bad, very sorry) so I’m curious — did you get the Goss book? As much as I’ve talked about it here in the virtual pub, I’m pretty sure I haven’t yet found the right way to encapsulate her point (oh ho, maybe that’s why she wrote a whole book about it, laughing now). Or perhaps it’s that I find my understanding of “hope” is changing as I try to integrate her perspective into my view of things.

Am I in the same place with this? Hmm. Yes and no. I don’t feel hopeless, but I no longer rely so much on hope. I think that what you said above — Holding out hope (hoping against hope) for a miracle could prevent one from making the most of what is in this moment — is perhaps a good parsing of her point. If we rely on magical thinking, if we decide okay, I will get this thing or person or result I want if I don’t step on a crack, or if I don’t call her first, or if I pray hard enough, then maybe we miss the opportunity to just give a rebel yell and do the thing to the fullest in the moment when it needs to be done. And if we do the thing, and it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t mean we did it wrong. It doesn’t mean we were wrong to reach for it, to throw ourselves out there (to, as they say, dance like no one’s watching). It just means that it didn’t work out. And that’s how it goes sometimes. Right now, I think that’s what she means, and right now I can mostly be okay with that. Would I be okay if it were the death of a lover I was talking about, if it were Nicola’s death? Probably fucking not. So I’m not sure where I am.

Except that I know I’m in a doing place, a place of action without as much expectation as before. I do think that it’s possible to act without hope, by which perhaps I mean this expectation that things will work out the way I want them to. I still want them to work out, on some level I still hope they will — I just don’t necessarily pin my self-esteem or lifetime happiness or sense of worth on it the way I used to. And in some weird way this has freed me to, among other things, be braver about what I write and love my writing more. Why? I don’t know, it’s a mystery.

And since I’m in quote mode at the moment, here are a couple more:

We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are. ‘” Anais Nin

We are not what we know, but what we are willing to learn.
‘” Mary Catherine Bateson

I know this is in no way a complete answer to your very thoughtful comments. Thank you for them. And thank you also for your kind words about digging and spoons. It’s true, that’s what I want in almost every respect right now. Life’s short. Let’s just reach right in.

I had been vacillating on whether to come on board and say hey ever since before last week’s Election Night. Reading this decided me.

Your more than gracious response to my own rant after the 2004 election came back to me unexpectedly in the days running up to this year’s election. I found a printout I had made of my rant and your response while cleaning the house and carried it with me as a talisman against the crippling fear of a repeat disappointment. I was terrified before the election, but only vaguely cognizant of what exactly I was afraid. Corruption, stolen elections, a continuation of the triumph of the politics of fear and hatred and lies. What you wrote about hope had to serve as a placeholder for my foundering hope for a few days until the election, which turned out much better than I had been hoping. So thank you again!

But this post has given me more food for words, as follows:

— First, I haven’t read Tracy Goss’ book, but based on your description, I think I’ve had a similar first reaction to yours. It just doesn’t read for me. If I’m following you, Goss’ point is that acceptance of hopelessness leads to freedom from fear and, as you quoted “…the opportunity, instead of giving up, to play with full engagement…” But without hope, what motivation does one have to show up in the first place? Why be fully engaged with no hope? In other words, if one does not have a ‘hope’ for a certain outcome in a given endeavor, why bother engaging in the endeavor at all? What is hope if not inherent motivation, a reason to go on? Maybe I’m splitting semantic hairs here, but acceptance of life as it is does not require for me letting go of hope. To let go of hope is, in a strong sense, letting go of life itself.

— Second, but relatedly, you ask “are hope and fear two sides of the same coin?” The metaphor implies that they are opposites, but I don’t think that’s true — I don’t feel that fear is the opposite or absence of hope, or vice versa. They co-exist, in some cases very closely, but I don’t see it as a 1-1 correlation. While they are sometimes connected, I don’t feel that the amount of hope one has directly determines the amount of fear one has (as if one could quantify emotion!) And I certainly don’t believe one must lose hope to conquer fear. I’ve seen too many folks conquer fear as a direct result of having hope to believe that.

— Finally, you ended with a wonderful Castaneda quote, which reminded me that I often use quotes as a source of solace, or joy, or hope. And one of the more hopeful new quotes I’ve encountered in the past year, one, in fact, I’ve often repeated to friends, family, co-workers, goes like this:

“I still believe in plans, but more and more, I think it’s a Plan B world.”
— Kelley Eskridge

Keep passing the open windows (—John Irving)

Adam D.

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Hey Adam,

Lovely to hear from you. I was thinking about you at the elections, as a matter of fact. There was a certain amount of anxiety in our house too…. and at the same time, I believed it would turn out the way it did. Very gratifying, and in some sense so predictable. The wheel turns.

I can recommend the Goss book, if your definition of “recommend” includes wanting to throw a book at the wall but then being compelled to read it again just because…. And I don’t think I’ve represented it accurately (maybe not even coherently). But there is something about it that speaks to me lately.

I don’t think it’s so much that she is asking people to not bring hope to the party. Or maybe she is asking that — and maybe the real issue is what does each of us mean by hope, anyway? I think she’s saying that many people having a notion of hope as a kind of crutch, almost as a blueprint for “here’s how my life should be, and I’m going to hold my breath until I turn blue or until my life turns out this way.” I think what she’s trying to say is that kind of hope can hold us back, because instead of desire without expectation, we tie ourselves to a particular vision of how things should be, and then regard any variance from that as “failure.” And then our hope is “lost.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations lately. It’s been said that all anger is the result of failed expectations. I know that most personal conflict I’ve experienced comes down to disappointed expectations — I “expect” that strangers will honor the social compact and not cut me off on the highway, or be rude to me at Starbucks. I expect that my closest people will always be wise, kind, and respectful of my little personal quirks (along with being able to read my mind). Et cetera. I know that my greatest mistakes with other people happen when I write scripts in my head for how things should go in any particular interaction — and then discover, much to my surprise, that everyone else has failed to learn their lines, and in fact aren’t acting in my little play at all.

I have not let go of hope — in a big way, I’m all about hope and always will be. But I’ve been astonished by some of the things I’ve been able to do in the last year by releasing hope and instead just doing the thing I yearn to do, or the thing that needs to be done (which are sometimes the same and sometimes not). I don’t hope for the thing to work out in any particular way. I just do it and see what happens. I don’t assume that it’s “good” only if it works out the way I want it to. I don’t know how to explain it better right now, but it sure is making me think (grin).

I agree that hope and fear are not opposites. And I don’t think hope is in any way a bad thing. But I believe that hope gives fear a doorway into our lives. We fear the loss of what we hope for. Is it better sometimes to live without hope? Is it possible to live without hope and at the same time to not be “hopeless”? I dunno (scratches head).

Although, actually, that’s not true. I do know, in some ways. I no longer hope for a cure for MS, for example. I look at Nicola and give great thanks for my life with her. I don’t look at Nicola and think that if we only do the right thing, make the right choices, if only we are good, that she’ll be without MS someday. I no longer regard MS as something that might go away. It never will. Is that hopeless? Or is that simply moving hope out of the way so we can get on with our lives?

This doesn’t mean I never hope. I just don’t want hope for a particular thing to define my happiness.

I think I’m starting to climb down my own navel here. Apologies. And these are real questions, not rhetorical ones. Comments welcome.

I’m glad you like the Plan B quote. I still stand by it (grin). Here’s another one I like:

— Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
— How?
— I don’t know. It’s a mystery.
— Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love

Why do you love Nicola?

anonymous

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Well. I have been holding this question for ages (with apologies to anonymous), because it’s really a moving target. Some days it seems like the only proper answer is ‘œDuh.’ Other days it’s the entire 18 years’ list of ups and downs and sideways that we have been together.

The answer you are getting today is not about how much I admire her fine mind and body and spirit, how much fun we have, the values that we share, the hard times we’ve overcome. Today’s answer is that I love Nicola because she gives me, every day, the chance and the choice to be myself, even if I decide sometimes to be the smallest self instead of the biggest.

Nobody makes me brave or strong, or any of the other hard things in the world that I aspire to. But Nicola makes me want to be those things as much as I can. I try harder because of her. And so I am more of myself, more of the things I want to be. And when I’m not brave and strong and true and fantabulous, she loves me anyway.

The thing is, love isn’t really about the other person. It’s about ourselves. It’s about how we feel, who we are, in the sunshine of the other.

And another winter goes whizzing by while I was cooking soup and looking for my glasses and fixing the storm door. I’m always amazed when I send off the tax returns and realize it’s spring. (Did you know some people use trees blossoming and nature stuff to tell the changing of the seasons? How about that?)

It hasn’t all been home domesticity and writing time: we also have been to visit Nicola’s family. I hadn’t been to the north of England in February before. It’s cold. A long trip, made longer and more unpleasant on the way home by British Midland Airlines, who will never ever ever get my business again, or yours if I can possibly persuade you.

But it’s well past time to get settled into the virtual pub and catch up on all the news. If you’re interested in chatting, get in touch.

And in the meantime, have fun with this. I certainly did (thanks, Mom).

And this.

Cheers from she who will now be known among you as Sister Boot Knife of Enlightenment.

The turning of the year always puts me in a reflective mood. It’s a time to think about what I might wish to change or preserve, to strengthen or finally let go.

I set goals, but these days they aren’t so much things I want to do as ways I want to be or feel — the shape of my life for the coming year. It turns out this is more useful for me: things tend to happen in relation to the shape of life. Things fit or they don’t. If I know what I’d like the shape of my life to be, it’s easier to tell when I want to encourage a thing to continue, or whether to let it go. It’s one thing to say, “I’m going to finish a novel this year.” It’s another thing entirely to say, “I’m going to feel that I’m always being the best writer I can be.” The former requires word count, desk time, rigorous attention to craft. The latter requires all of that as well as being open to the idea that finishing the novel might not be the best use of the writer’s time.

It’s a tricky exercise. Goals untethered to vision are less meaningful. Vision without goals is less productive. And so on I go, seeking balance. Growth and peace; comfort and adventure; still moments and big life; clarity and fearlessness; to be, or at least to act as if.

It’s been both a good year and a hard one. Tonight Nicola and I will drink champagne (Thierry Triolet, our new favorite) and talk about the old year and the new. We’re hoping for more good and less hard in 2006, but I expect we’ll take whatever we get and squeeze as much out of it as we can.

Thanks to everyone who visits the virtual pub for a pint every now and then. I value your company, whether you stop to chat or just to listen. My very best to you all. See you again in the new year.

Hit me with a double. Or a double-double.

Morning after the election and as an Ohio resident, I can’t escape the feeling in the pit of my stomach that Ohioans are going to get more blame for the re-election of Bush than anyone else, even though more than half the population was gullible enough, ignorant enough, blind enough to vote for the bastard. My apologies if you’re a Bush supporter, Kelley — I’m making the assumption that you’re not, based on what you’ve written here and in other spaces.

Sitting here trying to work, trying to silently talk myself out of falling into a deep depression (my therapist would tell me to allow myself to grieve, but I feel ridiculous grieving over a political race like this. I feel a little bit like Red Sox fans felt until a week ago. The grief is real, but I’m finding it hard to admit to myself that I was that emotionally invested in something guaranteed to disappoint me.), I find an old question floating back to the surface. Indulge me in a brief flashback…

In my senior year of college, I landed the weekly opinion column in the school paper. One week, I wrote a column about labeling people in which I talked about how fun and helpful labeling is. I thought I was being subtly ironic, but I was too subtle for at least one reader, who wrote an impassioned letter to the paper decrying my column. I was reminded at the time of Randy Newman, whose early and best songs took this same boldly ironic approach. And I felt better at the time, thinking that for every person or few people who didn’t get what I was trying to do, there would be someone who did.

But now Randy Newman makes money writing unsubtle pop songs for Disney (not that this takes away from what he has done in the past, but still…). If the results of the election yesterday show me anything, it’s that the voting public, in spite of turning out in record numbers, is the opposite of subtle. They’re boneheads, dumbasses who are content to be led around by their noses, lacking the interest to make even a cursory attempt to question what they’re told. It takes hardly any effort at all to see the lies and misleading statements that Bush and his administration make constantly. They don’t even try to be subtle about lying or misdirecting anymore because they know no one will question them, including those whose job it is to question.

So is subtlety a lost skill? Is it fading out of popular art because the mass audience is too stupid to get it and so won’t pay for it? Or is it still alive and I’m just myopic with grief at the moment? As I type that, I can think of examples I’ve seen recently — Tony Kushner, South Park, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. But is this enough? Is there hope? What keeps you going when you fall into moods like this?

Thanks for letting me vent. I’m sure I won’t be the only one venting today, but I hope I’ve done so here in a respectable way.

Stranded in Ohio ,

Adam Diamond

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Hey Adam,

You know that I’m sorry for the delay in answering this, because I’ve already apologized in private and will do so now again. Many sorries. You get the Kelley Eskridge Big Patience Award (grin).

Nicola and I were entering the Hideous Time of Moving in the days before the election: we had seen the new house, made an offer, and gone into scramble mode about inspections and contractor estimates for remodeling. By election day we were stunned with the promise of debt and the enormity of having to clean up nine years’ of accumulated “well, we’ll get to this someday” junk so that we could put our house on the market…. I was so tired that all I could really feel was a faint, fatalistic sadness that so many people were so scared.

Because I do think that Bush’s re-election is a prime example of large-scale fear in action. I know I go on a lot about fear and love and joy in the virtual pub; give me a beer and I just seem to want to talk about the big stuff. From that perspective, I think that Bush lives in fear, leads from fear, and will do most anything to make the rest of us afraid so that we believe he’s right to do what he does. I think he surrounds himself with people who are well versed in the art of instilling and managing fear.

But I’m also thinking about something I read recently. I’m not sure who said, “we have met the enemy and he is partly right,” but it stopped me in my tracks. It is this “partly right” that can change the world, for better or worse. It’s the “partly right” that makes us wish to stamp out the opposition so the ambiguity no longer exists, or that allows us to suck it up and see other people as real, even if we think they are real assholes. I believe that people voted for Bush thinking he would make them feel safer, and for some of them, this will happen. I don’t think that’s about subtlety or its lack: I think it’s about fear of difference, fear of ambiguity, fear of annihilation. Fear of meeting the enemy and finding (all props to Pogo) that they are us.

I get that, you know? I have those fears too. I just hope they never get that kind of grip on me.

I don’t think subtlety is dead. I just don’t think it works on everyone. It’s about nuance, and the current cultural struggle is in a fairly bold-strokes phase. I’m doing that myself, in this post: I haven’t yet offered any consideration that Bush and his folks might be people with whom I could share a margarita and some chips and salsa and maybe even a joke or two. That they are people who love their families, who maybe enjoy a sunset or the smell of honeysuckle. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t make me like them or their choices any better. It just means that I know that in some ways, in the human spectrum, they are “partly right” (a concept which is a giant pain in the ass, you know? It is simpler to push people away).

I just reviewed a book for @U2 called Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas (whom I also interviewed for the site). It includes a story that speaks to this. Bono relates a story told to him by Harry Belafonte. Belafonte met with Martin Luther King, Jr. just after John F. Kennedy made Bobby Kennedy the Attorney General. Belafonte tells Bono that it was “a very depressing moment, a very bad day for the Civil Rights movement.” Bono asks why, and Belafonte says:

Oh, you see, you forget. Bobby Kennedy was Irish. Those Irish were real racists, they didn’t like the black man. They were just one step above the black man on the social ladder, and they made us feel it. They were all the police, they were the people who broke our balls on a daily basis. Bobby at that time was famously not interested in the Civil Rights Movement…. We knew we were in deep trouble. We were crestfallen, in despair, talking to Martin, moaning and groaning about the turn of events when Dr. King slammed his hand down and ordered us to stop the bitchin’: “Enough of this!” he said. “Is there nobody here who’s got something good to say about Bobby Kennedy?” We said, “Martin, that’s what we’re telling ya! There is no one… There is nothing good to say about him. The guy’s an Irish Catholic conservative bad ass, he’s bad news….” To which Martin replied: “Well, then, let’s call this meeting to a close. We will re-adjourn when somebody has found one redeeming thing to say about Bobby Kennedy, because that, my friends, is the door through which our movement will pass.”
— from Bono: In Conversation with Mischka Assayas

Talk about the long view. King was willing to allow that there was something about Kennedy that was partly right. It’s part of what made King such an amazing force. But it requires geologic patience and an ability to persevere in a constant state of ambiguity. To stay engaged on that level takes enormous energy. I think part of what’s happened in our country is that about 50 percent of us believe that we don’t have the energy for it right now; we’re too scared to find the redeeming thing.

I am trying not to join the 50% in this regard. Some days are better than others.

And sure, there’s hope (the day I cannot find a shred of hope in my soul will be a very, very bad day indeed). There are people of goodwill in all parts of the process who are trying to find the doors through which we can all pass. And at the risk of sounding all fluffy and dewy-eyed, I believe that whenever any of us does this in our everyday life, it ripples out in directions we might not imagine, it touches others in ways we don’t perceive, and it makes a difference. I believe this, and it helps me.

And here’s to Ohio, a fine state. Cheers.