Street muralin the Barranco neighborhood of Lima, Perú
Earlier this month, I traveled to Lima, Perú. I wrote about it in last week’s newsletter on unity through difference:
At midweek, we were fortunate to go on a tour of Lima’s Historic Centre with workshop participants. We walked through the expansive plaza at the heart of Lima while looking at the beautiful colonial-era buildings surrounding it and the Andean foothills beyond. When we entered Lima’s stunning cathedral, I was handed a little card with a short prayer of unity on it. As I read it something immediately felt wrong. Classical music was gently playing in the background of this nearly 500-year-old cathedral and I sat down on a pew to take it all in. After a while I realized that I didn’t like how the prayer advocated for unity through “sameness” or “oneness.” If we somehow were to achieve unity through “sameness,” life would be reduced to something far less that it actually is. It reminded me of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk on the dangers of a single story, where she encourages us to see the multiple layers of people and cultures, and to fight powers that would seek to silence them. Some would argue that the silencing is already taking place. It’s why I’m appreciative of people like Kendrick Lamar, who publicly give voice to a counter narrative, both directly and symbolically. If we’re ever going to get to a place of unity, we have to do so through accepting and embracing “difference.”
This week, I started reading Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. In the book, Solnit calls for continuous hope and action. And she makes an important point about the past—be it good or horrible—and how it relates to hope:
We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats and cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope.
I’m encouraged by this—to be fueled by hope as I lean forward into action. In my newsletter, I wrote about other “untold” or, perhaps, “forgotten” histories of Perú that you can read about here.
It’s always difficult to spend the holiday season away from family and friends. You find yourself missing the traditions you’ve long held for this time of year, along with the special events and gatherings you look forward to with such anticipation. Your place in the world shifts and you have to deal with the friction the shift produces. One way is to bring the familiar into your new space—some Christmas tunes, favorite holiday movies, putting up a few recently bought decorations (instead of the beloved ones from the bins in your attic crawl space). Another way is to open yourself to how the holidays might be celebrated in your new place—spending unexpected time with new friends or observing the little changes in honor of the holidays happening around you.
I was thinking about friction this past week when I took a break from my comforting Christmas playlist and turned on Television’s song “Friction” from their album Marque Moon. Like so many forces in life, I started to process how friction can be both good and bad. So like Santa shimmying down the chimney, this week’s newsletter is gonna involve some friction.
In Television’s song “Friction” (from the excellent Marque Moon), Tom Verlaine sings, “You complain of my diction. You give me friction” while cleverly pausing for a noticeable moment between “dic” and “tion.”
Innuendo aside, I think we need more friction. Our world tries so hard to reduce it. Get there faster. Buy it more easily. Watch it whenever you want. Our convenience culture often leaves us feeling disoriented, reaching for something solid to hold onto. The rapid pace of it all can cause us to become desensitized to the richness of all that life has to offer—blinded to what is truly valuable.
Friction can help us slow things down—see things more clearly. It can help make things a little harder so that we’re forced to grow. And it can also set up limits for us—limits that surprisingly make life more enjoyable.
I remember reading this Guardian article around the time I started getting into vinyl. In the article, Jeff Tweedy discusses why the album still matters in an age where you can just as well download individual songs from iTunes. While discussing the album Sukierae that he and his son Spencer released back in 2014, Tweedy says:
I just want to listen to the album and have a feeling that one part has ended, and now I can take a little breather before I listen to the second part. Or I can listen to the second part another time. It’s a double record on vinyl, so there are three breaks like that. I wanted it to have different identities artistically and the album format allows me to do that.
Listening to music on vinyl brings intentionality to the listening experience. There’s more friction compared to streaming an endless playlist on Spotify. You have to pay attention to when the record is finished, get up out of your seat, physically flip it over or change it, go sit back down. Changing the record requires even more friction—you take the record off the turntable, put it back in its sleeve, take a new record out of its sleeve, place it on the turntable, and so on. If you want to keep listening, you have to take all of these steps all over again. The intentionality brings mindfulness.
I also think of watching holiday specials when I was a kid. Each December, we use to pull out our living room hide-a-bed and lie down under it to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas. The idea of a holiday special is mostly lost on us today, but we can still add some friction into the mix to bring the “special” back. Rather than binge-watching a show, pick a night and watch one episode weekly. Showing some restraint and delaying satisfaction makes you appreciate it the show a lot more. Like listening to vinyl, it also might help you watch the show more mindfully.
This is true of a lot of things when you think about it. It’s the reason seasons are so cool. The season changes and you have to wait a whole year to see it again. As a result, you appreciate it a lot more when it finally comes around. Limiting yourself to eating out once a month makes that night a whole lot more special than if you eat out every night.
Friction can create more mindfulness and enjoyment for us, but it has an enemy: efficiency. In his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin writes about the dangers of our efficiency-based culture:
Our continual quest for efficiency discourages looking too deeply. The pressure to deliver doesn’t grant us time to consider all possibilities. Yet it’s through deliberate action and repetition that we gain deeper insight.
Friction allows us to look deeper, but the cost of it is time. Where do you have time to sacrifice efficiency and gain the benefit of deeper insight?
In the summer of 2023, I took a lot more time when I chose to bike from Wausau to Eau Claire (a journey that ended up being 120 miles) to see a late night concert at the Blue Ox Music Festival. There was certainly a lot more friction for me riding my bike than driving my car. It was a lot harder! But, I gained a great deal from the experience. When I arrived, Them Coulee Boys were singing “Ten Feet Tall,” and that’s just about how I felt.
Entering Eau Claire County
Feeling 10 ft. tall in front of the porta potties
There are so many ways you can add some more friction to your day. And the benefits are many—you get to know yourself better, you grow as a person, and you live with more intention. Ultimately you decide what is important to you rather than letting someone else determine that for you. Life becomes a lot more meaningful and satisfying as a result.
This week I was listening to Francis Quinlan’s song “Another Season,” and I caught the word “friction” in the opening verse. It struck me as a good way to close out the end of another year:
Hey Nothin’ much, just Wrappin’ up another season What do you make of this town? Here I have been taking the long way around Do you, like me, keep closest to the most familiar friction?
I learned a new term this week: negative capability. Rebecca Solnit talks about it in her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
She writes that in December 1817, the English poet John Keats penned a letter to his brothers, George and Thomas, in which he described negative capability (from Selected Letters):
I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
Keats is speaking here of creative pursuits, in particular those of writing and literature. While fact and reason are important matters indeed, much of life is not so easily defined. There is a real skill and perspective in being able to accept those things that are unresolved and yet-to-be worked out—things like learning to do something new, adapting to a different culture, dealing with the unexpected, and putting in the effort to grow a relationship. Negative capability is something I embrace. I knew how it felt before knowing the name Keats ascribed to it.
The term got me thinking a lot about what it means to use the word “negative.” In mathematics, of course, “positive” means addition and “negative” means subtraction. In the case of negative capability, the answers are subtracted, or taken away, and one is left in the space that exists before arriving at an answer.
Negative might also imply that something is nonexistent, as in the negative space surrounding an object in art. Sungi Mlengeya (via kottke.org) is a Tanzanian artist who deftly uses negative space to create beautiful paintings of dark faces and bodies. In perhaps less-striking, yet no less profound fashion, Charles Schulz’s drawing of Charlie Brown and his sister, Sally (at the top of this post), uses negative space to reveal the two characters as they look out into the black night sky.
Pencil drawing by Charles Brown (not to be confused with Charlie Brown) of his close friend John Keats, 1819 (via The Examined Life)
The negative, by nature, removes the nonessential, leaving space for a minimalist perspective to shine through. It can be said that the Peanuts comic strip was minimalist in this regard. I recently read Nicole Rudick’s article, “How ‘Peanuts’ Created a Space for Thinking” in The New Yorker. Quoting David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography throughout, Rudick writes of Charles Schulz:
To draw the readers’ eye, Schulz opted for the less-is-more approach, aiming to ‘fight back’ with white space to echo what he once called the strip’s ‘very slight incidents.’ The usefulness of that simplicity became clear as Schulz’s writing deepened. ‘The more they developed complex powers and appetites while staying faithful to their cut-out, shadow-play simplicity,’ Michaelis writes of the strip’s characters, ‘the easier it would be for Schulz to declare the hard things he was set on saying.’ Had Schulz filled his panels with visual distractions, the business of examining interior problems might have proved less successful.
It’s no secret that modern life is filled with distractions. If negative capability describes a person’s ability to experience peace in the midst of discomfort and contentment in the absence of answers, then negative space, perhaps, can be said to remove those distractions that are obscuring what’s important, bringing life’s profound truths more clearly into focus.
Negative as the removal of something to reveal something else—it reminded me of Nazca lines. I just read about the discovery of over 300 new ones. Nazca lines are geoglyphs—drawings on the ground that were made by removing rocks and earth to create a negative image. They were created by the Nazca people in the desserts of southern Peru between 500 BC and 500 AD (you can see more of them here). The dessert rock is a deep rust color due to oxidization and weathering, and when removed, a lighter sand color is exposed, creating a high contrast that reveals the drawings when viewed from high above (via National Geographic).
There are theories, but it remains largely a mystery as to why these drawings were created. Nor is it known exactly how the Nazca people were able to create them with such precision, given their magnitude and the lack of a means to view them from above. Some have speculated that the lines were pathways, tread upon by the people.
There’s an ancient Tibetan proverb that goes like this:
Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves.
In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Solnit unpacks the proverb by describing the deep meaning behind “shul,” the Tibetan word for “track.” She writes that shul is:
a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by—a footprint, for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night. All of these are shul: the impression in the ground left by the regular tread of feet, which has kept it clear of obstructions and maintained it for the use of others. As a shul, emptiness can be compared to the impression of something that used to be there. In this case, such an impression is formed by the indentations, hollows, marks, and scars left by the turbulence of selfish craving.
Negative describes the removal of earth to reveal the Nazca images, just as it describes the removal of those barriers that hold us back from becoming centered. “Centered” here does not mean whole or complete, because these states are unattainable as imperfect human beings. According to the proverb, however, becoming centered is within one’s grasp, if only there exists a willingness to let go. The experience of suffering—both the self-inflicted kind and the living-in-this-world kind—is something that knocks us off balance. It’s at the moment of letting it go that we become aware of the emptiness filling the impression of its absence. That emptiness, existing in all of the impressions made by things that used to trouble us, is what reveals the path, or shul, upon which we can become centered.
Solnit also likens it to purposefully getting lost in order to be fully present. She contemplates the words of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin by writing:
In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.
This too is negative capability and is something that’s achievable only through intentional physical and mental movement.
Negative capability is a valuable skill to cultivate—especially because while some things resolve over time and with effort, there are a great many things that don’t. The messiness of life is unavoidable, and oftentimes the only means left to overcome it is through acceptance.
through Peanuts, Schulz wanted to tell hard truths about, as he said, ‘intelligent things.’ But the main truth he tells is that there are no answers to the big questions.
There’s a Peanuts comic strip mid-article that, to me, perfectly highlights the acceptance that comes with negative capability:
Yes, there are solutions for Snoopy’s predicament and he actively seeks them out. But in the end, Snoopy accepts that he will have to weather the storm, just like so many of us. Can we accept it?
Painting of Grenada and its two smaller islands, Carriacou and Petite Martinique, to the north — a happy discovery while paying a campus parking ticket in the Chancellery building at SGU
Fall is my favorite time of year. As the days get shorter, the nights get cooler, inviting you to put on something cozy and warm before gathering round a campfire with friends. By the time October rolls around, football season is well underway, as are the yellows and reds scattered amongst the once-green leaves of the Northwoods. To me, fall is comfort. I love how it leads into the holiday seasons of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas—joyous times that each conjure their own moods of nostalgia mixed with anticipation.
I’ve always been grateful to live in a place that has four seasons. While living outside of any one season, you gain a fresh perspective of all the wondrous elements that season holds and look forward to the moment it will arrive again. It’s a constant cycle of welcoming back something that’s both novel and completely familiar at the same time.
The following image from kottke.org struck me in its representation of how seasons bring change to one, isolated place, in this case a Finnish island, which is surprisingly shaped similar to Grenada.
Four seasons in the life of a Finnish island (via kottke.org)
Living abroad brings with it a strange juxtaposition of missing where you’re from while embracing where you are. I’ve been missing fall in the Midwest and all its delights, the changing of the color of leaves among them. In Grenada, there’s a rainy season and a dry season. We’re currently in the rainy season, which ends in late November. Other than scattered showers, I’ve started to wonder, “What aspects of Grenada should I be embracing while it’s my time to be here?”
This was on my mind one morning when I picked up Rick Rubin’s, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. I’ve been reading it every morning as a kind of devotional. The chapters are short and accessible, and offer a wealth of practical wisdom on cultivating creativity in your life—a perfect way to start the day. In a chapter on nature as teacher, Rubin brings up the seasons and other ways nature changes. He writes:
Nature is the most absolute and enduring. We can witness it change through the seasons. We can see it in the mountains, the oceans, the deserts, and the forest. We can watch the changes of the moon each night, and the relationship between the moon and the stars.
He goes on to talk about the wide range of color available to us in nature:
If you step out in nature, the palette is infinite. Each rock has such a variation of color within it, we could never find a can of paint to mimic the exact same shade.
Reading this really primed me (no pun intended) to intentionally embrace all of the new colors around me. As is the case with most things in life, when you catch onto an idea, other connections to that idea seem to pop up everywhere you look. Shortly after reading Rubin’s description of nature’s infinite color palette, I stumbled upon the following video from thurstonphoto.
The wave crashing beautifully in slow motion reveals a wide spectrum of blues and greens, a nuance that might go unnoticed in real time or casually missed by the unattuned eye. Anyone who comes to Grenada can see that the ocean surrounding it is made up of a vast array of blues and greens. I started to wonder if I might pull some meaning from them in the same way I would while reflecting on the reds and yellows of my home during this time of year.
Looking out over the Caribbean Sea from the campus of St. George’s University
So this October I’m contemplating blue. In his book, Theory of Colours (via The Marginalian), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe writes:
We love to contemplate blue — not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.
I relate to being drawn into a thing. Strangely, I think we are drawn into gazing out at the immensity of the ocean in a way that’s similar to how we are drawn into staring at the intimacy of a fire’s flame—one large and one small, yet both inspiring a sense of awe. Considering the connection here to the fall (warmth of a fire), I was motivated to dig (or swim?) further.
I discovered Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, via The Marginalian, and am currently working my way through it. In her book, Solnit contemplates the color blue. She starts by providing a scientific basis for why we see different shades of blue in nature and goes on to describe blue as the color of desire and longing. She writes:
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.
I found this so applicable to my current feelings of wanting to embrace Grenada while at the same time missing home. Solnit goes on to caution against fulfilling our desires through closing the great distance embodied by the blue of the ocean, in an attempt to grab hold of that which we seek. She writes:
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond […] Something is always far away.
The idea of owning your “longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed,” speaks an overwhelming truth to my soul. There is such empowerment to be found in accepting whatever uncontrolled adversity you face, and embracing those aspects of life that are within your ability to control. A shift of perspective is often all it takes. As humans, we are always longing for something, whether it be within our control or beyond it. What if we made peace with this fact and were contented to live in harmony alongside that longing instead? She concludes:
The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not … abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway. […] Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.
It is indeed a complex terrain we traverse, filled with surprising contradictions.
Various shades of ocean blue I’ve found in Grenada
I see shades of blue all around me here. The ocean is reminding me of all the beauty to be found in this place just as it reminds me of how much I long for home.
Yet, if the blue of the ocean represents a great distance between me and home, I think it also provides a connection. Wisconsin is no stranger to expansive bodies of water after all. As I sit on a beach on the southern shores of Grenada, I know that two buddies of mine may very well be sitting on the northern shores of Wisconsin. I’m content to think about them, along with many others, while I welcome new waves upon my shore.
My buddy Joe J’s tattoo, revealing the blue and green shades of Lake Superior
As a final note, I love the music of fall. For the past couple of years I’ve put together a new Halloween mix each October. The Charlie Brown holiday specials are also some of my favorites, and I love the mood that the Vince Guarldi Trio brings to each season. So in honor of where I come from and where I am, I put together an October Oceans playlist. I intentionally made it to blend together the blues and greens of the Caribbean with the reds and yellows of the Midwest. You can listen to it here.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the many ways technology helps people stay connected from a distance. I connect with people and places via music, so while living abroad, I’ll often stream The Current out of the Twin Cites or WXPR’s Northwoods Cafe out of Wisconsin’s northwoods. These are great ways for me to connect with the Midwest, a place I will always call home. I’m connecting to Grenada too, through music. Two great trends I’ve enjoyed about the music here: 1) popular songs that have been caribbeanized (think Simon & Garfunkel with steel drums), and 2) 80s/90s soft rock and R&B. There is a radio station here that I swear plays Luther Vandross at least 50% of the time. If you’d like to tune into Grenadian radio, I’m a big fan of Radio Garden (also an app), which allows you to stream radio stations from all over the world. You can explore the globe through an interface similar to that of Google Earth, each green dot representing a different radio station. This is how I discovered Interferencia IMER (Instituto Mexicano de la Radio), broadcasting out of Mexico City. I highly recommend it. They play a wonderfully eclectic mix of tunes. It was through Interferencia that I first learned about Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers being traded to the New York Jets. At the time I thought, “How appropriate is it for a Spanish teacher from Wisconsin to get big-time Wisconsin news from a Mexican radio station?”
I also wrote about the moon and how it connects us to one another across great distances.
Earlier this month we visited the House of Chocolate, a small museum in St. George’s that specializes in, you guessed it, chocolate. Grenada is a big producer of chocolate, and the folks at the museum offer a nice little demonstration of chocolate production on the island, from the cacao tree all the way to the wide array of chocolate delicacies available for purchase at the museum’s store.
So far we’ve seen and tasted Jouvay Chocolate (you can also visit their factory which I look forward to doing) and The Grenada Chocolate Company. Both offer a variety of dark chocolates (70% or higher raw chocolate content with the other 30% being additional ingredients like milk, sugar, etc.). My favorite “other” ingredients are nibs, or crushed pieces of cacao beans. I was also interested to learn that the higher the raw chocolate content, the less the chocolate melts in the hot Caribbean weather. And it tastes better!
If you’re not one to appreciate the complexity and depth of bitter flavors, not to worry. The museum highlights some other reasons why you should eat dark chocolate. Here are some of my favorites:
Sun protection – London researchers recently tested chocolate flavanols’ sun-protecting prowess. After 3 months eating chocolate with high levels of flavanols, their study subjects’ skin took twice as long to develop that reddening effect that indicates the beginning of a burn.
Contains anti-depressant agents – Eating a delicious piece of dark chocolate can reduce stress levels. It works by stimulating the production of endorphins that may give rise to a happy feeling. Dark chocolate also contains stimulants such as theobromine and caffeine.
Increases your IQ – Next time you’re under pressure on a work project, don’t feel so guilty about grabbing a dark chocolate bar from the vending machine. Not only will it help your body ward off the effects of stress but will boost your brain power when you really need it. A University of Nottingham researcher found that drinking cocoa rich in flavanols boosts blood flow to key parts of the brain for 2 to 3 hours which could improve performance and alertness in the short term.
Pucker power – Research has shown that allowing chocolate to melt in your mouth produces brain and heart rate activity that was similar to, and even stronger than, that produced with passionate kissing.
What other reasons for eating dark chocolate can you see?
Stepping out of a life that has become your normal is always a jolting experience. You almost instantly realize all the basic routines and rituals of day-to-day living that you’ve taken for granted. On a deeper level, you physically leave your people, your support network and the relationships that bring you meaning and significance.
One of Angie’s routines in Wausau was teaching yoga on Sunday mornings. So this past Sunday morning we did some yoga poolside, Angie instructing as the pair of us moved and found breath. Angie prompted to think of a word to serve as a mantra that would set the tone for the week. As I gazed out on the gorgeous Grenadian landscape before me, with its mountainous peaks and valleys, all I could think of was the song, “Lonesome Valley,” from the movie, O Brother, Where are Thou?. In low and rolling voices, The Fairfield Four sing:
You got to go to the lonesome valley You got to go there by yourself Nobody else can go for you You got to go there by yourself
This, of course, is a song about death. “Death”—maybe not the best choice for a mantra. But as we continued to do yoga the song’s refrain played out over and over again in my head: you got to go there by yourself. To be clear, I know that I’m not here by myself. I am married after all and I live with Angie in this new place. But the demands of medical school are intense, and the reality is that the past few weeks I’ve spent much of my time alone while Angie is in class or studying. And Grenada is, in fact, and island, the perfect symbol of how I’ve been feeling: isolated and alone.
But I embrace my solitude for the time its mine to bear.I think that being alone is especially beneficial during times like this when you need to adapt to an unfamiliar environment and new community of people. To be alone heightens your senses, allowing you to more acutely observe all that’s going on around you and inside of you. There’s less conversation filling your thoughts and fewer distractions vying for your attention. Solitude affords you the space you need to grow and acclimate. As an introvert, I benefit from my seasons of solitude and even look forward to them.
Music is a great friend to me when solitude loses its luster and fades to loneliness. I like how Jeff Tweedy describes this impact of music in his book, World Within a Song:
Almost all songs function in a way that consoles the listener with a brief but vital companionship. In essence taking the place of another human in the room—another consciousness filling the void of isolation. It’s a tender relationship regardless of a song’s musical nature. From the bleakest black metal to the sweetest pop confection. The power to embrace the lonely is always at the heart of the bargain.
Adjusting to a new life requires patience. Patience and faith that Angie and I will find our people here, and also meaningful moments with one another. Life gets so much more messy and beautiful when you occupy space with others in an intentional way. Real meaning, I believe, is created in community, when the barriers come down and you see people for who they are and they see you. At some point you need to take the risks and get in the game. Engage with life. As Lucy puts it, you need involvement.
Being alone and being in community both inspire growth in their own way. I know that next week is a new week and one that will bring a new mantra.
In anticipation of our move to Grenada, where my wife, Angie, will begin medical school, she’s been climbing our local ski hill at Rib Mountain State Park on a daily basis. She says it makes her feel grounded. I like her so sometimes I get grounded by climbing the mountain too. It’s a workout!
Summer days in Wisconsin are hot and humid, so we’ve also been frequenting my parents’ pool. After a day of work or packing up our house (or climbing a mountain), Angie will suggest we go for a float. But rather than ease her way into the water, she’s lately taken to doing cannonballs.
It’s revealing that on the precipice of a huge change for our family, the two activities that are putting my wife most at peace are climbing mountains and doing cannonballs. It’s gotten me thinking a lot about movement.
Life is composed of dualities. We think of these dualities as opposed to one another but often they work together to help us find balance. Angie’s been finding her peace through rising (climbing a mountain) and falling (doing cannonballs). Rising and falling.
Rising is a movement that represents determined effort. You have to take it step by step, focusing on the tasks in front of you. As we prepare to move our household, it seems like we’re climbing a mountain. The same can be said for becoming a doctor. The end goal may seem daunting but all you can do is focus on the immediate task ahead; the next step or the work of the day. Eventually you get to the peak.
Falling is a movement that represents letting go. You have to jump in. You have to leave the firm ground of your comfort behind, facing the unknown and immersing yourself in new surroundings.
I like how Amanda Shires describes falling in her song, “The Drop and Lift”:
A swarm of sparrows rising over a cane field Hearts ascend like that Falling is the closest to flying I believe we’ll ever get, we’ll ever get
Contrast this to how Stevie Nicks describes climbing a mountain in the Fleetwood Mac song, “Landslide”:
I took my love, I took it down Climbed a mountain and I turned around And I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills ‘Til the landslide brought me down
In speaking of love and relationships, these songs highlight the fact that dualities are not always as they seem. They speak of the mysterious nature of rising and falling. Of looking at life from below, moving upwards; and of looking at life from above, moving downwards. Of climbing mountains and doing cannonballs.
I think the lesson is this:
Whatever the mountain you face, keep climbing it, because eventually you’ll reach the summit. But also remember to take a leap every once in a while, knowing that a fall will come shortly after, because in falling we allow ourselves to fly (or, in Angie’s case, swim).
We weren’t supposed to be a cat family. Before getting married I told my future wife that I never wanted a cat, that I’m extremely allergic to cats, that a cat would leave traces of cat hair and urine throughout our house. A month into our marriage we had a cat.
We misguidedly let our 3-year-old son name our cat and he joyfully proclaimed that we would call her “Booger.” I immediately had the thought that “Moco,” or booger in Spanish, sounded a lot better. I thought it maybe exuded more of a coffee shop feel because of its proximity to “mocha.” After a small amount of coaxing we were able to get him to agree to the suggestion.
Moco has been a part of our family now for sixteen years and I’ve officially become a cat person. But really, Moco had me converted during her first year with us. The epitome of a “curious cat” and a “scaredy cat,” Moco is easy to love, her Garfield-face always looking back at you judgingly.
Moco recently inspired me to start a list of things you should never do. The first thing:
Don’t hug your cat and then go change a record.
Moco is on my mind because this past Sunday we said goodbye to her. My wife and I are moving out of the country and made the difficult decision to not take her with us. Fortunately we were able to find her an amazing family to stay with while we’ll be gone the next two years. So it’s not goodbye goodbye. Still, saying goodbye to her was hard. She’s getting older and we don’t know if we’ll see her again.
I’m not sure why but I’ve had Billy Joel on the mind too. It might have to do with a comment a middle school teacher friend of mine made a few weekends ago. He was talking about unexpected things students say and recounted a first day of school scenario in which he asked a student, “How was your summer?” The student responded, “You know? This summer I really got into Billy Joel.”
So shortly after we said goodby to Moco, the following Billy Joel song popped into my head:
Goodbye Moco, goodbye my baby.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric Wenninger is an educator and writer. He teaches language and culture and writes about his thoughts and experiences here.
