there are no coincidences
taking inventory through narration
The best ideas come from good conversation. I remember something similar engraved in my favourite building at the University of Toronto, except “ideas” was replaced with “learning.” I always felt it was the most humble propaganda I have ever seen. As a solitary person, however, I am thinking now of all the understandings that have come to me while I’m alone at my computer, or lying down with wild abandon and a rapid mind in the middle of the night. I started this way because I was about to start a different way: with a book a friend gave me. This made me think that I start a lot of my ideas with a prompt or reminder I have heard from a friend in one of our more human-centric conversations. In any case or in all cases, or in both cases in this case, the book is called The Best Short Stories 2023, edited by Lauren Groff and a compilation of The O. Henry Prize Winners. Only now am I thinking that it is fitting to begin my year with a book of stories from the last. I did not intend to write this. The mind is mysterious because we cannot comprehend at a slow enough pace how it pieces things together, how it moves things along, and mystery is not the opposite of logic, nor is it the opposite of incoherence. Yet, whenever I start to write, I speed up a little in pursuit of my mind and, at the very least, I’m able to catch glimpses of that miraculous process.
The story I’m thinking of is called The Hollow by ’Pemi Aguda and it is about choosing to have power. It might also be said that it is about architecture or that it is about domestic violence. It is both and it is a metaphor. In the story the author quotes Honoré de Balzac writing, “from the relics of household stuff we can imagine its owners in their habitat as they lived” (175). While reading I was thinking about houses and structures and history and rubble but I was also thinking about how we live. Oddly enough, I never once thought about “a home;” or the other question, “what makes a house a home?” The prompt to consider how we live is pertinent to me now, on this second day of 2024, on a morning when I woke up thinking how to be an observer of my life. It is quite popular in modern neuroscience to practice being in a meditative state that will allow you to observe your thoughts, and thus make it easier to be the observer of your life. It feels like an insane thing to accomplish for what do we choose to observe and what do we leave to autopilot? Posing this question does not lead me to an immediate answer, but I do have a clue, and that clue comes in the form of another question asked by one of Aguda’s characters: “What is a house? What do we want from it? What makes it beautiful? [...] only when she could answer these questions for herself and for her client should she take pencil to paper” (173).
But this is one of those things that causes my mind to loop around and eat itself like an ouroboros. All of these questions are a wonderful place to start, but they turn the whole project of observation into a philosophical problem: the minute an object is observed it acts differently. This has been proven on an anatomical level. And so we have to ask ourselves, who am I performing for? The only way to contain this duality is to answer the question wholeheartedly, with our chests, and say: myself. That self-containment makes me want to label this practice as “safe.” But we are never safe with ourselves and we are only safe with ourselves, depending on how the individual’s semiotic-al mind defines safety. The story, I must now mention, is also about breaking a curse. It is about refusing to remain idle, it is about countering a foul inertia. And sometimes, the curses we seek to break are wound up so tightly in everything we do that we mistake them for our very own personalities. This is not so. It is good to act differently if what we are striving for is a new way of life, if what we measure ourselves against is ourselves. But this is again the same problem and it is a fickle thing; it is slippery and tempting to stray from ourselves, to perform, to be perceived, to merely want to take up the theatrical occupation of a person in a still-frame. A person who writes, a person who reads, a person who controls their emotions, a person who works, drives, exercises, has expensive clothing, a large friend group. Nobody has as intimate access to our psyches as we do ourselves, and so there is great power in the act of telling yourself the truth. The act of observing ourselves from a landscaped perspective allows us to disentangle from a curse that we mistook for temperament.
The story is about choosing to have a seemingly supernatural power over our own lives. It is a choice that we all have, to varying degrees. What is a life? What do we want from it? What makes a life beautiful? Do not be hasty in this or else the act of observation will be both fuelled by and serving only the ego. You risk being swallowed whole. My friend told me she heard of a practice where you do a full accounting of your life in a long seven hour session with no access to technology; use a pen and paper and take inventory. I like this idea but I would add that you take a pen and paper and narrate a day in your life in a meta-cognitive way, paying special attention to the fact that you are writing about yourself. For example:
Tatyana woke up this morning and was disorganized. She changed her outfit twice because she felt sticky. She was frustrated. Maybe it was because she had expectations for herself that she didn’t give herself an opportunity to live up to. Her clothes were in disarray on the floor. Her head was fuzzy like she had taken a sleeping aid. By 11 o’clock she finally had the courage to leave the house. Courage is a funny way to say that. But it’s true. What was the resistance she clung to? Why did she use the word “opportunity?”
In fact, most days she woke up this way: a foggy yet content mind, a desire to start something. Always the desire to begin. That is important, she thinks to herself now. It begins with desire. Everything is about her desires, her dreams, her imagination. And it is also about beginnings. Is that keeping me trapped, she thinks? Trapped in a new beginning every single day?
And after this, rewrite the morning in a way that is idyllic yet reasonable:
Tatyana woke up feeling calm and lucid. She knew what she desired to finish today. She rose and stretched on the carpet at the foot of the bed. Everything is okay. It was good to feel a pull behind her thighs and in her hips. She held a few postures and then rose as the blood rushed back to her head. She walked to the bathroom and brushed her hair and pulled it back into a ponytail. Then she brushed her teeth and bared them for herself in the mirror. She dressed according to how she felt. At this point she doesn’t know what that will be. Downstairs she pulled eggs from the fridge and turned on the kettle. The water boiled and the oil cracked in the pan. She ate. At 10am she tied up her sneakers, zipped up a large down-filled parka, and opened the door.
There are no coincidences, there are innumerable patterns. And now I have so much more information. Which, again, is no coincidence: a life is a circle, self-knowledge makes a life beautiful, and I want to go inwards and outwards until it makes me dizzy, until death spares me from madness. I feared answering those questions because I was self-conscious about my ability to carry them out authentically, to take an account of how I live and identify if it is in accordance with my answers. Because only then should I take pen to paper. Only then will I make the choice to have power.
This practice of self narration can be done in a macro way as well: narrate the past year of your life and see what comes up. What events do you mention? How do you write about them? What are you proud of? Sometimes I am plagued with inadequacy, comparison, sucked into mindless capitalist scrolling. But consider this: she woke up every day last year and looked on instagram first thing in the morning. Is that a character you would admire, abhor, or relate to? In this landscape you can begin to make judgments and have feelings about yourself as an observer. I’ll repeat this: once you answer the question, only then should you take pen to paper. Which, oddly, in this house-life metaphor, immobility is implied prior to answering. And in a way that is sort of what happens when you do not have a clear connection to the natural world. Things move along, of course, but they will not follow a path that you have intentionally chosen, and thus, autopilot. The purpose is to arrive at a state, through a meditative observation practice, where autopilot is very closely aligned to intentional action.
In this process, I have discovered that part of the way I have lived my life is in resistance. Which was, definitively, counterintuitive. To live in opposition tethers life to the thing you seek to avoid. There are a few benefits; for instance, it is a line drawn in the sand, it is a way to orient myself, and a means of remaining connected to a larger community. Ultimately, however, it was a distraction that I could no longer afford, and more importantly, it had kept me caged creatively. I do not want to observe or narrate myself as having a contrarian disposition just to be antithetical. This is a small secret that only I could reveal.
Learning is never done alone, I know that now. Even in the quiet of my mind I have strangers enriching my own experiences. I am indebted to every writer chosen to be included in the The Best Short Stories 2023, and I am deeply grateful to Lauren Groff for her kismet selections. I adore a story with an effervescent twist, landscapes that (quasi)defy physics, and characters who seek moral retribution.
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so well written!