And I’m only getting older
The boulder I have become does not move easily. This boulder rarely changes. I gather moss. I watch the world move around me.
I wasn’t always a boulder. I used to roll around a little, bump into other rocks, maybe share a roll down a hill with them. My brain tumor and COVID and a series of overlapping decisions have conspired to stop that rock’s roll.
I am a boulder. I spent the last five years turning myself into an immovable object. With all due respect to Johnny Mercer, this object is only immovable by choice. It takes only one choice, one decision, to make this boulder move.
I have made that choice. I won’t be a boulder any longer. I’m gonna move.
It doesn’t have to be a big move. It can be small: a brief tug, a gentle nudge. All big moves start with little ones. We cavitate a little and then explode.
This is that: a mere cavitation. The explosion comes later.
It doesn’t matter how fast you go, only that you move. Let’s move!
For the butter on your bread,
for the dying and the dead
For your cheeks turning red, let’s go
What’s great about this whole movement thing I’ve decided on is that the process has already started. To quote Alan Moore, through the dialogue of his anti-villain, Adrian Veidt, if I thought there was any chance I wouldn’t have already started this process of self-renewal, do you think I would have even mentioned it?
I have made buckets of promises that I never kept. This is common among humans, perhaps more so with me. We make our card castle plans with every good intention, only to have the vagaries of our lives smash them apart. Before we know it, we have developed a reputation for not following through.
When I say “we” I mean “me,” but that’s obvious by now.
I won’t outline what those changes or plans are just yet, but you’re reading one of them right now. And it’s taken me ages to get to this point. Actually, it’s taken me weeks to get to this point, because I started writing this weeks ago and I’m only now coming back to it. Why is that?
Because I Really Love Avoiding Things
That’s not true, I don’t enjoy it at all. I hate it!
But Jim, I can hear you saying. If you hate it so much why do you keep doing it?
Here’s the thing: I love avoiding things.
But I hate having avoided them.
I avoided writing this newsletter because it is taxing, emotionally and intellectually, to write something coherent when I’m not writing something coherent for work (which is pretty much every day). Similarly, I avoid exercising because it’s physically taxing, and it makes me uncomfortable.
COVID has made it extremely easy to avoid things that make me uncomfortable. Social engagement makes me uncomfortable, and the thought of getting COVID makes me uncomfortable. What seemed like reasonable caution a couple of years ago now feels like agoraphobia.
Being scared and doing the scary thing anyway is how we grow, and I have steadfastly refused to do any.
I spent a whole year, probably more, avoiding anything that made me uncomfortable. I am now extremely uncomfortable with my entire body because of this approach. I’m unhappy with my COVID body because I ate anything I wanted, any time I wanted. I don’t have the metabolism for that. I knew better.
Things happen when you avoid being uncomfortable. My mental homeostasis was maintained, but that’s about it in the Good, I’m Glad That Happened column. The Oh Shit, That Sucks column is much longer.
If I started listing everything on that side of my Year in Review, I would quickly run out of room. I am not going to make this newsletter a list of Things I Fucked Up. That’s a bummer and nobody wants to read a bummer.
Severance, the Book, Not the Show
I recently finished reading a book, which is an achievement for me. The book is called Severance, by Ling Ma. I find it hard to finish books. I start them and never finish them. I’ve been finishing more lately, though. This is the first of 2023.
Here’s the publisher blurb about this book, that has little in common with the tv series by the same name, except that part of it takes place in an office:
Maybe it’s the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma’s offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance.
This book (not a tv show) was recommended somewhere as being similar to Station Eleven (the show, not the book), which I love with my whole heart. I would agree that it is similar, though also different. I found it delightful and the author has a command of the language I find enviable.
In Severance, the main character lives through a global pandemic that kills most of the population and yet, through it all, continues to go to work. Her parents are dead, and she has no brothers or sisters. She has nothing but her job, which she doesn’t even like that much.
What friends she had all parted ways with New York City before the disease took hold, and the office staff dwindles until she’s the last one there. This coincides with the city slowly emptying as more and more people flee or die from the fever.
The fever isn’t a flu or a respiratory virus but an infection that kills its victims and then sometimes makes their bodies mindlessly reenact their daily lives. They become zombies but without the violence, as dead as anybody else but still moving, like mobile versions of the ruins and abandoned buildings that populate post-apocalypse landscapes.
The thing about Candace, the main character of the novel, is that she survives the pandemic and even though the world changes around her, she’s the same person she always was.
No Matter Where You Go, There You Are
A theme of this book that is not overtly stated but one that I discerned was this:
I used the phrase “drag along behind us” but I don’t claim to have invented it.
I derived it from two places:
The first is this: the quote from Buckaroo Bonzai that many people in my generation like to reference, but derives from a sentiment expressed as early as the 1400s, as quoted by Reverend W. H. Hutchings:
You cannot escape it, run where you will; for wherever you go, you take yourself with you, and you will always find yourself.
The other is more specifically the text from the lyrics of a Handsome Family Song called My Sister’s Tiny Hands (though I think I prefer Andrew Bird’s version):
Every creature casts a shadow under the sun’s golden fingers
But when the sun sinks past the waving grass
Some shadows are dragged along
Combined, they evoke an image that sticks in my brain, how we might be beating new paths and making new roads through the wilderness of an uncertain future, but behind us is the person we are, and have always been.
We can’t not be who we are, but there seems to be a choice about how we treat them.
Be kind to the person you’re dragging along behind you.
Anyway, stay tuned to this space for more of these.