She sat down at her desk and turned her computer on. While it was booting up, she made her way inside to see if she could fetch something useful. She always tread carefully, slowly, timidly. There was so much laying around, stacks upon stacks. There were creaky floor boards, and many holes where she had fallen through before and now paid extra attention to avoid. The place was covered in cob-webs and unruly vines criss-crossing and barring her way forward. As soon as she blew dust off of one stack to pick up an idea, another stack would catch her eye and divert her attention. Each one claiming to have been there longer or promising to be more interesting, or for other reasons more deserving of their day in the sun.
Whenever she did manage to pick one up, put it under her arm, and head for the exit, she would always be stopped by two intimidating figures who would interrogate her choice in the most alarming and disrespectful way. And it always happened that she would doubt her choice, lay the idea on a nearby stack, and make her way deeper and deeper into this cognitive over-growth, hoping, without any reason to hope, that one day she would find The Jewel. That one idea that would magically, effortlessly write itself. The Jewel that would be easily waved through by the sentinels at the door and be received by the entire world, without a single exception, with profound critical acclaim. But today was not that day. There was no such Jewel in sight. So, having spent considerable time rummaging around, she felt she had made a concerted effort, done the best she could to tidy-up the jungle in her head, and made her way back out; again empty handed. Exhausted, she turned the computer off and went shopping.
It wasn’t terribly late when she got up. She had managed to take a shower. She put new sheets on the bed, for which she would thank herself that night. She even put the seedlings back out into the sun, which she had rescued the night before from the hailstorm. All that before breakfast. But now, with her coffee and bagel, and seated in her favorite armchair, she found herself, as she did many mornings, peering into the windows of other people’s lives through her little, rectangle, crystal “ball.”
It always felt like voyeurism. Rarely did any real connection come from this morning ritual, not least because she seldom commented and even less often posted things herself. It had replaced her morning meditation, morning prayer. Instead of using this precious time to center herself, listen to her own voice, root herself in her own values and dreams, she let herself become distracted with the lives that others projected out into the world for everyone to see.
Some of those lives seemed chaotic, and she felt as though she was being pulled into a vortex of drama that she had no power or proximity to untangle, though staring at them on the screen gave her the false sense that she should somehow. Some lives seemed so rooted in a predictable script, so bound to the track stretched before them, that they failed to notice it was the very same track that trailed behind them. Some lives seemed vibrant and creative and did sometimes give her helpful impulses, inspire her, or helped her feel less alone with what she had always thought were her own idiosyncrasies. But many seemed too polished, too pristine. She did not envy those show-case lives; she didn’t even admire them. She just didn’t believe them. No one is flawless. She was sure of that. Nevertheless, these lives highlighted her own flaws as if with a glaring neon paint.
So why peer through this magic window into lives that were as far away and disconnected from her reality as could be? “Yes, why do that?” she thought! “I have not grown one centimeter as a person while scrolling along through this bottomless post-pit.” And with that realization, she derailed herself from this circular track, and laid her phone on the table.
“Oh noooo, there are caterpillars on my precious new olive tree!” She could feel her pulse beginning to race, her breath getting shorter, that combination of helplessness, disappointment, and anger at the futility of things surging through her limbs. “Why couldn’t things just go smoothly for once! Why was there always a catch, a set back, a hurdle?” But this time she caught herself. She noticed the physiological symptoms that told her she was headed into catastrophic thinking. She paused long enough to step back and listen objectively to the voices inside her head telling her that it was “unfair,” “futile,” “doomed to the worst possible outcome.” She decided to leave the philosophical questions of “Why the world was this way” for another day, consciously slowed her breathing, sent a “Help me! Help me! help me!-prayer out into the Universe and set about trying to solve the problem at hand.
Google told her to fill a spray-bottle with water and dish soap and to spray the leaves and wipe off the critters, so that is what she did. It wasn’t fun, and it might not work, but at least it was something. She would probably have to keep at it the next few days, but it was a good feeling to know that she could do something. She wasn’t entirely at the mercy of the random, often unexplainable, and sometimes seemingly mischievous events happening all around her. She herself was a force of nature. She herself could make a difference. That was a good feeling. Yet, all that emotional commotion wanted out, so next she did the one, best, sensible, soothing thing a person can do:
She loved this car. And she had earned it. Senior year had been grueling. The AP courses would have been manageable on their own, but volunteering in the shelter, writing the college essays, holding the champion title as Coxswain of her crew, and placing second in nationals with the debate team kept her in constant motion. Seven days a week and not one moment to stop. To be still. To listen to something other than the voices of the adults around her who knew best. Coach Chris, always drilling them that “Winning is the whole shebang!” And “Sync your team or sink yourself!” Her parents constantly managing her schedule, checking in if she had finished assignments or written thank you notes, giving pointers for making good impressions during college interviews, offering last minute pep-talks while chauffeuring her from one obligation to the next. Everyone of their efforts blaring as loudly as through her cox-box of their need for her to be the perfect child. She was never alone. Never was there not something she had to do. Never was there not an expectation that had to be met, no, rather exceeded. Only those few precious seconds between her head hitting the pillow at 9:30 every night and sleep engulfing her with one quick swallow, in those precious, fleeting moments, something would flutter on the rim of her consciousness, something curious, something dangerous. If she could just focus… but before she new it, the 4:45 am alarm would rudely summon her into motion again.
And then, there she was. The day of graduation. When she came down that morning for breakfast, before they would all leave together for the ceremony, her dad seamed angry. He was telling mom that kids had egged the house. That they would have to clean it up before they left or it would bake onto the siding. He motioned for everyone to come out and see the damage, ushering her ahead. She stepped out of the front door with the rest of the family close behind, and there, directly in front of the house, was a bright red and white Mini Cooper convertible with a huge white bow on top. When she turned around, she saw her mom and sister holding their phones, filming her stunned reaction and joyful tears. Her dad held up the keys and said, “You earned it!”
That was a month ago. After a week of graduation parties, the family went to their summer house at the Outer Banks for three weeks. She had never felt so free. She, in the driver’s seat. Her own hands on the steering wheel. The one place besides the toilet where she was alone with no other voices drowning out her own. How many times had people had to honk behind her because she was just basking in the brief silence and rest that a stop-light could offer. Now the top was down, both the trunk and the back seat were full of the things she would need for the rest of the summer in DC for the obligatory internship before heading farther north to Connecticut at the end of August. Again she was lost in her thoughts, which seemed almost like a new acquaintance after all those years of back-seating it. Here at the junction where I-40 heads west off of the I-95 that would take her all the way to DC, again the impatient commuters scolded her. Usually the angry, grating noise jolted her out of her time-suspension, snapped her back to her “on-setting,” reminded her to stay in-line, “in-sync,” just as she kept her crew obeying a navigation they hadn’t chosen. But this time she could not be pulled from the aimless, lazy river of her mind. This time the incessant bleating of their horns triggered something else. Something did snap. She heard it loud and clear. It was the same pop that came from opening a jar of her mother’s peach-preserves. She engaged her blinker, flipped the bird at the cars behind her, slowly pulled on to I-40, and in her beloved, bright red convertible, her journey began.
It Takes One To Know One 