Page Two: Discovering Enough
End-of-year thoughts at the start of another day
By Louis Black, Fri., Dec. 31, 2010
The holiday season is often one of the warmest and highest of times and the most cold and alienating as well. The end of another year, the celebration of the holidays creates a stark context that exaggerates or minimizes considerations and feelings – often both – in some kind of alternating, high-density, manic-depressive strolling.
No matter how good you get at whatever it is you do, if you care about it, the stress never really lessens. The insane edges smooth out, the monstrous fears that eat your gut and puke out nightmares all night shift to a much lower gear, but caring means you never relax, that you can't and won't. Even when you've done something week in and week out for decades, each time you venture forth to do it again, what you've done in the past doesn't excuse the present.
The last couple of days have been overcast, with sporadic drizzling. I pretty much love rain in any form, and overcast days create a kind of warmth and harmony that is so welcome. This is not to say they indicate or celebrate despair, that the gloom of the day matches the gloom of my heart. It doesn't. My heart has rarely been nearly that gloomy. Still, for those of us who navigate ever forward but are always a bit uncertain and more than a bit nervous, overcast is comfortable. It lets you be who you are, but it also allows you largely to disconnect.
The all-the-time stress is like a low-grade fever that sometimes flares but is usually even-keeled – or at least as even-keeled as one might imagine stress could be. But if the stress accelerates or gains force by accumulating, if it makes you crazy, if it drives you mad, well, that is that, and it is all pretty much finished when you reach that point. One should love and take pride in his or her work, but it's best not to let it kill you.
If you push through and keep on going, the stress can't be banished, but it can be tamed. Over time, the dominating emotional tone is not one of the electric buzz saw tearing of flesh and nerves nor the volcanic upheaval of stomach and soul but something else. If you love what you do, if you believe in what you do, then stress is not just all stress but is shadowed by the satisfaction of confronting and solving problems, of the way work can be enjoyable.
What does so often get to you, as blessed and lucky as you might be getting to do whatever it is that feeds you, is a kind of weariness. Many of us still expect to turn some chronological corner and find that life will somehow make sense, that all its patterns will finally be obvious. But there is really no moment of revelation. If you have one, it almost always turns out to be a mirage. You never pass "Go"; you never collect your $200. As much as experience provides clarity and knowledge, it also makes you face just how much you don't understand or don't get. When you look back at your life – your friends, family, accomplishments (both triumphs and disasters) – there may be some peace, some sense of having done well, but there is no feeling of finality, no sense at all that the task you've undertaken is somehow complete. Triumphant moments pass even more quickly than disastrous ones, but both leave you at the start of another day of doing it again.
Over the years, I've spent a lot of time trying to shake me, to get away from myself, to just not have to hear my voice in my head droning on endlessly. There is no way to work without always being who I am, but the overly conscious me is always getting in the way of everything.
That "me" is always there, but the more it is involved, the harder the going gets.
Over the past dozen years or so, I've found that one of the best ways to clear my head is to load up on audiobooks and start driving. The road, the books, the tonal undercurrent of a voice reading combine into an almost abstract experience – cruising through Texas listening to great stories while moving through the unending openness of it all. Mostly I listen to and love detective novels, but no genre of fiction is completely out. Still, when a four- or six- or eight- or 12-hour book is over, you don't just plunge into another one. You have to clean the palette, so to speak.
Once I listened mostly to music and then later as much music as narrative, but these days mostly I listen to a few old radio shows in between books. There are still times, however, when music works its way in as well.
A tough, tough year, one crammed full, with some highs and some lows but mostly the endless vista of plateaus, now comes to an end. Right before Christmas last week, I hit the road. I needed to. You can't escape from yourself. As Satchel Paige cautioned: "Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you." A great road trip is being in that place where you are there, looking neither forward nor back.
But heading home after a great Robert Parker Western tale, the day overcast, the rain there and not there and there, I decided to listen to some music. I put on an album by a friend of mine, one almost but not quite half-a-century old. The album, though I've listened to it at least a thousand times, always sounds so fresh. Knowing the singer and what the songs are about soothes. It brings back memories of a time of innocence – though it must be noted that innocence is just a lack of knowledge and owes more to ignorance than to transcendence. There is nothing inherently sweet or better about the innocence of youth except the way memory pasteurizes it.
Those long-ago days of innocence allowed for endless daydreams, unrestricted possibilities, and the constant potential for the extraordinary. At the same time, they accelerate insecurity, wrapping everything in uncertainty while multiplying the already raging and nonspecific emotional storms. Over time, one becomes aware of restrictions, and even if you are living a great, creative life, it is invariably smaller than you once might have dreamed.
The sweetness of the voice and the intimacy of the songs reminded me that one just keeps on keeping on, that there is no moment of glorious revelation nor any transcendence of the mundane as one obtains the magnificent.
Currently, there are so many who claim we are in the worst of times – or, if not all of us are there, at least the person who proclaims this belief is in a time so lacking in meaning and hope as to be a historically and personally unique nadir. The idea is that, whereas it might not be as fantastic as one might have once hoped it would turn out to be, it's also rarely as tragic or flawed as it might seem. In a sense, memory tortures us by creating a context that is inaccurate and fictional; at best, it offers a too-often hopeless confusion of life and dream, of reality and illusion. Nothing ever exaggerates and distorts as outrageously as ongoing, immediate experience. We know it was better in our past and in history, though it probably was never any better and quite likely was much worse.
The car, the road, the rain, the endless landscape, the story, and the voice are so often enough, if not in fact much more than enough.
