In keeping with my desire, my goal rather, to sit down and write every week or two, here I am. I’m not sure I have anything specific to say. Too many things have been taking up residence in my skull lately: Questions directed at nothing but air, questions that don’t, perhaps can’t, have answers, questions that perform adjustments, however minor, to the whir and modes of my thinking, cogs shrinking and expanding, changing direction, setting loose shards of metal or grinding to a halt. I try in the evenings to take walks and devote my attention to the heavens: to Jupiter floating high and heavy and bright in the black sky, to the leaves marled and brightening and darkening, dismissing at last their attachment to tree for the loose freedom of air, only to soon meet grass, pavement, or concrete. I wonder how those stains form on the sidewalks, the ones that look like leaf shadows, despite the leaf that made it now being long gone. I try to point my focus at the air itself, how it smells like water and gently decaying earth, how I can feel the water in it, microscopic particles hanging out and dusting my cheeks, swimming up my nose and then down into my lungs. Water and leaf.
I try but I fail. My attention towards both the heavens and the earth upon which I walk is a frayed wire at best. So often I come across a gap in the cord, lose my grip, get lost in my day-to-day, my worries about work, my thoughts and questions about the news, about how easily humans can kill each other, both en masse and with a spray of bullets shot into a single truck traveling at sixty-miles-an-hour. It’s a luxury, isn’t it, a privilege, to be able to think about anything else? The fall leaves, planets dotting the night sky, the arresting anatomy of your run-of-the-mill garden flower. I will get back there, to that place of better balance, but it will take some time, some learning, thousands of repetitions exercising a single muscle: the stream of my attention. No, not right now, not there, back here. Stay.
The protagonist of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead would tell me I need to get better at saving my juice. Not giving all of my heart and energy and care away to everyone around me, to strangers on the street, to unknown people thousands of miles away, not even to my students; and to preserve more of it for myself, for those I love, for my passions. Demon says in the book that it’s like training any other muscle, repetitions must be performed. A recent realization that may very well propel me toward real progress, at least with regards to work/life balance was this: it’s never my decent or good or wonderful students who clog up my mental space in the evening hours. It’s the buttheads; the ones I can’t figure out, who cause me trouble, who cause everyone trouble because they don’t seem to care. When I saw it like that, suddenly, it seemed beyond foolish to allow such negativity eat up my precious free hours on earth. I’ve since spent the weekend relaxing with people I love, reading good books, and playing in my sketchbook. I’ve hardly thought about work at all.
A couple of weekends ago, I went with my boyfriend to a funeral for a coworker of his. Not someone he knew well, but someone he knew enough to have been affected by his quiet kindness. He was twenty-two, the solitary death in the shooting up of a city sewer truck with three employees inside, between jobs, as it drove south on a highway at sixty-miles-an-hour. He was innocent, completely. He was kind to everyone, loved to eat, go bowling, and wanted to be a firefighter. At the service, his friends and family and coworkers shared stories of his generosity, his willingness to shed tears for others, to offer help and kindness to every single person he came across, even if it was something as simple as buying someone a bag of potato chips. The pastor spoke about the challenges this young man had faced, but reminded us all that having challenges did not mean we did not have choices. He told us that this young man made all the right choices, that his mother had made all the right choices. And then he paused. “Sadly,” the pastor began, “somebody else made a choice.” It was one of the most, if not the most, moving sermons I’ve ever heard. It gave me a lot to think about it, and it stayed with me all day.
I want to remember and really live that line the pastor kept revisiting: just because we have challenges does not mean we don’t have choices. No amount of good done will bring this young man back, will right the wrong of his death, but I think we can still find ways to honor someone who has gone. We can find ways to carry them forward, despite their absence. Like the pastor said, this young man made all the right choices, even though many of them were very difficult, and certainly inconvenient. I want to make more of the right choices, too. I want to get better at doing hard things, or changing how I do things, instead of falling into whatever pattern is easiest or most automatic. I want to quit making excuses for avoiding the things I know I should be doing, simply because they feel too hard, or too frightening. Enough, Katie. I know.
I’ll close with an excerpt from a favorite poem.
In “Gravel”, Mary Oliver wrote:
(Oh, heart, I would not dangle you down into
the sorry places,
but there are things there as well
to see, to imagine.)
I always come back to these lines.
I want to know terrain both solid and liquid, humanity, life as we’ve spun it into existence on this planet, our marbled blue pearl drifting through space. I’ll never see and feel it all, no matter how long I live. But I return to these lines as a reminder: what is perfect or ideal or easily beautiful—these things are incomplete. They do not, cannot, reveal the whole picture. To be reminded of this helps me to not shy away from difficulty, from discomfort or grief or fear—and there is no shortage of these things on planet earth today. It’s tempting to turn away from them, to turn down the volume, hit the dimmer switch, and sometimes, we must. But I want to be here, fully, completely, as often as I can, while I am. Living like this? It absolutely requires saving your juice, doing hard and inconvenient things, making the right choice, however arduous the challenge.
XO
wildmind.space 
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