“To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.”
                -Ogden Nash, “A Word to Husbands”

                When I first started putting my toes into writing–which is an awkward image, but also a tempting one; I imagine a pool of burnt-tan parchment with ripples of black ink, undulating as my chubby toes dip in–people kept telling me, “Don’t write answers.”   Other teachers repeated variations of “show don’t tell. “I distilled that into “don’t write answers,” too, and then I hated it. Why couldn’t I? I knew so many things. Why couldn’t I just say them?
                Reading Nash, I think the answer might be, Because there are so many things more important than being right.
                Sometimes I’ll start class with little exercises. “Write down ten words you think you learned in the first two years of talking,” for instance, or “Cover this little piece of paper in colors,” or “We’re going to play with free word associations, back and forth, for a few minutes.” Sometimes, afterwards, I’ll ask students why we did that exercise just now. They’ll come up with wonderful answers: “Our first words show something about how we grew up looking at the world, and that’s what Huckleberry Finn is exploring.” “Yesterday, people didn’t want to contribute to the conversation because we were all too nervous about getting it wrong. Free word associations open the door for us to start listening and responding.” I love thinking about my students’ answers. At the same time, I usually didn’t have a “why,” or perhaps, more precisely, my “why” was to let them wonder. I thought of the game, and we took five minutes to do it. They made it relevant by enjoying it and looking at it. Their own “whys” were more rewarding than anything I could’ve given them.
                There are so many things more important than being right. There are so many parts of gardening beyond listing off the Latin name of a flower.
                A few days ago, I heard a story about a father and his daughter. When she was very young she started asking questions about the sun and the earth, and why it looks like the sun moves. One day, a sophisticated five, she started explaining it back to him:
                “You know, daddy, when it looks like the sun’s over there and then it looks like the sun’s over there, the sun’s not really moving. It’s the earth spinning.”
                “Wow, really?” he said.
                “And when the earth spins all the way around, that’s a day,” she explained.
                “That’s so cool.”
                “But the earth is running around the sun, too, not just spinning.”
                “Is it going fast?”
                “Really fast. When it goes all the way around the sun, that’s a week.”
                The father glanced at her: “A year, you mean.”
                “Uh huh,” she agreed. “A week.”
                “It’s a year.”
                “Yeah,” she said, glowing with curiosity, with the coolness of the solar system, with a mind’s ability to learn about it. “A week.”
                So the dad smiled. They could come back to this part later. There were so many things that were more important than being right.
                “That’s so cool,” he said. “So what about the stars? Are they as little as they look?”
                “They’re big,” she said. And for a moment, the way the dad tells it, her surprised, curious eyes were almost as big and as sparky as the stars.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
                -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.”
                -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

                I heard Wittgenstein’s famous comment about the lion when I was nine. I had no first-hand experience of lions, so I carried the idea over to the dog down the street. The dog had no mane, but it was large, and fierce, and barked at me in something that felt like a roar, so “close enough,” my young mind thought.
                All the same, I couldn’t understand what Wittgenstein meant. If I could only talk to the dog, in its language or mine, it seemed obvious, even inevitable, that we would work out our differences. “I’m scared you’re going to hurt me,” the dog might say; “I’m scared of the same thing!” I’d respond, and then we’d wag our tails and jump the fence. Or maybe it didn’t like the smell of my soap. That would’ve been fine; I didn’t like baths, either. A year later, I considered the strange scene of an angry, talking dog attacking me: a dog who could speak and think through what I said, but with whom I still couldn’t come to an understanding. It felt almost impossible, but I saw a glimmer of something else–a glimmer through my certainty in communication, my trust in words, as though the mountains were painted canvas and a seam was coming undone.
                I still would like to think that the dog and I could’ve worked out our differences, and to be honest, I might’ve practiced barking a bit, but it isn’t easy. Even when we’re both human and we’re both calm it isn’t easy. I’m a teacher, and in classrooms I sometimes find this assumption that a mind is a shelf, and if the mind is paying attention, someone else can reach up and set an idea inside it. The idea stays there, intact, informed, functional. I don’t think it works like that. I’ve spent as much time talking to my friend Mike as I’ve spent talking to anyone. We like each other, listen to each other–and when we get near the edge of our understanding (which is where we tend to steer), we end up checking and rechecking, asking and answering and asking again, because seemingly simple concepts turn into unknown islands wreathed in fog. That happens when we talk about his higher level mathematics (he has a PhD; I struggle along, trying to understand the outline), but it also happens when we talk about values, goals, or how we see the world.
                I think we each live in the palace of our mind. We make rooms, hallways, stairways; we make windows, and using our senses, paint watercolor interpretations of what might be beyond them. Some rooms are in most palaces: there’s a doorway from 2+2 into the room of 4 in my palace, and the same door exists in Mike’s. (Although the rooms are distinct: for me, the 4 room has a corner dedicated to Doyle’s The Sign of Four and another to Dumas’ refrain, “One for all, and all for one,” because my brain thinks of words more as sounds than as spellings). Other rooms are individually mine, and most rooms are always being built and rebuilt with stone and thread and fog. When Mike explains a new, nuanced idea, I can’t go walking though his palace, looking at what he’s done. It’s more like both of us trying to build, separately but cooperatively, a few rooms in a shared style, and then trying to stand in the same part of the same hallway, and call to each other. Of course, even the words we send out are tied to our palace: “I’m at the top of the stairs” means my stairs, not his. If he says, “Okay, now look to your left; see how this connects to altruism?” and my answer is, “No,” then we go back to our respective blueprints and start asking questions, trying to figure out where in the world (of the mind) the other is standing.
                I wonder how much of this made sense in your rooms. I wonder what it looks like as you build it. I wish I could see, though I can’t–but you can tell me about it, you can describe it, you can send me something that is transformed as I remake it in my world, and we can play this wonderful game of imagining, asking, listening and building.

Paul [to the woman he’s having an affair with]: Don’t be naive. Everything is a negotiation, Harriet. Everything. [Women today] want me to be the wife. They want me to be the support system. Well, I can’t do that. Harriet, I just wasn’t told that’s the way it was supposed to be.
                -Wendy Wasserstein, Isn’t It Romantic, Act 1 Scene 7

Harriet [an adult, to her childhood friend]: Life is a negotiation.
Janie: I don’t believe I have to believe that.
Harriet: Janie, it’s too painful not to grow up.
Janie: That’s not the way I want to grow up.
                -Wendy Wasserstein, Isn’t It Romantic, Act 2 Scene 5

                Lately, I’ve found myself thinking back to the adults I grew up watching, and wondering if the strains and divorces I saw came from the marriages’ place in American history. Perhaps the idea of an American marriage, of who does what and who’s valued for it, was sexist. When feminism introduced the radical idea that women are people, the old system broke. When I suggested this to a friend in my generation, he observed that he and his wife were struggling with something similar. They want an equal marriage, they want to both work, both raise their kids, but paternity and maternity leave laws make that hard, and most careers don’t seem set up for part-time work. My friends want an equal love. In our country and our culture, they’re not sure what that looks like.
                It’s easy to hate Paul in Isn’t It Romantic, though it’s also clear Paul thinks that he’s just doing what people do. He has a wife–of course. He has a much younger mistress, an employee from his firm–in his worldview, why wouldn’t he? In life, he thinks, one person does the doing, and another does the supporting. A moment is either about me and my needs, or about you and yours. That’s how life works, and that’s why “everything is a negotiation”: we all want the support, the importance, the moment, and we’re convincing someone else to give it to us.
                As other characters repeat variations of Paul’s thought, I started worrying that, in a way, he might be right. Sometimes I need silence and you need song. Someone has to wash the dishes, someone has to cook the food. The ideal, of course, is to share, but that’s not always simple. I think trying to calculate half of a task leads down a rabbit hole. When I was younger, for instance, my brother and I were supposed to split folding laundry. I folded slower–and goofed around, I would think–so I wanted to “split” it by both working until it was done. He wanted to make two piles, and each do one. Besides, what’s hard for me might be easy for you. If we try to do some calculations, do we calculate by effort? By time? What if someone’s sick? One woman I know, who was married in the ‘80s when Isn’t It Romantic was published, once told me that couples usually compete about who had a worse day, who has a worse sore throat. Whoever wins gets to be taken care of, and the other person has to do the caring. “Everything is a negotiation.”
                I want an equal love. I don’t like Paul. I don’t think Paul likes Paul, not really, but he’s convinced that this is the way the “real world” works, and hoping for anything else is naive. But maybe, with his logic (or his history), he’s slipped up. Maybe there’s a way out of the knot he’s tying. Sure, we have different wants, different needs. A negotiation means I get as much as I can of what I want while giving up as little as I must. A negotiation has a “yours” and a “mine.” If we can love what’s other, if love can give me the joy of your music, and give you the peace of my silence, can’t our relationships–our friendships–heck, our communities–have more “ours”? Can’t we slip past Paul and his arguments and walk off, valuing all the ways that we take care of one another?
                That’s how I want to grow up.

                “Sometimes I think we forget that we’re meant to pick up and go when the well runs dry. Our ancestors knew that. You stay put for too long, you get weighed down by things, things you don’t need. It’s true. Then your life becomes this pathetic accumulation of stuff. Emotional and physical junk.”
                -Lynn Nottage, Sweat

                I don’t know where it came from, but there’s this rule bouncing around my head. “Stick it out.” Can’t manage to finish a poem? Stick it out. Confused by what I’m learning? Stick it out. Worried about the path I’m on? Stick it out.
                I think the most dangerous traps in my life are the ones I always respond to in the same way, the ones for which I keep offering the same answer. Here’s an example: for the last fifteen years, when I’m bored, I watch movie trailers online. I like stories, and I suppose I’ve become interested–at least a little–in the way these snippets try to present and suggest a longer arc; all the same, I’m usually as bored after watching the trailers as I was before. It occurred to me years ago that if I would sit when I was bored, if I would simply stare at the wall or look out the window, then after a few minutes I would probably find a new thought that I wanted to follow. I don’t usually do that. I watch trailers instead. I think I watch them because I want them to be doorways toward something new. I want them to reveal the variety of what’s possible. Most of the time, they’re just paintings of doorways hung on the wall, and I’m sitting in my same place at the table. If I would sit for a moment in my own mind, and then pick up and go off somewhere new, I think I would realize that each moment, on its own, is already a new doorway. I just have a habit of walking through it and arranging the next room just like the last one.
                “Sometimes I think we forget that we’re meant to pick up and go when the well runs dry. Our ancestors knew that.” We pump a lot of water out of the ground. We plant the same things in the same soil, and ask them to keep growing. And, yes, there are ways to grow crops sustainably, and that’s something to practice, but there are also new woods, new streams, new responses. When I started learning to draw, I didn’t want to keep working on a sketch. Stick it out. That lesson told me to stay with it. As I learned a little more, I wanted to stay on the same sketch, erasing and changing, worrying and trying. “Just start a new page,” my teacher said. That’s an important lesson, too, because “stick it out” would leave me erasing and redrawing while the paper tore away. We don’t need to do that. We can take what we’ve learned and go somewhere new.

“Under heaven nothing is more soft and yielding than water.
Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better;
It has no equal.
The weak can overcome the strong;
The supple can overcome the stiff.
Under heaven everyone knows this,
Yet no one puts it into practice.”
                -Lao Tsu, the Tao Te Ching (translated by Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English)

                It took me two years to wander from the first to the last entry of the Tao Te Ching. Sometimes I kicked myself for that. Part of me thought learning was like a staircase: step by step, straight ahead, and then I’d be done. I thought I was supposed to start on the first page, finish on the last page, and understand everything in between. Then again, I’ve never done that. I’ve never found a single line in a book and followed it, cover to cover, without turning off into another thought, and another, doubling back, and sitting for a while.  I’ve never come close to understanding all of it, either. There’s too much. There are caves and creeks and springs in every valley I’ve walked, or else there are rocks and shadows and an ant finding its way. I want to stop and look at them.
                Lately I’ve been struck by how little knowing seems to accomplish. I can know the health risks of packaged candy, know it’s time to get some rest, know I should write to my senator, and not do a thing. I can know the path I’m on leads somewhere I don’t want to go, and keep on walking.
                Maybe learning is less linear and more practice, more a returning current. You go somewhere, and you wander back; you go somewhere, and you wander back. The ideas in the Tao Te Ching do that: there are small arguments inside the sections, but all the sections together are not steps on a staircase. They’re a meditation. They’re a record of (a reminder to) practice. A book can tell me this, it can give me an idea that’s like a seed, and tell me to carry it. The Tao Te Ching gives me many seeds, and holds my hands as I spread them, and stands with me as I water them, and watches. The Tao Te Ching says learning isn’t an event. It’s time in the garden, time wasted and time gathered, time gained and time forgotten. It’s a walk through woods as different voices call. If there’s a line of experience, I don’t think learning stretches that thread from A to B. Learning ties the thread to a needle and dives in and out of thought’s cloth, in and out and back again, in and out and back again, creating embroidery beautiful enough to see and strong enough to hold together. Creating practice.
                In my first draft, I started by saying “It took me two years to read the Tao Te Ching.” That’s not true. In two years, I read every entry at least once and most entries many times, but I think I’ll be reading the Tao Te Ching for years and years to come.

                “It was easy to be somebody else when no one cared who you were in the first place.”
                                -“Virgins,” Danielle Valore Evans

                Individual. Identity. I wonder if those are more will-o’-the-wisps than guides.
                The first comes from in-, “not,” and dividere, “divide.” An individual is someone who cannot be divided. But I’m divided all the time: I want this, and that; my heart pulls here, and there. Part of me is at this desk, part of my is wandering down one misty lane in etymology, and if we’re friends, perhaps part of me is sitting there next to you.
                 The second comes from idem, “the same.” That’s why trigonometry has so many identities: sin2 θ is the same as 1 − cos2 θ. Then again, I think we have so many identities, too. If I stand next to anyone I’ve ever met, I can see some ways in which we’re the same. I can see some ways in which we’re different. I feel an identity in me, a sameness that continues, day to day, but I also feel changes and transformations. Whatever identity I have, I think it’s an identity of community, with different voices talking, an identity of transformation, with new plants growing. I might choose which voice opens my lips, which seeds I water, but I’m not a diamond or an atom. I’m more like a little storm system, pushed and pulled by the other storms around it and directed by the ground beneath it and held by the planet’s atmosphere.
                “It was easy to be somebody else when no one cared who you were in the first place.” I hope the other side is true, too. I hope it’s easier to be yourself when somebody else cares who you are. Maybe we’re not indivisible, we’re not the same (not always, not in all ways), but we can learn to be ourselves by sharing with the people around us. We can help them learn, help them be. I wonder if that’s a better guide than individual identity. I wonder if being is something we do together, not on our own.

                “She’s a bit…oh, stars, there isn’t a good word for it in Klip. Issik. You know that one? […] Literally means ‘egg soft.’ Like a hatchling’s skin, when it first comes out of the shell.”
                “So…inexperienced?”
                […] “Yes, but not quite. It implies that you’ll toughen up in time.”
                -Becky Chambers, The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet

                Last semester I gave my students an assignment: find something that needs a word but doesn’t have one, and make one up. Looking back, the one that sticks in my head is “pedserilus,” a low-level frustration that stays with you because you don’t stop to deal with it–like a rock in your shoe. My student put that together by googling the latin for foot, misery, and small, and he liked his word so much that he snapped it to some of his friends. ‘Snapped’ means sent via snapchat, for those who, like me, didn’t know that, all of which goes to show how we create the new words we need, and then climb through our experience using the handholds these words give us.
                I think we need more words that are about becoming instead of being. Issik isn’t just something you are now: it marks part of a transformation, a pattern of growth. I can’t think of almost anything that is truly static, and yet most of my words say is, not change. I think we should celebrate the undecided as well as the developed, the inchoate as well as the collected. I think we should celebrate the young and the soft, the fresh from the egg, as well as the old and the–well, come to think of it, I don’t have a word for “old and worn” that also implies the beauty and grace of the aging and acting that has caused that wear. Perhaps Becky Chambers will give me that one, too, as I keep reading. If not I hope someone else will. It’s a word I’d like to have. You know–like your grandmother’s hands.
                Until then, I’m not going to confuse issik with weak, or with incapable. I suppose something that wasn’t soft might have a hard time climbing out from the egg into a new world.

                “There is a weight of impossible description that falls away and leaves [Gabriel] bare and exposed to a frightful realization. It is a trauma that a sane and normal mind would be unable to withstand. He begins to dance. A slow, strange dance, eerie and life-giving. A dance of atavistic signature and ritual. He begins to howl in what is an attempt at song, or perhaps a song turning back into itself in an attempt at speech.”
                -August Wilson, Fences

                Throughout Fences, Gabriel carries a broken trumpet and the brain damage he suffered in World War I. He believes, wholeheartedly, that he is the Angel Gabriel, and that he’ll use the trumpet to open the Gates of Heaven on Judgement Day. When his older brother dies at the end of the play, Gabriel finally tries to blow the broken trumpet. He’s waited for this moment for more than twenty years. It has to work. He knows it will. It doesn’t.
                When I first read the end of Wilson’s play, I couldn’t figure out what was happening. I looked up the scene online, and watched the end of the movie. In the movie the trumpet just works: we get the religious answer that Gabriel believed in. We get the parting of the clouds, the shining of the light. But in the play, Gabriel gets silence. He gets an empty space where he thought there was the floor. I thought about this more and more. I started to fall in love with it, because afterward, Gabriel gets to realize that what he believed in wholeheartedly is not the same as what there is in the whole of his heart.
                Troy, Gabriel’s older brother, is trapped by the ways he sees the world. He’s trapped by the prejudice that others bound around him. He’s trapped by how he’s been hurt. When Troy’s son asks, “How come you ain’t never liked me?” Troy responds, “Who the hell say I got to like you?” He adds, “I owe a responsibility to you.” That’s the same thing Troy says while trying to understand his own abusive father: “he felt a responsibility for us.” Troy can’t stop reaching towards the only concepts he understands, the only patterns of interaction–between men and women, fathers and sons–he’s ever learned. These patterns pull him apart.
                Gabriel can see something new. Gabriel, the crazy brother, the lost soul, reaches out for the God he believes in–and finds nothing. He should break, but he doesn’t. He falls through the void of his expectations and lands in something else, something older. In August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, when a priest’s exorcism fails to stop the ghost haunting a family, an American child of slaves calls upon her own ancestors. Her ancestors, or her love for them, or her belief in them–or the history of her people, or her realization of something behind her own belief–does what the prayer cannot do. The ghost leaves. In Fences Gabriel dances. He goes back, back before his beliefs, back to ritual, back to movement, back to sound, and pours new life into the world.
                Sometimes I try to build the tower of my theories taller. I try to put in windows, and look out from the new heights of my belief and understanding. Troy’s tower–like mine, sometimes–becomes a prison he will not, cannot leave. Beneath that tower of philosophy there is earth, and body; history, and blood.  Gabriel’s tower comes crashing down–and beneath its foundation, he finds something that gives life. He finds more than he–or we–had yet understood. He howls into song and sings back into speech.

                “And though the two sang in their Orient language I knew by way of feeling that their song was about fleas and lice and vultures and blue jays and marmots and coons and cougars and grizzly bears, and through their soothing melody all these once frightful and malevolent creatures streamed into my heart as though it were Noah’s, and nested there harmoniously.”
                -Claire Vaye Watkins, “The Diggings,” Battleborn

                There are creatures that frighten me, that feel harmful. I love a kind of art that, instead of helping me fight against these objects of my fear, creates a harmony between them and me. A kind of art that makes my heart a wide, open enough place for the cougars and the grizzly bears, the fleas and the lice.
                Of course, that’s not what we “have” to do. It’s not the only option. We can fight, too–shoot the wolves, poison the spiders. We can, we often do, and in my own life I have. I’ve taken something that frightened me and pushed it away, covered it up, lied about it. But then I live without clawed footprints in the forest. I live without maggots, who bring old meat back into the web of living things. I live without whatever it is I could have learned from the monsters I killed or locked away. I miss the melody.
                I feel (and see) a driving desire to make things mine, to make them as expected, to make them the way I see them. But there’s no harmony with just one note. I want the vultures. I want the grizzlies back, though sometimes I’ll be scared of them. I want lice. There will be trade offs, of course, that come with that. I’ll have to be more careful. But there were trade offs that came with ending those things, too. A naturalist told me years ago that the thing to do with a bear is talk to it, so it hears you coming up, because then you can be going this way while it’s going that way and no one’s startled. A bear is still a bear. I don’t want it tamed. I don’t want it killed. I have my fears, but I want a larger heart and the streams that flow past it, and a song that lets in all those other things to nest, here, harmoniously.

                “I’m only guessing. As you get older, Gemma, you’ll understand things that don’t make sense now. Think how much you’ve changed since you left Iceland. You’re going to change that much again in the next ten years.”
                -Margot Livesey, The Flight of Gemma Hardy

                 “Young people, middle-aged people, and older people all believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future.”
                -Quoidbach, Gilbert and Wilson, “The End Of History Illusion”

                I don’t know how much I understand. Here I am at the end of my twenties, and I’m at the same place Gemma was at the beginning of her teens. I know that the me of a decade ago was very different. I still expect, somehow, that the me of a decade from now will be much the same as I am today. And of course, he–I–won’t be.
                I wonder if I do that out of fear: to contemplate changing so much is a little like contemplating death. I wonder if it’s just lack of imagination: wanting something now makes it feel important, and if it’s important, it’s hard to imagine not wanting it. In any case, as Q. G. and W. point out, it’s just silly for me to think that now is the end of history. It’s not. It’s another year, another spin. I remember studying Martin Luther King, Jr–a historical figure, for me–and feeling the world twist when my mom mentioned listening to his speeches first hand. Someday I’ll be on the other side in a conversation about Obama or George W. Bush–figures who are, for me, now, and who will soon be then. I’ll be on the other side of me, too. The things I thought I knew will seem different. The things I thought were essential to who I am and how I behave will be peripheral. I might have a new career. I might have a cat. I might have become a coffee drinker.
                That’s frightening. It’s hard to plan for a world that will have changed so much. That’s something to remember. The choices I make will become the history someone else has to live with. That’s rather nice. There will be more (and less, and different) than I expect. And of course, I’m only guessing, because I’m a child, listening and trying to understand.