“Oh, I don’t like this bit at all. We can’t progress to next week with all of you, sadly, so I’m really, really sorry to say that the person who won’t be coming with us next week is…”
                -Mel Giedroyc on The Great British Baking Show (Collection 3, Episode 7)

                Earlier today I thought, “I wish I could go outside.” Last month I told myself, “I wish I could be seeing my friends more.” Last October, I told a friend, “I’d like to find someplace around here to volunteer.” 
                “No you don’t,” he said. “If you wanted to you could just do that. Like that would literally take a minute.”
                Plenty of things are outside my control. All the same, it’s funny how I take my experience of the world and write down these rules, and then assume those rules are just there. Sometimes it’s funny in a good way: I don’t think I would be keeping up with Uproar except I “decided” it happens every Wednesday. Sometimes it’s funny in a sad way. Last October, when we talked about volunteering, my friend was right. I could just do that. He was also, I think, a little wrong: the fact that I didn’t wasn’t quite an indication that I didn’t want to. It was an indication that I believed in a world where I didn’t have time, that I’d moved recently and was feeling overwhelmed, that I didn’t know where to start. The rules I was seeing were between me and volunteering. It took some extra effort (and maybe my friend’s shove) to push through them.
                Baking follows the same template as most of the reality competition shows I’ve watched. It starts with a big group, and picks off people one by one to find a winner. “We can’t progress to next week with all of you, sadly…” Saying that, Giedroyc really did seem sad. I wonder how often I enshrine the rules I don’t like, the social habits I wish were otherwise, as though they’re some kind of unbreakable physical laws. As though I’m not one of those supporting them. We can’t. But can’t we? I find myself imagining a different kind of “reality” show, in which two skilled bakers taught something cool to an amateur. In week two the first amateur could share what they learned with a second, and the hosts could teach both something new. In week three there’d be three, or four. The group would expand instead of contract. You’d play off each other. You’d mess around, building on what went wrong. I’d like to watch that show unfold into next week, inviting more and more people to come along.

                “I started doodling ideas at odd hours, and I found that drawing a webcomic was an excellent way to avoid working on other seemingly more serious things. Better still, I discovered that research was an excellent way to put off working on the comic that I was drawing in order to procrastinate.”
                -Sydney Padua, preface for The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

                Sometimes I’ll see a student watching out a window or staring at the grains of wood in a table. They’re ‘lost in thought’—I like that phrase. As though thoughts have mountains and rivers and caves (they do), and in going out to get lost in them we can be more than we were before. Sometimes I won’t ask what they’re thinking. I don’t want to interrupt. Sometimes, when I do ask, they’ll say “nothing.” That can be because they don’t want to share, which makes perfect sense, but it can also be because they weren’t thinking about whatever the class was discussing, they weren’t “focusing on what they should,” and they’ve been taught to assume that makes their thoughts “nothing” at all. And of course it doesn’t. And of course, this isn’t only a story about a teacher watching students grow. Usually, in my mind, I’m a teacher and a student and a cook and a dishwasher, and sometimes I find a window.
                In The View from the Cheap Seats, Neil Gaiman suggests you “trust your obsessions.” When I talked to David Mochel, he asked me, ‘Right before bed, what do you think about without meaning to? What do you think about when you’re not thinking about anything at all?’ The answer, back then, was students and classes, stories and lessons and exercises that helped us understand things in new ways. That’s probably part of why being a teacher was a good fit. I’d like to keep practicing how to hold the reigns of my mind, how to direct myself toward one trail of thought or another, but I’d also like to unharness the horses and let them run. Maybe they’d head toward water, a spring I hadn’t found. Maybe they’d head toward a meadow, or up a ridge from which we could see a long, long way, or over the fields with the joy of moving. Maybe they’d roll in the dust.
                As far as I can tell we’re always thinking about something. When a student stops listening to our conversation their thoughts don’t disappear: they take a turn toward somewhere else. They find something else. I think it’s good to notice where we’re in the habit of going, but I think it’s also good to doodle because you’re procrastinating, to research because you’re putting off doodling. There’s something to trust in where we do not mean to go. I don’t know what I think about now, right before bed when I don’t mean to think about anything. It’s hard to tell in the confusion of these months. But the next time I go wandering, instead of asking myself to come back, I’m going to try to look around and what’s there.

                “We almost always can point to that hundredth blow, but we don’t always mark the ninety-nine other things that happen before we change.”
                -Maggie Stiefvater, All The Crooked Saints

                Years ago, I heard someone say “change happens very, very slowly, and then all at once.” A few weeks ago I heard someone say “a lot of quiet changes happen beneath the surface before it’s easy to see that something’s moved.”
                Stiefvater’s line comes after a little description of a barn. The wind nudges it ninety-nine times, and on the hundredth it falls, so it could seem like the hundredth was the one to blow it over. Since reading I’ve been trying to see back to all these hundreds. For instance: in working on my book, sometimes I’ll rewrite a scene without looking at the last draft, and it will be as though it was new. In some ways, it is. In lots of others, it isn’t. If I look at the two drafts, I can see what I was building between them, see what was gathering, see what I was brushing away. For instance: this week I might have made a new friend, but it wasn’t this week that we made each other friends. We said hello for the first time months and months ago. We talked a few times, in passing. We listened. We waved. This week the little paths of almost-being-friends that we’d both been building from where we were came close to each other, somewhere in the middle. 
                Growing up, I thought a lot about that hundredth blow. I thought about the dramatic actions that changed things, the clever tricks that reversed how a situation was unfolding. Walking around, now, I want to keep on seeing hundreds: I want to ask, what breath, and what breath, and what long dream of breathing is carrying me here?

                “But without a name, things get lost.”
                “Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field—it was always there—where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.
                As a rule, be more.”
                -Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

                Lately I’ve been struggling with Uproar. I don’t know what to write. I look at old drafts, old streets, and they go around the water instead of into it. I love how Vuong acknowledges the importance of names: without them, “things get lost.” I love how Vuong highlights the danger of rules: with them, we’re headed toward “known places.” Instead we can get lost. Be lost. Stay lost.
                It’s refreshing. Like waking up, if you’ve been dozing; like falling asleep if you’ve been on your feet too long. I had a passing daydream that all houses had holes in the middle, that next to our kitchens or our living rooms we left gaps where we could reach down and sink our hands into the earth of the field. “It was always there.” I would like to live in a house like that. I suppose, in a way, I’ve seen some: in India my friend lived in a house shaped like a doughnut, it’s central space open to the rain and sky. 
                Staying in so much for these last months, my walls, my streets, having started feeling very stable. I’m so often near here: so often, and in such a way, that I’ve started making the mistake of thinking I know here. But I only know the rules, the streets, the paths I take from breakfast (muesli!) to work (writing!) to finding ways to connect with friends (parks!). But I’m not just trying to go where I’ve known. Race Street was not always Race Street: it won’t be Race Street forever. It also isn’t: isn’t the line I expect, the path I walk. It also is: earth, and the heat inside, birds, and the murmur of voices with the wind. I think there must be a way to keep using our words, our names, so we’re not always lost—and to get lost like waking up. Like falling asleep. Like going in. 
                Here we are. It isn’t harder. It isn’t easier. It’s more. It’s simple. It’s simply more than I had named.

                “Perhaps humankind was powerless, or nearly so, in the face of the mind’s eagerness to make everything mean, to turn the world into a personal network of symbols.”
                -Alex Shakar, Luminarium

                A little while ago I was happy for a few days. Whistling happy: happy like in a movie where you step up on a park bench and spin. Once I realized what I’d been feeling, I wondered, why? What trick had I learned? Was I going to sleep earlier? Or later? Maybe I was staying hydrated? Maybe I was thinking about myself, my work, or the world differently? 
                In Shakespeare in Love, young William spins around and spits over his shoulder before, triumphantly, he begins to write. It’s his talisman, his way of summoning genius. For years I wondered what my spin-and-spit routine would be. Whatever it was, the habit would make things easy, make everything fall into place. Spin and spit and you’re Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s in love. I don’t think that’s how it really works.
                I do make patterns. I turn the world into a network of symbols that makes sense. Sometimes that’s useful—I’m not going to lean out of my car and ask the guy hanging on his horn whether he means he’s angry or if he’s just happy to be alive. I’m going to see the pattern, and guess. At the same time, I have this growing suspicion that many of the patterns I impose on what’s around me are silly. I have this suspicion my patterns leave a lot out. In my example before, I was sleeping, I was staying hydrated, I was connecting with people, but I don’t think I can arrange those elements into some blueprint that will always “work.” I’m trying to “make everything mean,” as Shakar says, to make every step the necessary result of what had come before. The world, meanwhile, is dancing: chaotic, quiet, changeable, quickening, varied, loud.

                “So much of my early years in skating weren’t about skating at all. They were only about Barbara.”
                -Tillie Walden, Spinning

                I’m not sure what anything’s about. Growing up, backpacking was about the mountains, about the beauty of rock and water (we were often above the tree line). It was also about family: about lying on a rock next to my brother, shivering after we’d jumped into an ice melt lake. About wading across a creek with my mom. About picking the perfect campsite with my dad. It was about quiet, and it was about all the sounds you hear outside. It was about stepping away from my friends and the social rules I usually moved through, and it was about coming back to those friends again.
                Tillie Walden skated, in part, because it was through skating that she’d met an adult (a coach) who held her and cared about her. I’ve seen that story many times: I had a group of students who loved their own version of “mini basketball,” but I’ll bet you what they really loved is each other. I had a varsity golfer who golfed because of his grandfather, a basketball player who played because of her mom, a violinist who was singing for her siblings. So much of skating isn’t about skating at all.
                I think there’s a warning in all this: we should be careful what languages we ask children to learn, to speak, in order to hear us say I love you. I think there’s also a chance: not necessarily to get to the bottom of things, as I’m not sure there always is a single coherent “why” to uncover, but to at least to sink down into them. Lately I’ve been saying “I just miss being around people.” And that’s true. But it’s not simply, easily true, because being around people isn’t just about being around people. It’s about feeling seen, about getting to share myself. It’s about getting to be quiet and not attached to a computer, and still be close to someone. It’s about getting to ignore each other and still being there. It’s about touch, and laughter, and a challenge to my expectations that pulls me out of my thoughts, and a kind of support that makes me feel at home in my head. At 25 I would’ve said that we should only go after the main thing we’re after, the real thing we’re after, but I’m not sure that’s possible. Maybe it is. Maybe, instead, I can be careful about what languages I ask others to use before I pay attention to them, and I can weave myself into my own messiness. Rock and water, family and solitude, leaving and coming back: these years are about so much.

                “It was the first time I remember our coach had no control over us. It felt so good to scream. […] I could still hear the rain pounding relentlessly on the roof of the rink and I couldn’t help but smile. ”
                -Tillie Walden, Spinning

                I used to write as a release, a leap, a shout of joy or discovery. I didn’t know where I was: others’ excitements and sadnesses, the threat of how we were hurting the world, the possibilities of a creek and a tree and a friend—all those wrapped around me, and I didn’t know how to stand inside them. I wrote to ground down. I wrote, like Walden, to scream and hear. If I had a little room that was my mind as I usually lived in it, my interpretation of the world as I usually shaped it, then writing was opening a window to feel the wind. Sometimes it was even opening a door: it was an effort toward going out, toward meeting. I’m not the first to use writing that way: Le Guin wrote to be “on all sides exposed, / unfortressed, undefended, / inviolable, vulnerable, alive.”
                The funny thing is, in “focusing more on my writing,”  I think I’ve largely taken that kind of writing away from myself. I didn’t mean to. Then again, so much of what I write now fits into an intended framework. I’m working on a novel. There are chapters. They go together in certain ways, and I write pieces to perform certain functions. I do something similar with my habits, my work: make the deadlines. Do laundry on Thursdays. Stretch before bed. And that’s good. The tasks need to be done, and an awareness for coherence, for pieces coming together into a whole, might be part of growing up. But I also want to remember that other kind of writing, of being, of breaking open.
                Walden’s memoir ends when the strict, controlled world of synchronized skating is shaken open by a thunderstorm. “Our coach had no control over us.” The accepted structure is swept away by something bright and real. I started writing as a way to reach out toward wonder, toward wider and deeper. At the very end of Walden’s memoir, listening to the storm, she smiles. Here is rain, unplanned for, undirected: rain pounding down against my little expectation of “all there is.” Rain washing out to new seeds, rain drumming, so close I can’t help but feel its connection.

                “Everyone I know has been making me crazy. Being around someone who doesn’t…who isn’t…it sounds all right.”
                Tillie Walden, Are You Listening? 

                In one of my older memories, I come into a room because I hear my mother crying. I ask what I’ve already learned to ask when people cry:
                “Are you okay?”
                She nods, smiles through her tears. “I’m sad.”
                “I’m sorry,” I say.
                “It’s okay. It’s okay to be sad.”
                Twenty-four or twenty five years later, and I’m still trying to learn that lesson. Maybe that’s because lots of other sources taught me it wasn’t okay (I know plenty of adults with rules like “no crying”), and maybe it’s because, as a culture, I think we often do relationships by restriction. We set up invisible requirements that you’ll show this part of yourself, but not that one; you’ll be one side of you, but not another. I think we do the same thing in a lot of our art: a friend and I were recently talking about Half World, a young adult book that acknowledges alcoholism, cutting, and other “adult” topics. “Wait,” joked my friend, “But isn’t it better to ignore those things, and treat anyone who interacts with them or talks about them as evil?”
                I wonder if this is what Tillie Walden’s character is pushing against. It’s an issue of being known when being known is a kind of limitation: you’re the funny one, the smart one, the artsy one. You’re the mechanic or the lawyer. You’re a specific role, and this kind of knowing expects you to keep to it. I wonder if we can know each other in a kinder, wider way.
                When I write, there is so much I have trouble approaching. When I talk to people, there is so much I have trouble revealing. Without meaning to, I’ve put these restrictions on those I care for. But I don’t want to. Sometimes I might need to step away from my friends, just like Walden says; I wonder if, even more, I need to step away from a kind of knowing, a kind of imagined being, that tells us all to be what I’ve expected. I wonder if we can grow close to each other and “know” each other as mysteries.

                “Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
                -Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (“influenced by Zen Buddhist theory on joy and impermanence, as echoed by Max Ritvo,” Vuong notes).

                I’m working on a revision of my novel. For a little while, things were positively jiving. (I’m not sure if the slang there means the excited, energetic confluence of movements and thoughts I mean, but it sounds like it should). The book’s world felt real. I cared about it. I cared about the people, their struggles and hopes. And then a breath, a look around—and I couldn’t seem to pick the story back up. I couldn’t find the thread that had been leading me through this particular labyrinth. I haven’t really worked on it since Saturday night, and then I was almost flying.
                “Haven’t you ever had writer’s block?” asked a friend of mine.
                Well, maybe, but I don’t think that’s what this is. I’m stuck because I was flying Saturday night. I’m stuck where Ocean Vuong says we can get stuck, and it’s not something I just do in writing. I’m not working on my novel because I’m worried I’ll mess it up: I like what I did with the first chapters, and because I do, I’m worried that what I do here with Chapter 7 will ruin things. I’m worried I was inspired, and now I’m not; I had it, and now I don’t. I’ve done the same thing with friendships, losing something that might have been (for a while) because I realize I’m leaving, I’m moving away, and “What will it be, really, when I can’t hold onto it?”
                “Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
                It will be what it is.
                Desperation is the right word. I’ve been fumbling, clutching and reaching, looking for the totally solid point to stand on, looking for the unmistakable golden path of inspiration. There isn’t one. I don’t think I need one. 
                “Too much joy.”
                There is. Here. Not only joy, but still: joy in every movement, every step. I have a friend who asks “What made you smile today?” instead of the more common “How are you?” The last time she said it, I grabbed at my memory, looking for the perfect sweet moment. I didn’t answer, because I didn’t want to say nothing. And then, Ocean in my mind, I looked back over the same day. The phone calls and the work. The struggles, connections, and sips of cool water. So much, so much, so much when I’m not desperate to keep it.

                “Kehinde had stories for everyone and everything except the dead man.”
                -Andrea Hairston, Will Do Magic For Small Change

                It’s her lost beloved who’s near Kehinde’s heartbreak, but she has stories for everything else.
                Here’s what I don’t mean to say: for a long time now, I’ve been wanting to write a story with a father and a son. The son is slipping away into frustration and confusion, into his own mental recreation of everything that’s wrong. The father listens to the hurt, the family cat twining between his feet. He listens quietly. When his son pauses he gently picks up the cat, scratches it behind the ears, and steps forward to rest it on his son’s lap. The creature curls up.
                “What?” says the son, looking at his father’s silence.
                “Pet the cat.”
                Here’s what I don’t mean to say: I’ve set up my life to be far away from people I love. It’s hard not to do that, these days, with how things go—even if I lived near my family (and I hope to, sometime soon), I’d be far from my closest friends. They all live in different places. There’s a sadness in that, in visiting, but leaving is also tinged with its own kind of joy. The night before a flight, before saying goodbye, I feel a push to say what I most mean: to open and be honest. I won’t see them for a while, which reminds me, whether we’re sitting side by side or walking out beneath the trees, to see them now. To let myself be seen.
                Here’s what I don’t mean to say: when I have something really important to tell you about myself, when a hurt or a hope is tying me up so I don’t know how to see, I sometimes write a story or a poem or a scrap of description. It usually doesn’t mention me: it sees a city in a snowstorm or the ocean an hour after the sun’s gone down. Or a boy, a father, and a cat. But showing you that poem, that story, that scrap of description is often a clearer window into what’s going on for me than the other windows I know how to build.
                Maybe one of the things we need art for is to tell all the stories except the story, to fill in negative space with color and narrative, movement and sound, until we get to the silence, the end of the last page. Just passed that is where we are. Where we need to be, and where, passed itself, our art can bring us.