“Everything that causes you to be more than you have been in your best hours is right.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
It was my boyfriend’s birthday this weekend, and I wanted everything to be perfect. I’ve known people who hate birthdays for this exact same reason: perfection. It’s too much pressure. I had a vision for the perfect unfolding of the day. The day ended up consisting of hard work and studying and sunset drives and delicious food. The day was perfect not because of its rigid adherence to a fixed schedule, but because it was serendipitous. We constantly adjusted what we needed to do in the day to have time to relax at night. The flow of the day was like walking through a new city where you don’t quite know where you’re going, each coming street gliding into the next, the sequence of the day’s events coming into clarity with each new forthcoming road.
When I get lost in a city and end up at a restaurant that could only be the culmination of those exact sequence of events, is it true that this was the best way for those events to have transpired? Or would I have been content at the end of the day, no matter which restaurant I ducked into? In other words, does a sequence of events always add up to be more than the sum of its parts? There’s two quotes that I always grapple with. One is from tiny beautiful things by Cheryl Strayed, where she writes:
“You get no points for the living, I tell my students. It isn’t enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn’t anecdote. It’s the consciousness we bring to hear on our lives.”
She counsels that things have meaning because we make meaning out of them. Our lives are composed of the stories we tell about them. Then, there’s also this quote in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson which says:
“Once we create meaning for ourselves, our brains are designed to hold on to that meaning. We are biased toward the meaning our mind has made, and we don’t want to let go of it. Even if we see evidence that contradicts the meaning we created, we often ignore it and keep on believing anyway.”
How do we create meaning out of our experiences while also objectively experiencing them as they are? I teeter on the edge of cultivating a story that makes meaning out of my experiences, and also trying to objectively witness events as they are, without judgement. However, there’s another quote which sways me, by Albert Einstein, who says:
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
I do want to live my life as if everything is a miracle. I would rather view my life as soil to be cultivated rather than dirt to be scrapped. I want to view the unfolding of a series of events as an iterative process. I want wonder. This mindset has made losing myself in cities some of the most sensational. However, I also want to practice observing without judgement. I’m caught by this essay by Heather Havrilesky who advises “conquering your shame really does make your life feel like art” and:
“Art isn’t something you need an outside license or a paycheck to pursue. It’s a way of life. It’s a way of adding up what you feel and where you’ve been and what you fear and what you can imagine. It’s a way of seeing your life through a lens that makes everything — good and bad, confusing and clarifying, uplifting and depressing — valuable.”
On my boyfriend’s birthday, we drive up to the beach, after having seen cotton candy skies on the entire drive over. We come down a hill and get a full view of the ocean, safeguarded by hues of blue, orange, and yellow. The sun is setting and it’s also blue hour, casting shadows on all of the palm trees, contrasting the light in the background. This moment is perfect, but it also would be perfect if we would have arrived in the dark, stars strewn across the sky. It would have been perfect if we reached at noon, warm and sunny, wrapping us like a thick blanket on a Spring day with a slight breeze giving us goosebumps. It would have been perfect in the cold rain, where we would have ducked into cafes to eat. I know this because we have experienced every one of these situations, and they have all been wondrous in their own ways because we make the most of any situation and we resolve to be present in each other’s circumstances, as they are. After wandering around the city of New York, I once saw this poem on the subway which I loved:
I was always afraid
of the next cardthe psychic would turn over for us…
Forgive me
for not knowing
how we wereevery card in the deck.
-Timothy Lu, b. 1965
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this essay, you might also like contentment as a form of resistance and on fear and faith. I do want to add this important quote by Jessica Dore which highlights the ways that trauma should not be forcefully qualified as an opportunity for growth. In her book, she writes, “And while you are never—and I repeat, never—required to frame a traumatic experience as an opportunity, you always, always, always have the option to tell a story that highlights your agency and power.”