“The surest sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.” -Michel de Montaigne

         I have a tendency to see courage, integrity, and some other important abstracts as solemn: there stands the challenge, and here stand we. I’ve often assumed that someone who looked serious was someone who understood. Perhaps it doesn’t need to look like that. Perhaps it rarely does. I’m reminded of a moment in Richard Feynman’s biography: as part of joining a fraternity, Feynman and some other freshmen were blindfolded, taken midwinter to the middle of nowhere, and dropped off by a frozen lake. Their challenge was to find their way back to school. They started getting frustrated and scared–except one kid, Maurice Meyer. Maurice just kept laughing and joking and making puns. He was having a grand time.
         When they come to a crossroads, and everyone else was arguing about which way to go, Maurice said, “This way.” They didn’t want to listen to him; after all, he’s not even taking the situation seriously. What could he have to add? “Simple,” says Maurice. “Look at the telephone lines. Where there’s more wires it’s going towards the central station.”
         Perhaps a true explorer’s attitude doesn’t always need to be serious. It might be a little silly. The explorer might be having a lot of fun. There might even be some bad puns. We can hold ourselves to a task by sternly insisting on it, by demanding more of ourselves, but we can also work like we played back when we were children: for the joy of it. I remember working very hard at my games back then, I remember pouring my mind into an imagined world (where I had a lightsaber!) or the building of a lego castle. Perhaps that’s why just imagining was often all the game I needed.
         There are always clues to discover, connections to make, and frozen lakes to explore. Perhaps Montaigne, behind his smile, has realized that the chance to look for those clues and walk around that frozen water, whether we’re lost or found, whether we discover something or not, is one of the greatest gifts imaginable. And it’s also just plain fun.

Acting is “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” -Sanford Meisner

         My friend Jay taught me an exercise we often do in Drama class. Each student gets a little speech. After a few days of imagining the story around it, she gives the speech on camera. Then we pause, and ask questions to tease out the story she imaged: who are you talking to? What’s happened? Where are you coming from? When the students start, they often either hold back, or “perform” to show us how talented they are. Watching that isn’t very interesting–it looks like people pretending. Something changes when we just talk about this imagined world they’re living in. They look like real people, thinking and wondering, sharing and hiding as they try to say their story. “That’s what we want,” says Jay. “That’s how an actor connects with an audience.”
         When we’re not on stage, we sometimes think that our imaginations can lead us away from the world–“stop daydreaming.” That happens, but I think imagination leads into the world far more than it leads away. Richard Feynman, the physicist, and an artist friend once had an argument about art, science, and flowers. The friend claimed that art revealed the flower’s beauty, but science destroyed it by taking the flower apart. Feynman said he could still admire the color and the shape, which were wonderful, but through study, he could also see more of the flower’s beauty. He could see how the cells interacted to create and sustain life. Except Feynman didn’t say he could “see” these things. He said “imagine.”
         The actor’s task is to imagine a world so that he has ground to stand on, and then simply stand. The task is to realize that who he is, and the emotions he’s feeling, are enough–they’re enough for a great performance (that doesn’t perform at all), and they’re enough for a real life. If he’s nervous, he can let his character be a little nervous. If he’s flustered, his character is flustered. He just has to be truthful. That’s our task, our opportunity: to connect ourselves, our emotions and our thoughts, to a world that we choose to make real.
         Sometimes our imagination brings us closer than we thought we could ever get to the beauty of a flower, the struggle of a friend, or the place our own heart is actually standing. The sun’s just come over the horizon: that’s a huge ball of nuclear fusion, burning warmth toward me across a vast, almost empty space in which we all hang, somehow safe. What a world. How real it is. And standing in a real world, when we want to connect, Meisner says to just live truthfully.

“A Song of Shattering”
         -Edna St. Vincent Millay

For you there is no song . . .
         Only the shaking
Of the voice that meant to sing; the sound of the strong
         Voice breaking.

Strange in my hand appears
         The pen, and yours broken.
There are ink and tears on the page; only the tears
         Have spoken.

         Sometimes I hear people speak honestly and beautifully about the matters closest to their hearts. And sometimes, when they speak of those things, their voices break and they start crying. The next thing they often say confuses me: they often say, “I’m sorry.” There was nothing to be sorry for.
         Millay is a beautiful singer, but she reminds us that “the sound of a strong voice breaking” is as powerful as any lyric. She is a poetic writer, and reminds us that, sometimes, our tears say everything we hoped to say, and couldn’t put to words.
         I’ve been talking recently with my brother about how we can be good parents, good siblings, good children or good friends. Millay tells me: a lot of the time, let yourself be, and then you can let yourself be where you are. Be in the sorrow, in the scream, in the tears. Be in the confusion, the moment in which you don’t know what to say or do. As long as you don’t run away, as long as you are present, you are saying something important. You are there, and your silence or your presence, your tears, or the hand you rest on a friend’s shoulder–all these things say a magnificent something.
         What if we made peace with our own broken pieces, and learned to let the tears (and the broken moments, and the connections we find even there) speak. I want to do that, but sometimes, I also worry that my tears have nothing to say. When I worry that, I try to remember the last time I held a friend while he cried. I knew how much he was saying. Can I remember that for myself?

“Oh, Francis, I wish you had some evil in you that you might know me.”
         -John Proctor in The Crucible, by Arthur Miller

         Looking around (and at myself), it seems we’re often fighting the “worst parts” of ourselves–our greed and our jealousy, our arrogance and our laziness. Perhaps fighting them isn’t a very effective choice: most things will fight back, when you attack. When I circle my mind around some characteristic to lay siege, I’m also making that characteristic the center of my mind. Perhaps there are other ways.
         It’s not just that anger and arrogance can help with some tasks, although I think they can; it’s that these emotions can always help us relate to and care for people who are also sometimes angry and arrogant. That means everyone, as far as I can tell.
         Our pains can make us close off, they can make us cruel, but they can also make us open up and be kind. We understand each others’ struggles because we struggle. We can understand when our loved ones fall short because we fall short. Our struggles and flaws can be reminders to stop and pay a little more attention to others, and they can also be the windows through which we understand a little piece of someone else’s tears or false smiles. So perhaps it’s okay to struggle. Perhaps it’s even okay to fall short. Perhaps it’s wonderful. Next time I find a part of me that feels rotten, I want to work on it, but what if I also remembered John Proctor for a moment, and said, “Thank all that is, I have some evil in me, so I can know my friends.”

Tomorrow I’ll start back to Oklahoma from California. Saying goodbye to one place, even when I’m excited to say hello to another, often leaves me feeling sad. Don’t we lose so much when we leave a place behind? Well, yes, says Richard Wilbur’s “The Sirens”–but then it says more.

I never knew the road
From which the whole earth didn’t call away,
With wild birds rounding the hill crowns,
Haling out of the heart an old dismay,
Or the shore somewhere pounding its slow code,
Or low-lighted towns
Seeming to tell me, stay.

Lands I have never seen
And shall not see, loves I will not forget
All I have missed, or slighted, or forgone
Call to me now. And weaken me. And yet
I would not walk a road without a scene.
I listen going on,
The richer for regret.

Whatever path we walk, we miss something: awake to watch the stars, we miss the sunrise. Present at one table to make a new friend, we miss another. It’s like picking a foreign language in school: at 14, how was I supposed to know which language, which culture, which entire world I wanted to try and enter? There is simply too much: too much for any of us to see, too much to drink in, too much to love, and while our heart can seek out new friends, it can’t meet all the new friends that might be. And yet–

These sights and sounds that call us away from one path are the glimmers of the world’s vastness. The promise around us (sometimes playful, sometimes poignant) is that we’ll find something when we go look. There are other things we won’t find, of course: but it would be a poor, sad world if there were only one path, only one set of views. So now, as I’m sitting in my regret (regret that the summer’s setting, that I won’t see my family for a little while; that I won’t see many of you, or the California rains when they start up) I’m trying to remember that this regret is my sense for the abounding, unending beauty of the world.

Look: here is more than we could ever dream of having, offered to us to share.

“I quote others only in order to better express myself.” -Michel de Montaigne

Learning from others helps us understand and be ourselves. Their voices offer lessons and tools to use in life: what if you looked at the world this way, they say. They are invitations from guides and friends. They are companions in our sorrows and tricksters to make us smile. The world is wide, and history takes all that breadth and gives it an endless depth. Like Newton, we can stand on the shoulders of giants. Like Matthew Arnold’s picture of Shakespeare, we can climb to the stars by planting our footsteps in the depths and mystery of the ocean. We can learn, laugh, and wander along through wonder with the voices of those who have gone before. So much of what we do we do together.

And by the way, it’s not only older generations who have “gone before.” The phrase applies to nine year olds. If you’re not sure, try keeping up with one…