The Zoopness: "Doing something you do not understand for someone you love"
“I like to see people reunited-- I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough... I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone."
One of the reasons nature became such a particular balm to me over the last few years was because I found myself desperate for places where I could pretend that the reality I was running from didn’t exist. I could look at trees and rivers and oceans that didn’t know the word Trump or virus. I could remind myself that there was a time that exists outside of human time, and that we’re living on a grain of sand on an enormous beach. My ideas of what “should” be happening started to feel small and insignificant again, and I could breathe a bit more deeply. And the more I experienced that feeling, the less inclined I was to go back into the environment that seemed to be making me sick and want to run in the first place — social media that made me feel agitated and lacking, political news that treated everything like an emergency and made it harder to know what was actually important, and debates about everything under the sun that went round and round and got nowhere.
I’ve been reminded again during my time away from work of something I was just starting to learn before the pandemic hit — that my time and energy are actually my most sacred and limited possessions and that if I’m not careful and intentional with where I direct them, there are a million forces happily willing to pull them into dead-end pits of comparison and scattered attention, to take me away from where my feet are, as my dad says. I’ve also remembered that my system doesn’t seem to react well to quick change/harsh ultimatums, and that sometimes it takes time, often way more time than my impatient soul prefers, to move back toward health.
Which is all a way of telling you that sometimes I still get on Twitter when I shouldn’t. But the pull of NBA Playoffs Twitter is just too strong, and so here we are. Political news inevitably creeps into my feed, and so now I’ve had too much coffee and am riled up about something I have essentially no control over — a dangerous combination that my therapist warns me against. :)
A group in Florida released a report called “Porn in Schools” that they sent to every school district in the state, recommending books that should be pulled from shelves because of their “LGBTQ friendly” content (this included Everywhere Babies, which includes a drawing of potentially same sex parents, a book about same sex penguins, and Judy Blume— lol). Over 20 districts have removed books like The Kite Runner, Brave New World, and Beloved (maybe you all already know this, but I basically live in a cave and know nothing except that Harry Styles and Shania dueted at Coachella). And in a normal situation, I’d probably have some feelings about book banning and hypocrisy and fear-based policy making and the laughability of a losing battle, but unfortunately this isn’t a normal situation.
Because the Florida Citizens Alliance also took the step of putting my favorite novel on their list of Scary Demonic Things You Shouldn’t Read. And so now I’m pissed.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is ostensibly about a young boy navigating the grief of losing his father, but it’s also about 9/11 and WWII and kids on the spectrum, and the trauma and love that get passed through generations, and how hard it can be sometimes to be a person in the world who feels things. I think it is a beautiful and and funny and creative piece of art and a touching love letter to New York City and humanity. It might be a little melodramatic and heavy-handed at points, but so am I. I’ve read it probably 20 times in the last 16 years, and genuinely cannot imagine what it is about this book that got the attention of the Florida Citizens Alliance, though I’d probably consider it a badge of honor to be on that list given the context and company.
I have thought of that book so often over the pandemic for a thousand different reasons — because of how it describes the feeling of people you love being in the way of harm and the sacrifices you’d make to protect them, the feeling of falling apart and trying not to show it, the feelings of longing and loss. How it reminds me that the way people look on the outside often has very little to do with how they feel on the inside, that we might not always make sense to ourselves, and that everything and everyone is lost, and found, in the end.
But the reason I’ve thought of it the most is because of this line from it — “What I regretted most was how much I believed in the future.” I would think of that, and the advice from Dear Sugar that we need to practice saying I love you to people we love so when it matters most, we have the courage and muscle memory to say it. When the world is ending, when disease comes, when things are on fire — you say I love you because you’ve said it and meant it a thousand times before when you were folding laundry or driving in the car or sending a text. You said it the first time, before they did, croaking out the words made your heart race and your palms sweaty.
__
When I was first down in LA in February it was at the height of Oscar season, and there were ads for movies plastered all over town trying to influence Academy voters. There was this particular ad in Hollywood for ˆDon’t Look Up” that felt like a knife to the gut every time I drove past it. {Spoiler alert here if you haven't seen the movie, but it’s kind of hard to give away the ending that the Earth and a lot of its inhabitants are facing potentially imminent extinction?}. It was a photo of one of the last scenes of the movie, where they’re all seated around the dining room table holding hands, with the caption “We Really Did Have It All, Didn’t’ We?”
Knife. To. Gut.
As war was breaking out in Europe, I drove around LA and wondered what it meant to live in the first simulated strike zone and if everyone I love knew that I loved them and how much I loved them. I went to the hermitage knowing there was the remotest possibility that the sky could fall while I was there and I wouldn’t get to say goodbye to anyone (I warned you about the melodrama). And I kept thinking about that scene at the dining room table and telling myself that the best I could do with this moment right now is to be doing something I love, with someone I love, when the end comes.
And I know I can’t live that way every day. Our limited minds aren’t capable of sustaining the idea of the infinite for very long. But it did force me to confront that I had stopped loving myself, and that I needed to find a way back to that love (with a lot of help).
I also thought about all of my friends who actually did have the sky fall over the last few years. Friends who lost the people who made them who they are, who faced earth-shattering diagnoses and illness and divorces and lost jobs in the midst of an unfolding pandemic that stretched every system far past its breaking point. The things that were endured largely in private and without the softening embrace of community.
But I believe there’s a path out for all of us, and that the path will be made more beautiful and less lonesome if we have art and friends that remind us we’re not alone in our suffering — that everyone is scared of something — but that courage is found on the other side of fear.
These feel like extraordinary times, but that’s partially because many of us had lived in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. For a lot of people in a lot of the world, the threat of bombs falling, or water drying up, or babies getting sick and not having medicine has been a daily reality for a very long time. Waking up in a comfortable bed this morning with my immediate needs met and my loved ones generally safe and accounted for — I’m already the luckiest of the luckiest.
The pandemic asked us to believe the myth of scarcity — that there’s only so much health and security and resources to go around. And in a material way, that scarcity became true. But there’s always been enough here for everyone, we just need to learn to share a little better. To extend empathy to people who don’t look like us or believe like us. To have pockets filled with love big enough for the whole world to fit in.
Happy Sunday. I promise to lay off caffeine and Twitter soon. Text me about the playoffs if you’re watching. xoxo.
Alison