“For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says “You are here.””
                -Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

                I remember, at 16, standing just above Piute Pass in the High Sierras and staring out at the clouds and the sky and the scattered rock of Humphreys Basin. Lakes slept among the low ridges like curled deer, and above us clouds went like an endless fleet, their pink hulls sailing toward a dimming sunset. When I remember it, sometimes, I see a tiny figure in the corner of the image, a boy of 16, trying to feel the wonder all around him by imagining sleeping deer and sailing ships.
                Adams is joking, he’s playing, he’s off and running and hard to pin down. But I don’t think I believe his machine. The Vortex gives you a glimpse of everything, the whole cosmos, with a little marker labeled “You are here.” In Restaurant, that kills you: you can’t survive seeing your smallness amidst this vastness, can’t survive having a true “sense of proportion.” The only character to survive is Zaphod, and then only because he’s in an alternate universe that was created just for him. Because, in all the vastness of that alternate universe, he’s the most important thing. I wonder if Adams has it backwards: if the weight of being the because for all that would crush you. Even if importance is one way to survive, I don’t think it’s the only one. I don’t think it’s the one I’ll look for.
                I spend plenty of time trying to be big. When I do, that effort on my part often pushes people out—there can only be one Most Important Thing in Zaphod’s alternate universe. It tends to push me out, too: I’m too busy with the posing. I’ll practice, instead, being small, being part of things, being awash in all of this. In fifteen years I haven’t finished feeling the view from one mountain pass. In revising this, and trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to say, I mentioned my ideas to a friend.
                “Of course,” she said.
                And with that, simply, there I was, next to a friend and surrounded by all this.

                “If you take ‘mortality’ as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then ‘immortality’ is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you’ll be…” -Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

                You’ll be immortal, at least by Crake’s definition.
                I spend a lot of time in my definitions. “Productive.” “Happy.” “Kind.” “Responsible.” It’s hard to know where else to be: when I walk into a room, I usually use one of the gaps I call a door, and I sit on one of the constructions I call a chair, even though philosophers (being awesome) have argued this out, questioning whether I can really define either category. I’ve had the argument: I couldn’t. Not knowing exactly where to put the boundaries for “chair” (can a stone be a chair? How about an indent in the wall? How sloped can the seat be—40°? 50°?) can feel like a gimmick, like well I can’t find the right words right now but I’m sure they’re out there, until suddenly it feels like something more. My definitions, the spaces I move through and stay in, are pretty shaky: my patterns help me along, help me choose directions and recognize similarities, but they also hide connections, overemphasize characteristics, blind me to another kind of “obvious.”And of course, my definitions could be otherwise.
                “Immortal” is a “not-” definition. I wonder if we often turn to that trick when we’re not sure exactly what we mean. We mean something different from dying, from what we think we’re experiencing now. What we mean follows from our imagination of ourselves, our conception of what we are and what we wish we could be. Immortal. In Atwood’s book, Crake creates a kind of almost-human who will live healthily, without aging or lessening, until one day when its rigged ‘biological clock’ will click over to dead. These creatures will never think of their own being, or their own ending; they’ll never be afraid. Isn’t that, he asks, what we meant?
                Reading Atwood, and living through these strange times, I wonder which other places to sit. I wonder which other ways to talk. I wonder which of my definitions I want to radically (celebratorily? Wildly? Whimsically? Wonderfully? Wanderfully?) redefine. The usual list comes up: “success” (a word I’ve always hated; one succeeds at clear tasks, at production, but when did we decide one could ‘succeed’ at life), “happiness,” “love,” “work,” “freedom,” “responsibility,” “safety,” “duty,” “worth,” “self worth.” Redefining any of these is hard. Redefining any of these is a door, or what might be a door, or a gap between two trees, and on the other side—well, it’s hard to see from here, isn’t it?

                “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” -Arundhati Roy, War Talk

                Does anyone else ever look back at past versions of themselves, and wonder, “wow”? Fourteen—that might have been the year in which I thought I knew the most, or at least, the year when I thought I would figure out my questions, find answers, and be able to share them. And long before that—five?—looking at tadpoles, entranced and bored at the same time, and when we’d catch a few and bring them back to the tank at home, I’d forget about them in all the other brightnesses of the world until I suddenly saw their new little legs. And then I’d stare, watch, want to see how it had happened, but it had already happened.
                I hear people asking if the world could be different. When I watch a certain way, that’s what my Facebook feed looks like: a series of how did this happen, a series of look where we are, a series of how does this change. Could we have different systems for safety, education, incarceration, elections, housing, wealth? Could we? I love how Arundhati Roy flips the question around in her answer We can’t not. It will be different (it is different) though we might not know how, though how will grow from what we do now. Listen, and you can hear her breathing.
                In my ten years of teaching, I’ve seen conversations spiral in and out from one central thought: “the way it is” is not the way it is. This, what we’re doing, is one way: one changing moment in one bouncing creek in one cultural landscape fueled by the rains of one set of circumstances. This is not forever: it’s only now for a moment. Perhaps it’s easier to see that through oneself: I’m not the thirteen year old, lost in Huckleberry Finn, and I’m not the 25 year old in Oklahoma, and the last months have been an intense spring/summer seminar in how staying is not staying the same. I want to see that in myself, to be open to the breathing, and I want to see that when I look around me, too.
                Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, can’t you hear her breathing?

                “The reason for your complaint, it seems to me, is the constraint which your intellect imposes upon your imagination….you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.”
                -Friedrich Schiller to a friend with “writer’s block,” as quoted by Alison Bechdel 

                For the last month I’ve walked around a little apartment complex pond almost every day. It’s not, you might say, a particularly nice pond: it’s surrounded by buildings and edged in a little cinderblock wall that’s fallen away in two places. Sometimes I walk around it, snapping through my To Do list in my head and probably on my phone, and never see much. Never feel very there. Other times—well, ducks have started sleeping in one of the wall’s gaps, and muskrats dug a den in the other. At night the water looks black like the inlet of some dark sea, or else like itself, the weight of dense sun-happy weeds catching ripples from flickering fish. When the wind’s down, the surface and the sky play back and forth, mirroring each other, and when it’s up, the surface shimmers apart the buildings and trees and clouds. Sometimes I’m swept away.
                Schiller is talking to his friend about writer’s block, about the trap of rejecting sentences and pages as not good enough before they have a chance to breathe. But I think it goes far past having trouble writing. Bechdel finds Schiller’s line in Freud, who uses it to explain free association. The twitch from the surface down into the weeds, a muskrat diving, except this muskrat-of-our-minds doesn’t stay in the pond. It moves from aches to a memory of apples, from lips to the taste of sour cream to a dinner cooked once over an open fire, my family sitting in a loose circle and watching the sky more than each other. Maybe we free-associate ourselves: ripple to the thoughts and connections that land like dry leaves in the water of our pond. The leaves float, sink, deepen to mulch. Or at least, we can let ourselves do that. It’s through the quiet decaying collection of all these many things that a pond makes rich soil. We can garden, too, can order our thoughts, trim our aggressions and prejudices, plant a new perspective. But playing Schiller’s line back and forth in my head, I wonder if we ground down into the earth of where we are and what we are more through our imaginations, through the image of all this, than through our intellects.
                That’s what I think. What I want is to let things be, and to be in them, to stop pulling myself away from one place toward another that’s supposed to be better. And Schiller suggests the force that holds us back: the beatings of that measuring stick that make if and maybe and look curl up and hide. Is this good enough? Do I have time for it? 
                I wish I could describe where you are: the end table, maybe, with three books and an old glass of water, or your phone with its cracked screen (see how the cracks hold strings of changing color?), or the sky outside. Is it all the colors that we define to grey? Is it bright? Raining?
                Imagination, subconscious, the weeds and the rain. A duck sleeping, head to wings, and one eye shifts open. A muskrat trailing bubbles as it swims.

                “Is this something that’s real for you, something that resonates in your heart, or is it just an opportunity?” -Professor Howell Chickering, at his home when I visited in ‘15

                Lately I find myself grasping at straws. Then again, that might not be lately: at Amherst, I remember talking with a friend about how I used homework to justify a day—if I’d written something or read something assigned, then at least I’d done something. (“Yeah,” my friend said, in a way that made it clear he’d done the same thing; then he added, “But I’m trying not to do that”). These days I want to learn something, study something, make something—prove something, really; anything; anything to ‘get through the day,’ to ‘make this time productive.’ I think that’s a misguided (and a misguiding) impulse.
                “Is this just an opportunity,” asked Chickering.
                Until then, I’d never heard “just an opportunity.” I think I believed, dimly, that in the struggle to learn, to become, to create—and of course, to get ahead—you took whatever secret doors you found. Life was Chutes and Ladders: if you were lucky enough to find a chute, you took it. I had just been told about a box with letters from Edith Wharton that had never been studied, one of those things passed down in a family. I could study them. As a student who’d loved my time at Amherst, as a twenty-something who wanted to go back to grad school, but didn’t know how to make that work, I thought it might be a dream come true. All the same, something didn’t feel right. Chickering reminded me that it matters what you dream, that you probably have lots of dreams, and some of them are passing flights of fancy while some of them are choices you might decide to make, again and again. I said “chutes” before, but picturing the board, it’s actually ladders that helped you. Maybe there’s something telling in my slip: and of course, outside of the game with its clearly imposed endpoint, you have to decide where you’re going.
                Too often, I’ve gotten myself mixed up and exhausted by clutching at whatever ladder seemed close to hand, by trying to bump through every door. I don’t mean that I want to be sure of the opportunities I pick: I’m not sure I ever will be. But I’m tired of fumbling for this or that “achievement” to show something. I want to practice pausing. I want to remember what Chickering said, not as a question, but as a place to be: a place where thoughts gather like water, where currents still, and perhaps eventually the pool overflows towards something that might be its own downstream.
                There are the opportunities, and there’s what’s real for you, what resonates with your heart.

                “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.”
                -Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

                Months ago I stepped into a room, and somehow, for a moment, I just saw the space. The breath of light and air that held beneath the ceiling. Beautiful. When I was a kid washing dishes, I would fill up this one glass vase and swirl my fingers through the little cool currents. Standing there, looking at the openness in front of me, it seemed I could feel space itself swirling the same way water did all those years ago. The same way water still does, of course, though often I don’t see it. 
                A year ago, or more, I was outside and looked up at the open space between me and the trees at the other end of a field. There was so much of it, so much depth: a world wider than the little brain in which I do my thinking. So much openness, so much fullness. Looking into it was like discovering a fairytale cave. Sometimes it’s hard for me to see the space outside: with no roof, no wall restricting my sight, it’s harder to notice the reach that goes out in all directions. I often feel the height of a skyscraper, whether I’m looking up or down, but I don’t often feel the depth of the sky. I think I have before. I probably fell over.
                I never studied architecture, but sometimes I think we build cathedrals, build vaulted spaces of air and light, to cut off a little piece of infinity and so give our minds a sense for size. In St. Petersburg, Russia, I walked into a public square and stopped, dwarfed by the city—exactly as I was supposed to be, said a local poet. Sometimes, instead, I imagine all our endless roads and heavy cement, I imagine the earth, the weight of its mantle, the heat of its sleep: I imagine the earth shifting, rolling over to yawn, our roads less than cobwebs on its skin. Maybe my cobweb image and my view of cathedrals are both a way to practice. I like both, anyway. I’ll keep practicing, or keep forgetting, and hope that sometime soon I’ll look up and see the trees, the field, the depth in front of me.

                “But how am I to know the good side from the bad?”
                “You will know when you are calm. At peace. Passive.”
                                -Yoda

                Three pictures: when I trained Aikido, I once asked Tetsutaka Sugawara Sensei where I was supposed to focus my eyes. I don’t remember his answer. I do remember him looking at me for a long moment. I remember watching him later that day, his face that gave nothing away while he trained and then warmed with a smile, his quiet eyes, wondering how he saw so much. I remember realizing I might have asked the wrong question.
                Dr. Gordon Neufeld says a mature mind can bring everything together, all the conflicting voices and perspectives, and find balance in the tension. The trick is learning to hold a large enough space. The trick it to hear the different sides—this, what I’m writing, isn’t good enough; a blog is a vanity project anyway; I like writing these; go back to the idea, before it slips away; I love the sound of the rain—without letting one of them drown out the others.
                I just came back from a walk. It’s windy out, and the trees are budding, red and purple and white. A little girl rode a bike, wobbly and smiling, her father cheering her on until he called her back. In the last month, I’ve found myself saying more or less the same thing when people asked how I was doing: “I’m alternating between feeling pretty good and feeling very overwhelmed, but I’m trying to be kind as I go back and forth.” Sometimes I add I’m grateful, I’m spending more time looking out the window, I’m scared. As the weeks go by and my answer stays similar, I’ve started wondering if I’m stuck. It seems silly, saying the same thing, again and again. Walking today it didn’t feel silly. It felt like, bit by bit, I was opening a larger space. I’m raising the tent beneath which I can be all of that at once.
                You will know when you are calm.
                I have this idea that Sugawara Sensei saw what I meant, saw what I was holding to—a world with just one rule, maybe: this way, or that way—and saw that I wasn’t ready to let go. So he let me watch his own careful look. He left me with that look, so I could keep wondering, so that,  a long time later, I might wonder into a walk through budding trees. 
                As peace. Passive. 
                Starting to realize the open space of all that is.

                “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”
                -Blaise Pascal, Pensees 139 (translated by W. F. Trotter)

                It’s hard to sit still lately, isn’t it? Is that just me? It’s hard to concentrate, too—one writer in my graduate program said that writing his stories feels “silly” with everything that’s going on, and a professor commented that she can play hours of Animal Crossing, but can’t seem to start any of the very good books she’d ordered. Among those of us privileged and lucky enough to stay home, there’s something funny going on. Another friend pointed out those people who are busy on social media, proving how productive they are—he thought they could go ahead and shut up about themselves.
                And then, yesterday, I lay down in the grass. And I don’t mean that I escaped the crush and the silly and all the rest: I most certainly didn’t. For the first long time at the park, I was playing Wizards Unite. I was playing as I lay in the grass. I was playing as I walked. There was a goal, and I was going to get to it. And then, in a pause, there was the wind, cold as it slipped around my fingers, and sunlight, warm on one side of my face, and shadow, cool on the other.
                In the rest of Pensees 139, Pascal says he’s discovered why people avoid their own quiet room: it’s because we’re all going to die, and it shakes us to think about that, so we have to run around distracting ourselves. It’s because everything we built is going to pass away, we’re going, necessarily, to lose everything, and so our “mortal condition” is so “miserable” that we can’t bear to think of ourselves. So, you know: Pascal, always an upper.
                But the sunlight, and the shadow. The carpet beneath my feet. A wave from a neighbor I’ve never talked to, and my wave back. I don’t just mean appreciate the little things. I mean, instead, that it seems our society has been obsessed for a long time with teaching us to distract ourselves from loss and mortality. It seems we won’t let ourselves be still because we’re scared of the big still. So we take, and insist, and build, and yell. We write, and buy, and sell. Pascal pointed out a cage we might have stumbled into. I wonder if right now is asking us, not to find a way out, but to find a way in: our existence is always wound within a place, a time, a certain community. I can imagine this room as a cage. I keep expecting myself to get over my sadness, my confusion, and get back to work. It’s not happening. Perhaps it doesn’t need to. Perhaps I’m turning toward something else. I could imagine, I suppose, the world as a cage, or even the solar system. I’ve done that. I’d like to stop, now. I won’t manage to all at once: the next time I’m uncertain, there will be a voice that says, “Use this time!” There will be a twitch in my hands toward a game or a goal. I’d like to tell that voice, that twitch, “stay here a moment.”
                I wonder how things might look if more of us could sit quietly with ourselves.

                “The story is truly finished—and meaning is made—not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through.” -Celeste Ng, “On Leaving Space for the Reader”

                For a little while now I’ve been wondering what I’m doing when I’m “reading.”
                The question finally stood up and waved its arms for attention a few weeks ago. One of my classes explores the stories people tell in science and technology, and a scientist friend came along for our discussion of Randy Olson’s Houston, We Have A Narrative. Understated spoilers: not my favorite book. Olson has picked up some useful tools, he has some good ideas, but he’s like the guy entranced by a hammer who runs around telling you that everything is a nail, and by the way, he’s the master at nails, because look at this: a hammer.
                 If that isn’t a proverbial little legend, dibs. But I’m pretty sure I’m stealing from somewhere.
                After our discussion, my friend said: “Interesting. When I read Houston back in grad school, I thought it was 80% filler, but I just tried to walk around that for the 20% I could use. But you all are talking about everything.” I felt a little “oh no,” somewhere in the back of my head. My professor joined our conversation, offering the term “extractive reading:” reading for what you need. Reading for what you can take away. In her own graduate studies, that became one of my professor’s primary ways of reading, because there was so much to read. My friend agreed: when she read a research paper, she was often looking for the one idea she could use. At that point, I recognized my little quiet “oh no:” it was the realization that I’ve been reading “extractively,” too. I’ve been reading like a mine, like equipment gnawing through earth for ore. Or worse: I’ve reading for the tidbit that backs up my point of view, or for the funny soundbite I can share, or for an uproar quote, or to say, “Oh yeah, I read that.” 
                “You all are talking about everything.” I’m not sure if I lived up to that, but I want to.
                Reading for what you need might not be the worst thing in the world. Sometimes, I’m sure, it’s important. But I remember reading like falling into a lake, reading like falling asleep, reading like waking up. If writers leave a little ambiguous space, I want to be the kind of reader who sometimes goes into that space, who stays there, neck deep in the water or the grass, listening until I realize the silence isn’t silent. Until I hear a beetle buzzing in the air I called empty, or feel subtle currents I’d missed. I don’t want what I’m looking for: I don’t want to take anything. I want to be there with what is, and what was, and what’s becoming. I want to be there, letting the power flow through.

                “Let’s say it’s an antiprediction: If this future can be described in detail, maybe it won’t happen. But such wishful thinking cannot be depended on either.” 
                -Margaret Atwood, on whether The Handmaid’s Tale is a prediction

                There’s a rule among white water kayakers: “point positive.” In rapids, the river gets too loud to shout over, so kayakers do a lot of pointing to share information about dangerous things: undercut rocks (if you get swept under one, the current can hold you down and you drown), strainers (same thing), and so on. But if there’s something dangerous on the left side of the river, I’m going to point to the right. I’m going to point where I think you should go. Point positive.
                Dystopian stories—which I’ve often found incredibly powerful, and when I’ve tried to write—do the opposite. They’re warnings. They’re charms against the curses we’re muttering. They’re the opposite of predictions: look at this, see it, so we don’t end up there. That’s a powerful thought, and an important one. The Handmaid’s Tale is still one of my favorite books to teach in high school: I’ve felt, and seen, how it can break open the walls, how it can start a conversation where the real prejudices built into our systems don’t get to stay behind the sheetrock. At the same time, as I watch people trying to respond to COVID-19, I find myself looking for stories that point positive—that show us choosing something better, that give me a different perspective, a different way of conceiving of and ordering reality, so that, in reading, I can see walking a different path. A better path. A path that’s not this doomed capitalistic greedy one we seem so intent on.
                I wonder if Atwood feels something similar. Afterall, she says it’s “wishful thinking” to hope these antipredictions can steer us away from the future they describe. Or maybe we just need, next to these visions, something more wishful. Something more hopeful. Seeing the horror of what we’re headed toward, showing that horror—that warning has power. Warnings make us pull back. But the river’s loud, and it’s hard to hear each other. Once we’re aware of the danger, once we feel the rapid churning, maybe we also need someone on the shore, someone who’s seen the shape of the water and is pointing, hoping, this way.
                Just now, in all this, I want to keep learning how to point positive.