But the writer Anne Lamott haunts me with this:
"Oh, my God. What if you wake up some day, and you're 65 or 75, and you never got your novel or memoir written; or you didn't go swimming in warm pools or oceans because your thighs were jiggly or you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It's going to break your heart. Don't let this happen."
So.
Now, to start, I'm going a cheat a little bit. The remainder of this inaugural post is a reflection I composed in November 2015, in advance of my fifteenth college class reunion the following spring. But the piece surveys a number of the key themes I hope to explore in greater depth in this blog, in a style and on a level of substance that I can only hope to meet and exceed. I've made two small editorial changes to this blog version, but it otherwise remains the same as the original published in the 2016 Class Notes book for Harvard College, Class of 2001. Enjoy!
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When we gather in May, we will be more than twice the age we were when we first gathered in Harvard Yard in the fall of 1997. I find myself baffled by this observation, hum-drum as it is, and despite the fact that I’ve never really been one to wring my hands over the passage of time.
When I was a senior in high school, I was asked in an interview (not for Harvard), “What is the perfect age?” I had been doing a lot of reading about practicing presence in the moment, savoring the little things in life, etc. At the time, I was working on a graduation speech that I would ultimately entitle “More Ice Cream and Less Beans,” and I had taken a line from a Van Halen song as a mantra: “Right now is your tomorrow.” So when I was asked this question about the “perfect age,” I summoned my old soul and replied that the perfect age was seventeen, the age I was at that time. I went on to explain that I hoped I would always think my current age was the perfect age. I remember saying something like, “Whether I’m seventeen or thirty-four, I hope I can always love where I am in life.” Thirty-four. (Insert giant eye-roll here.)
Comedy aside, this perspective served me well at Harvard, I think, although I don’t recall making any particular effort to keep it in the forefront of my thoughts, to “live by it” so to speak. What I do remember is perusing the Courses of Instruction catalog we received the summer before we started – that fat physical book that smelled of fallen leaves and promised innumerable adventures and can’t possibly be printed anymore. At some point in poring over that tome and fantasizing about some seminar on the Russian novelists or a class on Kant’s metaphysics, I noticed our graduation date printed in the front matter. Listed among the others for a four- to five-year stretch, I noted June 7, 2001 with a curious detachment. The date seemed so far away as to dwell in the realm of unreality. For all practical purposes, in the summer of ’97, the idea that June 7, 2001 would ever come to pass seemed to me about as likely as a trip to Alpha Centauri. It wasn’t that I feared or otherwise resisted life after Harvard – hell, we hadn’t even started. It just didn’t register. Life after Harvard was not even a blip on my radar.
This may explain, in part, why I didn’t really think much about life after Harvard until well into the second semester of our senior year – specifically, after my thesis was due on March 19 (yes, I remember the date distinctly). And even then, I didn’t have much of a plan. Largely thanks to my educator parents, who had always insisted that I learn for the joy of learning and let a vocation arise organically from whatever stirred my soul, my choice of academic path was guided mostly by what made me feel alive. And I lucked into a circle of friends for whom a life in touch with something vital, the deep pulse at the heart of existence, really mattered. So by the spring of 2001, all I really had in the way of a plan was this vague notion that I would eventually go to graduate school for something. I didn’t have any specific trajectory in mind, and I wanted to take a couple of years off from school anyway, so I just figured I’d return to academia somewhere to pick up on threads I had worked with in my classes for Harvard’s Comparative Study of Religion concentration. I certainly did not anticipate – and, in fact, would have scoffed at the idea – that I would end up spending six (really good) years teaching in public schools back in Oklahoma, before going to law school and practicing corporate law in Oklahoma City for five years.
Now, having traveled this unexpected path, I find myself – much like Paulo Coelho’s Santiago in The Alchemist – right back where I started, in my hometown, flushed with the discovery of my treasure right beneath my feet. My second daughter, Madeline, will be nearly a year old by the time our class reunites, and my older daughter, Emma Coretta, is busy dazzling me daily with her ferocity and sweetness. My husband and I have bought a small piece of land just outside of town, where we plan to take up gardening and small animal husbandry; hopefully our barn (where we plan to live while building our house) will be well under construction come reunion time. And in the meantime, I’ll continue learning the practice of small town lawyering. Move over, Atticus Finch.
But here’s the thing: if time could somehow be bent and I could talk to my younger self – the one dreamily thumbing that Courses of Instruction catalog – I wouldn’t tell her any of this. I wouldn’t tell her that she would have her heart broken a few times, and break a couple of hearts, before marrying a gem of a man who excels in the fine craft of fatherhood. I wouldn’t tell her that she would lose almost everything she owned in a house fire not long after our graduation, or that mourning that loss would open her up to a broader, deeper mourning for the end of childhood. I wouldn’t tell her that her children would change her as nothing else had, that her best self would emerge from the warm presses of motherhood. I might tell her that the stomach aches are because she worries too much, so she should loosen her grip a bit; she should let herself be – to borrow C.S. Lewis’s phrase – surprised by joy. I might also tell her that she should value her mentors; that she shouldn’t be so afraid of math; and that she should work hard at being really, really honest.
But then again, maybe I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t want to risk breaking the spell.
You may recall the mathematical axiom that states that there is an infinite number of rational numbers between any two real numbers. I probably first “learned” this when I was about 13, but the thought simply staggers me today. Think about it: between 1 and 2 lies infinity. Why? Because you can always – always – add another number behind the decimal point. You can always make the fraction of space between 1 and 2 smaller, and thus (oh, so paradoxically) multiply the rational numbers between them ad infinitum. Seriously? Yep.
And that’s why I probably wouldn’t breathe a word to my younger self after all. What I now know is that she was about to live that paradox, about to experience the infinite contained between the presses of the finite. Harvard, for me, was a space between childhood and adulthood, where, though time did not exactly stand still, it took on a magical quality, like I had stepped through the wardrobe and breathed the air of a super-reality. It was a gift.
My deepest longing and highest aspiration in life is for my children to be able to touch infinity in this way. It will almost certainly not be at Harvard that they do so. The odds are just against that. But I hope to help them cultivate a readiness, of sorts, to step into life’s clefts and crevices, its hidden passage ways – the tight spaces between 1 and 2 – through which we humans can touch something eternal, something divine. I hope that they can perceive, with Gerard Manley Hopkins, “the dearest freshness deep down things.” Harvard’s gift to me would thus become my gift to them.
