I’ll be honest—it’s been a grim
summer for reasons I don’t want to get into here. A long, hot, ugly, depressing,
relentlessly stress-filled summer. My attempts to escape my problems and my semi-mid-life
crisis through literature have only made it worse with my recent reading of the
acclaimed novel “The Woman Upstairs.” It’s
about a woman named Nora who is a passionate yet failed artist, an elementary
school teacher embittered by the choices she’s made and the choices that have
been made for her. She’s self-pitying and stubborn, giving but angry about the
lack of rewards her sacrifices have brought her, creatively blocked, full of
untenable longing, and for all of her dutifulness, a rather selfish person. I hate
to say that I relate to such a difficult character, but I relate to her so much
it’s painful.
Yesterday, one of passages in
the book really struck me. It described a holiday assembly at Nora’s elementary
school, a beautifully rendered scene that immersed me in the warm, mystical world
of the young children and their doting teachers. It seemed magical to me, and I
was puzzled by Nora’s failure to appreciate the beauty in it.
Then I thought about my own daily
life. In my desire for it to be something other than it is, have I failed to
see the magic in it? How many tiny, magnificent miracles escape me every day
because I waste so much time desiring things to be as I want them to be, rather
than how they are? Is my willfulness, rather than forming my life more to my
liking, only making it less and less bearable?
We live in a culture that has
completely swallowed the Kool-Aid when it comes to the concept of self-determination.
We think we have total control over our own destinies, that our choices and
actions inevitably lead to a predictable outcome, that the circumstances anyone
finds themselves in, good or bad, are entirely of their own making. We can’t
seem to handle the idea that we don’t have total control over every aspect of
our lives. We point fingers and lay blame to victims all of the time to protect
ourselves from the scary idea that random negative events might happen to us,
too, or that positive actions may not lead to us getting exactly what we want. We
create a mythos of predictability, of action=outcome. The truth is that the
amount of control we can exercise over our own circumstances is terrifyingly
small. Which leads me to consider the practice of acceptance, a discipline that
seems beyond my abilities, no matter how unhappy the lack of it is making me.
On a lighter note, to get away from
the sun, the stupid relentless cheerful
sun, Mr. Typist and I went to a big dark cavernous theater yesterday and
watched the new Seth Rogan flick, “The is the End”. It was totally
self-indulgent, over-the-top, completely improbable, and full of crass,
juvenile, disgusting boy-humor. I loved every second of it. I haven’t laughed
so hard in months. It was such a relief to have two hours away from my own
head, completely immersed in its gleeful idiocy. There weren’t a lot of people
in the theater and I think I laughed louder and harder than anybody else. I was still stuck with my own sadness
afterwards, but laughing until tears poured down my face was very cleansing.
Lesson learned? Literature makes you think upsetting existential thoughts, and dick jokes make you laugh long time.
--Kristen McHenry
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