Looking for wonder

I’ve been wanting to write this for some time, it’s been floating around in my head and I said to myself, “Rachel, that’s a great first post for your new years writing goal.” So I sat myself down to write about how much harder it is to experience wild wonder as you enter middle age and as I did I saw on a random social media post that my best friend from high school had died. And it may seem like maybe at this point that I was like wow life is short I have to really reach out and grasp that magic again, but that is not what this is.

There used to be this silvery thread that wound through my every waking moment; it would resonate quietly when I saw a dandelion in the cracks, a murder of crows, a woman in a great outfit, a proud cat sauntering down the sidewalk. It was mostly always vibrating slightly but sometimes would bring me near to tears with the absolute glory of life. But slowly it quieted. For a long time I didn’t notice, I thought “I’ve become calmer with age, how wonderful.” Not sensing that it was not the calmness of a stormless sea, but the quietness of a locked room. This difference matters, and it matters for all of us as we age, and so let’s go back to my best friend, CHW.

C was a genius. Truly. He was wild and goofy and when we were 16 he would read phd level psychology books with me in the hallways of our high school, and he, unlike me, understood them. He built computers from scratch and had an eye for fashion that I still think about when I’m looking out into the world. Like me he wanted to know and understand everything, like me, his brain often felt like it was on fire, and like me, he didn’t feel understood by anyone. He was deeply lonely. The drugs helped him feel less alone. But a part of who he was became subsumed by them. This is not an anti drug rant, most people become subsumed by something, be it their partners or their careers, a tv show, a sport. People bury ourselves in things and we lose parts of ourselves. Some do it with things that are culturally acceptable. Some do it earlier than others. Most never even notice it happening.

But must we lose our childlike wonder?

The prefix sub means exactly what you probably think it does, below, beneath, buried; subject, submerged, subsumed. That below becomes less than that above. This is just a little essay so I’m not going to go deeply into what it means on a neurological level to subsume ourselves into something, though I did start down that rabbit hole and it is, as one would expect, a wild ride. But it’s not what I want to write about here. I want to ask, why. Why do we lose ourselves in something else? Why do we offer up what most of us think of as the most wonderful part of childhood onto the sacrificial altar of maturity? Is it necessary? What does it offer us in return?

I am blessed/cursed with an excellent memory and my very earliest memories are all just complete glee at the most absolutely mundane things; a mushroom that opens like a book to be read, a wave created by a motor boat filling the moat I’d made on the beach, raspberries in three colors and flavors and textures. Why did I give up that simple joy? I mean nobody can ever *really* know can they? But let me offer up my guess.

Grief.

Oh that heavy companion. The thing is- I don’t remember my first heavy griefs because I wasn’t yet aware of loss. When uncle R was found with a self inflicted wound I made up stories of his murder. When aunt C died her youngest child asked when her miracle would happen. Grief is different when you are young. It doesn’t carry as much weight. It’s like a snowball rolling downill, gathering mass as it goes. And yes, I understand that some children are given far too heavy of a load as a child and I would venture to say that I myself had a heavier load than I would give to the young, and I refuse to deny these children their own experiences and also I must say, I can’t speak for them and I can’t speak for you. I can barely speak for myself because how does one even begin to know who we are? This is an aside, because the side stories are also important, but coming back, grief is a weight that grows. Anyone who has lifted weights know that if you slowly add weight you will be able to wow yourself with an ever increasing load, but even though you are able to bear it, larger loads can lead to bigger hurt. That load of grief you carry will never grow smaller. You will just get stronger. And that load of grief you forget you’re carrying because you're so used to it suddenly makes itself known when you twist funny.

And so, to protect ourselves from this, we notice what hurts us. And we bury ourselves in the things that protect us from adding to that potential pain. But the thing is, as my therapist said to me so brilliantly in a conversation we were having about this recently, “Grief and gratitude live as a team in my brain.” And so the more that we avoid the grief and build up tools to prevent ourselves from experiencing it, the less gratitude that we feel. And isn’t gratitude just the big kid word for wonder? Like when you see a murmuration don’t you just feel like the luckiest person alive? That silver thread vibrates hard. Time becomes outside of you.

This does not mean that we need to just throw ourselves at grief waiting for the gratitude to come. Grief itself is a subsuming thing, the amount of water and drowning metaphors that seem so cliche are simply because there is nothing else that can quite describe the strange timeless quality of being submerged deeply in it. This essay is not me encouraging anyone to drown. I am not saying just let ’er rip when the time comes for grief. I am neither a therapist nor a saint so I am offering no advice to strangers or friends who are reading this. But coming back to those cliched metaphors, I am trying to learn how to surf, rather than avoiding getting into the water at all.

And you may notice something in these last two paragraphs that I bring up. The thing that I see as the commonality in the two Gs, their ability to warp our senses of time. Things that warp our sense of time are not beloveds of capitalism. Clock time was literally invented to make sure that commerce was happening in a rigid structure. Things that alter that rigidity are frowned upon, and so grief and gratitude have entered into our modern vocabulary stripped of their essence. When my dad’s mother died he took the day off for her funeral. And went back to work on Monday. When we talk about gratitude in my country, it is nearly always individualized into specific relationships and objects. These emotions of the intangible are captured by the market. We buy cards and send gifts in their honor. We place them into nicely cubed packages that we can place into our linear timeline. But occasionally one of these emotions that we’ve forced into their perfect packages unwinds itself, popping through the package and knocking things over, reminding ourselves that though we perceive time as linear, we don’t actually experience it that way.

Awfully big words. I know. I’m sorry. Please bear with me. (Or don’t this is honestly basically a public diary post that I’m writing to force myself to let people read my writing so, in fact, please take this moment to know if you don’t continue to read you’re doing me a favor. :) )

I don’t want to get into physics or metaphysics or any of that stuff that needs more words to explain and I think most of the people who are going to read this understand that time is not actually linear but that because our brain is essentially a tool that helps us find food and partners with whom we can reproduce it has developed along a singular track of moving into a future in which those things exist. Many of our emotions exist outside that linear track as a way to bring us back into the circular nature of our experience. We do not have the right wiring to actually perceive the world as nonlinear. Sometimes I hear people saying that this is actually an educational deficit but given that most life forms we know have to do the things that are future oriented to continue their existence, I’m personally on the side of it being hardwired into our deepest brain. Either way, in the words of my dad “it is what it is” so let’s not speculate too hard on how it could be. Most emotions are actually mental shortcuts- we know that x input leads to y output and so instead of having to mentally process it every time we develop an emotion that gets us there (this is just really cool and I will, if I’m good and keep writing, write more about all of this).

Ok so Rachel, you are probably asking, why does nonlinear time and emotions and what the where huh? Yeah I’m sorry speaking of nonlinear my brain is a doozy and I’m trying to just write these with minimal edits because I had 3000 words written and erased them and started over this morning and I have 12 hours until I promised to publish this so. Phew. Deadlines. Bringing it all back home. We forget that grief and gratitude remind us to stay present in the flow of the universe when we are forced to place them within the realm of a rigid and linear time that when we really think about it, feels wrong. It doesn’t feel good. When we continually do things that don’t feel good they become a well worn path that never lose that feeling, simply burying it. And oh lord by now I have so many boxes of grief, stacked one on top of another. Some really big griefs. Some smaller and I spend a lot of time managing that grief so that it doesn’t pop out at unreasonable times. But because gratitude is packed in there with the grief I end up managing it also. They fit so nicely together on the shelf, sometimes, often actually, they are wrapped up in the same package. I am so grateful to have had C as a friend. So much of my formative years he influenced. Do I push those memories into a small package with my grief and place them on the shelf like it’s just like the other griefs, do I file it under loss? do I file it alphabetically under name? Where do I put this with my other griefs? But the times that I think that I really can hold the grief in space are when I think of throwing it into the pool. I am no longer going to carry it. I’m not going to let it be a weight. I’m not going to be subsumed by it. And while I may occasionally submerged myself in it, instead I find myself floating on it. Letting my grief carry me instead of me carrying it. Looking down and seeing that grief is just the shadow side of my gratitude. Seeing schools of grief flitting about, their silvery scales reflecting until I wonder is that the silvery scales of grief or my silver thread of wonder that I had thought that I lost?