“I want you to imagine a landscape with its full complement of beavers.”
                -Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. I might be biased, as Ben’s a friend, but Eager has me reading more playfully, more intently, and more–I’m sorry–eagerly than anything else in a long time.

                It turns out beavers used to swim and build and look adorable all over North America, and it turns out they have a habit of changing things. The mountain streams I love, the ones I grew up with, are streams that have lost their beavers. They’re streams with clear, fasting moving water, and narrow beds cut down into the ground. As a boy, I stuck my feet in those streams, I swam in them, and bit by bit I decided that’s how mountain streams should be. I thought the clearness was cleanness.
                If I could walk those same streams, back before the beavers were killed off for their pelts, I wouldn’t walk a laughing little ribbon. I’d wade and slip and stumble through a “sluggish, murky swamp, backed up several acres by a messy concatenation of woody dams.” Imagined Me doesn’t like the sound of that: it sounds messy, yucky, and it would certainly be hard. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve gotten covered in muck and thought, “Oh, good.” (Which, come to think of it, is a problem, and something I should remedy). My favorite swimming holes–the ones I would tell you about, if you were looking–all have nice, clean sand bottoms, and bare rocks to sun on.
                Then again, even as a boy, something bothered me about the High Sierra mountains. I could listen to the water, but not much else. I could wander across meadows to the thin stream, but even if I was lucky, the only other creature I’d find wandering was a marmot. (Or my dad, who’d call me a varmint, but that’s another matter). Ben writes, “In the intermountain West, wetlands, though they make up just  2 percent of total land area, support 80 percent of biodiversity.” There were other critters here. They miss their trees, their grasses, their places to live; they miss their year-round water. They miss their beavers. We miss them, too. I want to go on and on about all the ways beavers could help us–recharging groundwater, preventing floods, lessening damage from forest fires, and probably all sorts of other things I don’t even know yet–but Ben already did that. You should read his book.
                My post, I think, is more about how Ben pushed me to reexamine one of my “shoulds.” We all have a lot of “shoulds”–conversations should sound this way, a bed should (or shouldn’t–it’s going to get messy again, right?) be made every morning, a work day should be this long, a stream should have clear water. It doesn’t always have to happen, but it should. Lots of these shoulds are buried deep, and lots of them are so quiet, so “obvious,” that it’s hard to see them. Some are useful, and help guide you; but if you’re me, then some of your shoulds are just plain wrong, and you need a Ben Goldfarb to come tell you about beavers and swamps.
                Also, I need to go get covered in muck and think, “Oh, good.” I bet Ben would come along for that, too.

                “Everything we see hides another thing. We always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible.”
                -René Magritte, in an interview about his painting, The Son Of Man

                “I know that I have never met these characters. I made them up. I read about the things they did, I studied them and then imagined what they felt and thought and said and wanted from their lives. What they were really like, of course, no one will ever know. This is, I am convinced, a blessing, a blessing, and I feel dismay for all the people who, a thousand years from now, will have our times on tape and film to study. They will see our faces, hear our voices, know it all and be deceived. They will be dealing with the surface, and the truth of things is always underneath. It has to be imagined.”
                -John Goldman, in his 1980 introduction to The Lion In Winter. Goldman’s play imagines the private lives of Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their children.

                Back when I was seventeen or eighteen, I remember sitting at the beach and looking at a palm tree. My mind, tense, shifting, chased another dozen thoughts at the same time. I was bored. On edge. Disengaged. So I started to look at the tree. I looked at its jagged fronds, shifting in the breeze. I looked at its rough trunk. I remembered, and imagined, the feel of that trunk–the brown stubbs of old fronds, fibrous and serrated. On a whim, I wondered if I could get my whole mind to gather around the tree. What would it sound like, if I knocked my knuckles against it? What would it taste like? Not the fruit–the trunk itself. What mixture of dust and sand, salt and wood? My brother had climbed the tree yesterday, so I’d been close to it–I thought back to its smell, and held that in my mind. Layered on top of each other, my senses wrapped me around and around this growing thing. At first I had to keep leading my mind back to the tree. Then it was easier for my focus to gather, like water to the bottom of a bowl. Then, for a few moments, all I did was see, touch, hear, taste and smell the tree, there from where I was sitting.
                Maybe all things are hidden to us. In Magritte’s painting, the man’s face is hidden behind an apple–but even if the apple wasn’t there, we’d see the surface of a face, not the person underneath. If we looked beneath the skin and the eyes, we could see the surface of the skull, the surface of the brain. We couldn’t see the person. Goldman takes Magritte’s idea and brings it to history, to politics. We have so much information about people, so many pictures, so many soundclips–and “the truth of something” he says “is always underneath” all that. In a way, Goldman’s thought reminds me of how different people see Donald Trump: the people I know who admire him are not talking about the same individual as the people I know who are horrified by him. There is an actual human there, of course, a person with a mind that believes certain things; but the supporters I know are sure this person is one way, and the critics are sure he is another. In “liking” or “disliking” him, they seem to be talking about two different people, and disagreeing about which one exists. I wonder what would happen to the argument if you could resolve that disagreement.
                Maybe it’s only through concentration (or playful awareness) and imagination that we can come close to seeing. There are depths to every person, and sounds and tastes to every tree. Instead of thinking about the world as a face behind a veil, maybe we need to think about it as the face and the veil together, and the blood and bone beneath, and the hidden lips and the unseen air they’re breathing. It is a mystery. Seeing shows us some surfaces. With imagination and time, and the work of making, maybe we can start to understand.

“If we didn’t love each other,
we’d HATE each other.”
                -Kwame Alexander, The Crossover; a boy is describing his relationship to his brother

                Just now, this is my favorite definition of love. There are so many reasons to give up, to stop trying, to stop caring. There are so many arguments that can push two people apart, so many old wounds, seemingly never to heal, that can make opening up feel impossible. There are so many ways to end up hating. Love is why we don’t.
                My older brother’s athleticism has always impressed me. He climbs, he jumps, he laughs. When I was ten or eleven, I had a bad run whitewater kayaking, flipping over and knocking my face against the rocks underwater. After that I was scared to get back on the river. My resistance to kayaking, my stubborn dig-my-heels-in I won’t, must’ve frustrated my older brother. He must’ve seen I was saying no to something because I was afraid, instead of learning how to paddle so I could be brave. After months and months of convincing me, my brother led me back onto the water. I froze and flipped somewhere that was easy, so my brother wasn’t closeby, and somewhere that was also dangerous to be upside down. My brother wasn’t close. And then, somehow, he was. Cutting back across the rapid was certainly an act of athleticism, but I think it was also an act of love. We are all more capable than ourselves when we’re supporting those we love. When we’re too far away, when we don’t have the talent or the time, love is why we can.
                A little while ago, a friend of mine had a troublesome student in her class. Day after day, the young woman was mean. She was having a hard time at home, especially with her mother, and she was ready to tell everyone that she didn’t care. More than anything, she was ready to spit in the eye of anyone who looked at all like a mother figure. She wasn’t going to accept help. Halfway through the semester, realizing that, my friend let it go. As a teacher she reined in the worst comments, and ignored the rest. She didn’t push, she didn’t pull. Later, she told me that she’d accepted that she wouldn’t end up helping this young woman. This young woman wouldn’t accept help.
                At the end of the year something strange happened. They didn’t have a big movie moment, and the kid didn’t suddenly turn out balanced. They did, on the other hand, care about each other. The student talked, not that deeply, but a little, about what she was struggling with. My friend mostly listened. Loving is why we don’t have to hate, and sometimes, maybe, not hating for long enough, calmly enough, while still being there, is enough to teach us how to love.

                “Everybody has to work, right? I have to help my mother. Well, I’m just like all these people in here who have to do something to get by. But that doesn’t tell you who these people truly are.”
                -Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon, Daytripper

                “There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem with DWYL, however, is that it leads not to salvation but to the devaluation of actual work—and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.”
                -Miya Tokumitsu, “In The Name Of Love,” Slate

                When I think about my career, about what work I’m doing now and what work I’ll do next year, I think about what’s fulfilling, what I enjoy, what I think will help the world. And, of course, I think about money. Those are good questions, but I think the fact that I get to ask them shows my privilege. As Daytripper comments, work, for lots of people, is what “you have to do to get by.”
                Tokumitsu points to Steve Jobs as one of the big “do what you love” icons, and then points out that his branding of Apple as his own playful, brilliant child ‘elides’ the work of literal thousands. (An elision is an omitted sound while speaking, like the center syllable in “family,” and in this case it’s the best metaphor I’ve heard in a long time). Sure, he started the company in his garage, but how long until he pushed production overseas, to factories filled with real people who were doing what they had to to get by? How many others contributed design ideas and programming, not because they were gurus of self-fulfillment business, but because they working? That’s just in his company. What about the people who grew his food, made his socks, and collected his trash? The fact that Jobs got to live that way doesn’t mean everyone can. In fact, it might mean he was relying on a whole bunch of people who didn’t.
                I’m way out of my depth, here. There are a lot of different voices echoing in my head, commenting in different ways on my experience. Lots of my own work is boring. Some of it is truly inspiring. While I’m in California planning new, playful lessons, other employees at my school are replacing flood-soaked insulation. Are they doing that for the love of it? When my students ask me about work, do I tell them to find what they love and follow it into a career–or do I tell them that the insulation needed to be changed if we didn’t want mold in our walls?
                The Japanese concept ikigai, often translated as “reason for being,” is the intersection of 1) what you love doing, 2) what you’re good at, 3) what you can make a living doing, and 4) what the world needs. That reminds me of a Buddhist friend, who talks about how every labor (brushing your teeth, scrubbing the toilet, etc) can be transformed into a meditation if you approach it with mindfulness. That same friend says that Americans like “Buddhism-light:” all of the self-affirmation with none of the hard work, none of the realization that your desires are not the most important thing around. Thinking back to my friend’s comment, DWYL looks a lot like ikigai (a concept that goes back hundreds of years) if you cut off everything that has to do with other people, and just kept the part that’s about you.
                I admire Steve Jobs. I believe that one person’s dedicated vision can change the way we talk to each other, the way we learn, the way we build. At the same time, one person’s dedicated vision usually includes a whole lot of other people, day after day, putting the pieces together. Some people get to show us who they are by the work they do; some people show who they are by the conversations they have while working. Some people show who they are through weekend art, and some people are so pushed upon, so pressured, that they’re struggling to show who they are in the other world of their own minds. In writing this, I’m asking how I should think about my own work. I’m also asking how we can look at work in a way that lets us see more of the people–and the world–around us.

“I took a step to my left and held the broken shoes over a trash can.
The cobbler elves gasped, all together, and froze in place.
‘Do not do this,’ Keef begged me. ‘Lost all is not. Repaired they can be. Good as new we can fix them. Good as new! Do not throw them away.’”
                -Jim Butcher, “It’s My Birthday Too,” Side Jobs

                I don’t think I’m a hoarder. Then again, isn’t that what a hoarder would say? In any case, it’s hard for me to throw things away. On the bookshelf near my desk, I have a three foot power cable cut from a broken lamp my friend had tossed. (I’m stripping the plastic off, and the wire below is beautiful. It could be woven into an interesting piece of art, couldn’t it?). I have a foot of red ribbon. I have half a candle. I have a turtle shell. That’s a sad story, so I won’t tell it. I have a foil swan that’s two years old, and the wooden cubes from a brain teaser that broke three years ago, and homemade soap, though for the life of me I can’t remember who made it or why they gave it to me. Someone ploughed through the metal crosswalk tower near my house. A few weeks later, I took a piece of its shattered metal from the gutter, and right now it’s a paperweight. I pick up pencils from parking lots, wondering what words are still in them. I have a pair of cargo shorts from when I was twelve–the seams are ripped, but I cut some of the cloth to repair my backpack, and I turned one of the pockets into cloth buttons for a Max Where The Wild Things Are costume.
                In Butcher’s story, Dresden, a wizard, threatens the cobbler elves by holding a pair of old shoes over the trash. (He’s usually a good guy, but he needs their help quick). Once the shoes are in the trash, the elves can’t repair them. I wonder if that’s why I still have the ribbon and the power cable. Throwing something away is saying it’s trash. That seems like saying it’s useless, and that no one will make it into something useful or beautiful. I don’t know if I want to say that about anything I’ve ever seen.
                Maybe I just keep expecting to find the cobbler elf Keef–or, if that fails, to be a little more like him.

                “You learn in creative life that there are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn’t felt that.” -Jeanette Winterson in The Guardian, May 2004
                “Most of us don’t live our lives with one integrated self that meets the world. We’re a whole bunch of selves.” -Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job

                Some months ago, I talked with two of my favorite students about identity. It’s the kind of conversation I’ve gone back to again and again, over wine, over a campfire, over cookies. Perhaps a lot of us have. In any case, my students maintained that they were searching for a “real self.” They said that lots of the people around them in high school “didn’t know who they were.” They themselves didn’t know, but they hoped that, with kindness and awareness and courage, they would figure it out.
                I would have said many of the same things at 17, but looking at them now, I wonder if those thoughts are true. Or maybe I wonder if they’re that important. Sure, I’ve “faked” things–faked interest, faked kindness, faked myself. These counterfeits never seem to have that much depth, that much current, that much punch, so I think it’s worth avoiding them. On the other hand, I am different in different situations. In some moments, the group around me seems to need someone loud, someone to pull them together. In other moments, the person in front of me seems to need someone quiet, someone to listen. In some moments, faced with the horrors I see, I’m sad–sad to a point where sadness seems like me. In other moments the world laughs like sparkling water and I laugh with it. Sometimes I’m still, and watching the leaves fall is all I want to do. Sometimes I’m moving, and every new step is another thrill.
                Growing up, I learned (and thought) that my “real self” was something unique, something important, something the world should make space for. Right now, I wonder if the plurality in me–the fact of having different faces–is a sign of richness, not a sign of confusion. I wonder if there is really one me.  There certainly seem to be different adventures, different friends, different possibilities. Perhaps it’s a sign of wisdom to be the person that a moment needs–not forever, not finally, but firmly and for now.

                “I love romantic comedies. […] I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world. […] So it makes sense that in this world there are many specimens of women who I do not think exist in real life, like Vulcans or UFO people or whatever.”
                -Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

                Mindy Kaling goes on to skewer a few stereotypes, like “The Sassy Best Friend” (she “runs a chic dildo store in the West Village”) and “The Forty-Two-Year-Old Mother of the Thirty-Year-Old Male Lead.” It’s well worth the read. But when I was reading that last night–or, more exactly, when I was having that read out loud to me last night–what stuck out to me most was the comedy. Kaling is taking on some serious cultural mumbo-jumbo, she’s changing the spell of expectations that we cast on our children, but she’s doing it in a way that, at least when read out loud, might make you spit out your beer.
                This morning, I’ve been wondering if someone’s style–the perspective they take on a situation–could be arranged by three poles: on the left, there’s compassion, the knowledge that the world is not just you. On the right there’s cruelty. It’s easy to just see me, and when I do, then hurting you is not that hard. Above those two, and between them, there’s humor. You can be funny and mean. You can be funny without caring whether you’re being kind. You can be funny while creating compassion.
                When I think about pointing out something that’s wrong, I tend to get all serious. I can watch a movie and ache because of its shallow depiction of love, or gender roles, or violence, or whatever. Kaling can see the same things that are wrong with that movie, but she can also laugh at the jokes and share the entertainment. Part of me thinks, well wait a minute, isn’t that ache part of the motivation to be better? Kaling responds, “Well, sure–but over here I’ve got an engine that runs on laughs. Wanna try it?”
                I think I skew towards serious when I’m worried we’ll lose, and the injustice will win. When sexism (or prejudice, or whatever other monster) looks as silly as it really is, when someone like Kaling is going to come along and give our kids a better chance at fighting back, it’s easier to laugh.

                James Thurber’s essay, “There’s No Place Like Home,” reads an English/French phrasebook as though it were a narrative poem. Here’s a little piece of it:
                “Panic has begun to set in, and it is not appeased any by the advent of `The Chambermaid’: ‘Are you the chambermaid?’ ‘There are no towels here.’ ‘The sheets on this bed are damp.’ ‘This room is not clean.’ ‘I have seen a mouse in the room.’ ‘You will have to set a mousetrap here.’ The bells of hell at this point begin to ring in earnest: `These shoes are not mine.’ ‘I put my shoes here, where are they now?’ ‘The light is not good.’ ‘The bulb is broken.’ ‘The radiator is too warm.’ ‘The radiator doesn’t work.’ ‘It is cold in this room.’ ‘This is not clean, bring me another.’ ‘I don’t like this.’ ‘I can’t eat this. Take it away!’”

                Reading that, I’m awed by what Thurber can do with comedy. I’m having fun. And I notice that comedy–and maybe a certain kind of self awareness–dies when we only speak of our flaws carefully, reverentially, to demonstration how bad we feel about them.
                And okay, sometimes I’m that bumbling Englishman. Sometimes I interact with the world as though it will be a hotel room made up for me. Clean towels, a mint on the pillow, and no one else’s hair. That’s how I’m thinking when I’m in a hurry, and I get mad at another driver for hurrying. That’s how I’m thinking when I say it’s too hot outside, or to cold, or call the rain “bad weather.” (I imagine all the plants outside with New York accents: “We’re drinking here!”). That’s how I’m thinking when I’m mad that the milk’s ‘gone bad.’ That’s how I’m thinking when I wonder why I didn’t get that job I applied for, why that guy is praising someone who isn’t me, why people won’t just listen to what I have to say. Those are the times when I expect the world to be “in order,” which means (of course) in the order I’m expecting. And then I become the panicked, insistent Englishman, muddling through rooms, horrified at the mess, unable to understand why the law of my will isn’t applying to All This.
                At the end of his essay, Thurber quotes, “‘What must I do?’ ‘What have I done?’ ‘I have done nothing.’ ‘Have already paid you.’ ‘I have paid you enough.’ ‘Let me pass!’ ‘Where is the British consulate?’” If that’s not existential panic, I’m not sure what is; and if you don’t see the appeal for a Proper Authority to Enforce The Law, then I’ll set my dogs on you. Nothing here could be my fault. Things should have been arranged better. I’m going on to some place better. I deserve to, I’ve paid to, and there oughtta be a law (there is a law!) to make me right.

                In traveling, I have an opportunity to shake my little laws, to escape from them and see other things; and in traveling, I can be so intent on holding my fistful of control up before my eyes, so that it looks like all the world. A hot day, a well, and me, the thirsty fool too in love with his bucket to let go long enough to lower it into the water.

                “As the sound of ranchera music from Esta Noche blasted me to sleep, I thought of the skull lodged in my own head. How it would one day emerge after everything that could be recognized as Caitlin–eyes, lips, hair, flesh–was no more. My skull might be crushed too, fragmented by the gloved hand of some hapless twentysomething like me.”
                -Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: and Other Lessons from the Crematory, in describing the night after she first held a human skull.

                Okay, so: I’m going to die. Not soon, I think, unless we’re talking on a geologic or cosmic scale–but sooner or later the Scythe of the Shadow will swing, the last gain in my hourglass will fall, the bucket will be soundly kicked, and the rest, as the poet said, will be silence.
                Except it won’t. In that same moment, somewhere, someone will say, “It smells terrible in here,” and someone else will say “I love you,” and someone else, I hope, will laugh while reading Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. Not to mention the crows who will go on crowing and the ducks who will go on ducking beneath the water and the fish (barracudas, perhaps) who will go on fishing. I’ve heard lots of people talk about how humans come to grips with the reality of their own death. (Maybe the fact that I wrote “sooner or later” means that reality, in my mind, is still behind a gossamer curtain of youth). In the middle of her book about life, death, what cremation and embalming actually look like, and why a culture should pay attention to all that, Ms. Doughty brings us close to that conversation. She brings us next door, not to the moment of our death, but to a moment afterward, when someone else is living.
                I’m glad she made me imagine that moment. I’m glad she made me wonder about my own skull: what it will look like, where it will be when Azlan’s thoughts aren’t flashing around (and around and around) inside it anymore. My end isn’t the end of the world. There will be someone who moves my body, and then goes on with the day. There will be night clubs playing ranchera music. I hope there will be barracudas. That’s reassuring, and that reminds me to think about the world I’ll leave behind for the someone who picks up my skull.

                “As Irwin Shaw once said, ‘A writer does not write just one story at  a time. A person who writes is on a long journey, and he or she is saying, ‘Here is where I am today and here is what this place looks like today.’ A body of work should be looked at from a far horizon. You look at a person’s career, you’ll see it rise to a peak and then settle to a lower plain, and then rise to a lower peak…” -Harlan Ellison

                It’s tempting to look at life as a task: a class to teach, a book to write, a job to land, an election to win. It’s tempting to look at a task as a singular challenge: a shot to make, a speech to give, a jump to land. In a culture that likes pointing out who’s winning and who’s losing, looking at life that way can seem comforting. It lets me know who’s on top. It also makes every problem one good moment–one great success–away from being solved. All the same, I think looking at life that way distorts everything in front of me.
                When I look at the people I admire, I don’t see one clever move and then a retreat from the game. I don’t see a “game” at all, with clear rules and clear winners. I see work, day after day. I see uncertainty, day after day. I see love, day after day. I don’t think a good teacher gives one great lesson: I think she lets her students know that they matter, and that their thoughts can matter. I don’t think a novel’s written in one great burst: even the stream of consciousness writers come back to writing, again and again, to practice, and the rest of them walk through a narrative with lots of steps. If I look at anything important I’ve done, I don’t see a single race:  I see a thread in the wider weaving of learning, hurting, making friends and eating (perhaps too much) chocolate.
                A few months ago, I wrote down this line, looking for a poem: “…and forgetting my high intentions, add my feather’s weight.” I haven’t found the poem yet, but the idea is important to me. I don’t think that what’s in front of me is one grand performance. It’s a “long journey” of confusions and ideas. It’s a chance to build what we are, what we give the world, not with a grand gesture but with the long, sometimes shaky, sometimes inspired effort of every day.