Month: October 2023

I recently attended my 40th high school reunion. As part of it, a few of us agreed to participate in a mentoring session for the current students. We were asked to give our “Obi-Wan Kenobi nuggets of wisdom” to a crowd of high school seniors in the library. This struck me as inauspicious. These high school seniors did not want to be in that library with us, and I promise you that none of them would mistake any of us for Obi-Wan Kenobi. So the event was actually a kind of panel where a few old people without credibility dumped life-advice platitudes on a crowd of sullen, motionless students. You’d be surprised how well we thought we did after the session was over. It’s a good thing we didn’t ask the students.

Image by Midjourney

I wondered: When does advice make a difference? And why is there such asymmetry between what we want to hear and what we want to say? Nobody wants to hear “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” But when called upon to dispense wisdom onstage, we say it all the same.

I won’t excuse myself. I was slinging clichés up there with everybody else. The best opening line came from the guy next to me, a successful dentist and business man: “I hated school. I absolutely hated it.” It was one of the few raw, unpackaged moments. I thought “Oh man, that’s hit the target.” But still there was no flicker of reaction. Tough crowd.

It occurred to me that these platitudes weren’t actually bad advice. You really should turn lemons into lemonade, after all. Platitudes are true enough, if you can hear them and act on them. But so much advice is already downstream of any chance at making a difference. Here’s an example of what I mean: “Set your goals and then work really hard to achieve those goals!” Good advice, yeah? But what if I don’t know my goals are? How do I follow my freakin’ bliss if I don’t know what my bliss is? This is the big question. Before it’s answered, career advice is worthless. After, it is superfluous. If you don’t care, there’s not much I can do to start you, and if you do care, there’s not much I can do to stop you.

We love to give advice about how: here’s how to achieve your goal! We don’t give so much advice about what: what is your goal? And it’s probably just as well, because nobody can give you advice about what. I’ve always liked this quote from Schopenhauer: A man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants. You choose actions based on desires, but desires choose you. Your desires are not subject to negotiation, and so they define you more completely than your talents. I keep coming back to this prayer of gratitude: Lord I am grateful for my talents, but more so am I grateful for my interests. Talent can follow interest, but it can never lead. Hard work can make up for missing talent, but neither talent nor effort can make up for missing interest.

Is there anything we can say to high school seniors who don’t know what they want? If I could travel back to that mentoring session, I might say something like this.

1. Try a lot of stuff to see what sticks
2. Get quiet to hear the quiet voice inside you that might already know

To do the first, you need to be willing to work hard at something that you might not like. That might be hard, but as long as you think of it as a trial period, as long as you have a plan for rotating into trying something else, it might be tolerable. To listen to the quiet voice, you sometimes have to be willing to take a flying leap into something strange. But if you have that small interest, pay attention! Large desires grow from small ones.

It’s still advice from an old guy who likely seems irrelevant. But I believe what-talk is a better starting point than how-talk. I’d love to find out if that’s true.

My big house clean-out is mostly done. One major task remains. Closets. I still have several closets filled with my wife’s clothes. Dresses, sweaters, skirts, shoes. What do I make of all these clothes?

Image by Midjourney

When the clothes go, it feels like goodbye. Everything else felt easy, in comparison. My sorting algorithm went like this: Photos and letters, keep them. Work notes and textbooks, out they go. Sentimental, keep. Mundane, toss. But clothes are in a special category. When I see this red dress with the small spiral patch, I see my wife before me, wearing it. She is elegant. We are getting ready for a night out. The sitter has arrived, and my wife is leaning in close to the bathroom mirror as she puts on mascara. Always a multi-tasker, she calls out to me: Look up parking near the theater! And check the traffic on Google Maps.

When the red dress leaves, that image, that much of my working memory, starts to unravel. It is a slow, subdued ripping sound in the center of my head.

At the same time, I don’t want to hold on to these things forever. The nice thing about these clothes is that they can still do somebody else good. They can live again. I want them to be out there in the world making someone else sparkle just as my wife did when she wore that long blue dress. Someone else should have a night like the one this outfit calls to mind. It makes me happy to picture these things re-animated, no longer dangling unseen in a dark closet. It’s time to donate them and hope they make somebody somewhere a little happier.

But it’s taken me a while to get around to it. One of the things that makes me hesitate is that, should my wife walk back in the door tomorrow, this is the one thing that would really annoy her.

“Welcome back,” I would say, “I missed you!”
“I missed you too!” she would reply. And then… “Wait! what did you do with my clothes? Now what am I supposed to wear?”
“I’m sorry, sweetie.”

I think you can see the importance of this consideration. Nevertheless, when pressed, this is what my poor brain offers up as resistance. Some milestones are easy, some are hard. This one caught me in the shin.

I can’t escape the feeling that these clothes, which in a literal sense embodied my wife, still contain something, still house a motive force. They were closer to her person than anything else in the house. When she danced, they danced. They expressed her taste and knew her form, even as it changed. They knew when she was getting thin. So thin. They understood. And they stood by her. With her. On her.

Clothes cling to us, but it does no good to cling to clothes. It’s time. Still, the emptiness is painful to contemplate. I’m afraid she won’t come back now. She won’t. Goodbye, red dress. Goodbye, my love. Goodbye.

One of the tasks I’ve been working on since my wife died is a big house clean-out. I’ve been sorting and donating things no longer needed in this truncated household. It feels useful and it keeps me busy.

But it’s an ambiguous exercise. One that flips rapidly between being happy for what was and sad for what is no longer. Among other things, I’m sifting through lots of old photos. The kind printed on paper and kept in albums. So many photos! I haven’t looked at them in ages. They are from the lost time before the age of digital photos. My digital photos are easily sorted, viewed, and edited. But these old photos feel more like memories trapped in Jurassic amber, at once remote and close. Time grants them a special legitimacy. Time decorates them with ticklish, aching melancholy.

If someone close to you has died, you too have received cards that say something like this: Your beloved isn’t gone. They are still present in a thousand ways. It’s one of those things that’s true and not true. On the one hand, don’t tell me they’re not gone. They’re gone. There is no solid warmth to draw close in an embrace, no cheek to place here against my own. My cat looks in vain for the missing lap. The absence of the departed is indisputable. But their presence is also true enough. Look at all these photos! Every one of them rekindles a memory.

Image by Midjourney

There we are on the beach in Jamaica. And I remember this picture outside the restaurant in San Francisco. We look happy, but I remember we were both hungry and tired and we were about to have a fight.

These photos make the past seem more present, more legitimate than the present. It’s a hazard, because intoxicating nostalgia can cheapen THIS moment, this now. Your loved one is still present, says the card. But we forget to flip this around. If those impressions radiate from the past, then so must we all be radiating into the future. You’re doing it right now! You’re distributing yourself into many futures. Uploading yourself into the timelines of everyone you know. In photos, in the forward recollections of others. We are forever busy shipping memories into the future.

Listen: Everything depends on this moment. This sweet, solid, pungent moment. This legitimate moment. Five years from now, ten years from now, the people we become will look back at the people we are now. What will they make of us? What will they see? They want to believe in us. Now is the time to be worthy of the stories they will tell.