Rather Suspect

There’s a funny kind of lonely nostalgia that can envelop you when you’re in a city for too long. The bars are still noisy, the markets still alive, the people ever-changing…but you become a bystander, dwelling on memories. You suddenly aren’t in the painting, you’re outside of it — the Sunday afternoon art museum visitor, footsteps echoing against the bare walls.

But all this is a strange nostalgia, of course, because you aren’t a bystander. You aren’t on the outside. You’re as much a part of the city as anyone, so where’s the separation?

I used to think that feeling was a unique outcome of urban life, of being surrounded by so many strangers.

But I realized later that feeling isn’t a byproduct, it’s the point. People who move to cities are seeking that exquisite melancholy, that special kind of loneliness that you only feel when you realize you’re a bystander among a crowd of bystanders, each separated, each looking to the next to make that move, to cross the divide, to break the spell.

I drove into the Sunset neighborhood in San Francisco earlier today, not far from the ocean, and a quiet fog enveloped everything and everyone.

What is it about fog that softens and slows life down? Achieving something in the fog feels almost pointless. Fog takes the world and transforms it into a hidden place, a childhood place.

When the fog arrives it’s best not to resist. No need to worry, no need to strive. Sit, eat, drink, relax.

I saw a young boy in a wetsuit, covered in sand, trotting along behind his father on the sidewalk. And why not? The surf doesn’t care if it’s sunny. The surf is a sort of fog itself, welcoming to young boys, welcoming to the childhood mind.

What will he remember, this boy, sixty years from now? By then his father will have passed on, into the fog. But the boy doesn’t know that yet. Right now all he knows is the salt on his lips, the sand in his hair, and that his dad took him surfing one foggy afternoon in a place where the gray water and the gray sky all blend into one.

The sun is a dim red orb, hanging in the Oregon sky. It’s too early to feel like sunset but it does. This is what wildfire smoke does to a place.

It’s not possible to escape the smoke, not really. I’ve tried. One year when the smoke settled into the Bay Area I drove an hour south to breathe some fresh air at the beach. The following year that escape was gone; the smoke was everywhere, from Seattle to San Diego.

If not smoke, floods. If not floods, heat. If not heat, hurricanes. Climate change is upon us.

It no longer matters the reason for it. What matters now is surviving.

How does one survive a situation like this? It would seem possible, provided we are willing to trade-in some cultural assumptions.

First: to be tied to a “place” — a city, a community, even a nation-state — will become as much a liability as an asset. What value is there holding dear a place that is covered in smoke three months each year? Or battered by hurricanes regularly? Animals regularly migrate with the seasons, why don’t humans? What prevents us from doing so? And at what point will those benefits of staying put crumble in face of the costs?

Second: as ever, money and power triumph. To be able to move, adapt — most of all, to change — is the ultimate. Flexibility in all things — locations, jobs, communities — allows one to respond to what would appear to be quite nonlinear. Those who can afford to change will do so. Those who cannot willl be forced to.

Third, and perhaps most importantly: there will no longer be a class known as “refugees.” We are all refugees now. Political boundaries will be challenged, and challenged again, so many times they will break. Walls, fences, borders — what was strong enough to hold back millions will likely not be strong enough to hold back billions.

The question is: do we face this new normal openly, or do we resist?

I remember in college how satisfying it was to find “secret” places to study — relaxing places, hidden-away places, places where I could spend a couple of hours, uninterrupted, to get on top of things. I loved the flexibility of it, of being able to pick a spot, any spot, on campus and spend time there.

In many ways the pandemic — at first — reminded me of that feeling. There was no ability to go into the office, so…pick a place. I hid away at a little spot in Sonoma County for a time, and, though it could be lonely, there was a certain beautiful gift in that experience.

But — over time I realized, the trade-off is much worse than I thought. This “new way” of interacting has its price, and that price is steep. With infinite flexibility comes a sense of disconnection. A Zoom chat is a terrible substitute for a human interaction. Why does it feel as bad as it does?

Somehow phone calls are better — I think in part because a phone call doesn’t pretend so hard. Looking at someone on a video screen — what’s gained? When talking heads broadcast themselves on television, it’s a trick, propaganda: they are using visual images to engineer a false sense of closeness. We are made to feel like we “know” that news anchor but of course we don’t at all: it’s all theater.

So Zoom approximates that, the falseness, the fascimile. Seeing someone smile on-screen engenders a feeling of closeness but it’s again not at all real. There will never be an opportunity to shake that person’s hand, to give them a hug. They will only ever be a block of pixels.

And so of course this all feels terrible — and truly, it does. Our hearts and souls crave more than this, even when working. And because we are on screen as well, we have to try so much harder ourselves — to smile, to give the “thumbs up,” to indicate that yes, we really are human, we’re not just pixels on a screen.

But, sadly, pixels really are all we are, as long as this lasts, and at this point it seems it will be forever. The advantages are so great — work from anywhere with others from anywhere — that there is no turning back.

I liked the hidden places to study not because I disliked other people, quite the opposite. I wanted to carve out time to study so that when I was with others I could be fully present. But streaming one’s video is the worst of all worlds: there is no presence at all, and never will be.

It’s a challenge sometimes to find that quiet.

The city is busy: traffic, trucks, commotion. So I go searching for a quieter space, a café.

But the café is busy: people, conversation, plans. So I go searching for a quieter space yet.

But the problem so often is my mind is busy: worries, judgements, fears.

How does it get so loud in here I wonder? And why?

How many moments will be worth remembering today?

The clouds overhead this morning looked like waffles, rippling across the sky, choppy ocean whitecaps.

The garbage truck crunched and thumped and made its stomping elephant racket like it does every Wednesday morning.

A pocketful of sparrows rolled about on the sidewalk in front of the French restaurant, seemingly confused by the day, or by each other.

What makes for a full day, a rich day, a noteworthy day? It’s barely 10am and all this has occurred, already.

Yesterday I saw a three-year-old girl point out a white butterfly to everyone lining up for breakfast in front of that same café. Look, she seemed to say, a little sparrow herself, using her whole body to communicate, arm out, hand out, following it with her smile. Do you see it? There. Don’t you see it?

The butterfly flew an impossible path, up, down, arcing out between two shrubs, and then suddenly stopped, mid-flight, frenetic fluttering yet frozen in space. All wings, only wings.

The adults continued to chat with each other, an unbroken murmur, leaving only the girl, alone, transfixed.

Do you see it, she seemed to ask again, with her face, her eyes, her body. It’s there. And there. And now there.

Don’t you see it?

Yesterday I was walking in the park while listening to Wilco’s album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. There’s a haunting section at the end of the song Poor Places where a woman’s voice repeats, over-and-over, the album’s title.

Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot.

Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot.

These words are, of course, taken from radio transmission military call signs — YHF.

You. Have. Failed.

Lately I’ve been thinking about that word, failure. It’s gotten corrupted (as with so many things) by Silicon Valley. Fail faster, they say. Failure is part of the process. Celebrate your failures.

But implied in those statements is not a true acknowledgment of failure. Instead, that’s failure as catchphrase, failure as an advertising quip. Failure is cute when the “story of failing” is told by someone who’s succeeded. Haha, they say. You see? The path to success isn’t a straight line. You have to fail a few times too! Put that into your project plan: fail here, here, and here. And then succeed.

But as I listened to that phrase — yankee…hotel…foxtrot — it came across like a command. Regardless of what you attempted, regardless of what you thought the outcome would be, you did not achieve that goal. You. Have. Failed.

I have failed. I am failing. I will fail.

In that moment I thought: okay, let’s not see failure as a negative. But let’s not do that shallow Silicon Valley trick where we just package failure up into something we can sell on the path to success. Let’s accept failure for what it is: the natural outcome of everything and everyone. Not a negative, not a positive, just reality. Entropy, perhaps.

Everything we do, everything we attempt, everything we try: we will fail. Not just in the short-term, not in the sense of stubbing our toe here and there. Everything we create — from the pyramids to the Great Wall of China to the Roman Empire to the United Nations — will fail. Sooner or later, they will all fall into ruin. Every breathe we take brings us one step closer to bodily failure. Every interaction in every relationship is a step ultimately towards grief.

We are literally designed to fail. Which means every day we aren’t succeeding, aren’t achieving. We are failing.

But then what? Perhaps, rather than rage against the inevitable, we can use this idea to approach the world differently. We can enter into everything with a sort-of peaceful nihilist’s mind: this will fail, and this will fail, and this will fail — but despite that, I’ll do them all just the same.

This won’t work, but I’ll try it anyway. You might betray me, but I will trust you anyway. You will leave, but I will love you anyway.

In a sense it’s maybe a turn on Bartleby who infuriates with the phrase “I would prefer not to.” Instead we say: “it’s foolish to do it — but I’ll do it just the same.”

The decision point for anything then becomes not: should I try to achieve this? Instead it transforms into: this ultimately won’t work — and I know that — but is it worth doing just the same?

My iPhone tells me the sun will set tonight at 7:32pm and rise again tomorrow at 6:44am. Right now it’s 82 degrees, tomorrow it will reach just 78.

These are the facts. And you don’t mess with facts. You don’t question them. Facts are like the face of El Capitan in Yosemite: slabs of granite so massive you can’t even think of moving them. They exist independently of any of us; they’ve been there since the dawn of time and they’ll be there until the end.

Some facts are more satisfying than others, which mostly corresponds to whether you can assign a number to them. “The sky is blue” is just a so-so fact mostly because blue is subjective, and anyway later today it won’t be. So that one is true but you don’t invite that fact to dinner, mostly due to its flakiness. But “water molecules have three atoms” is much more satisfying since, well, “three” isn’t subjective like “blue.” “Three” you can hang your hat on.

And then there’s the matter of the sunrise. That’s the best fact yet. 6:44am. Tomorrow. You can’t argue with that one. Not only does it have a number, it has a couple of them, and that colon in-between? That’s like putting a black tie and tuxedo on a number; you know it means business.

But my dirty little secret is: I never bought into any of these facts — including the last one. The earth has been spinning, and circling, and whizzing along at whatever ungodly speed we’re moving right now and while it seems like we’ll see the sun tomorrow at 6:44am, what proof is there that we really will? “Because it’s happened lots in the past” sounds pretty suspect. Even if we pretend to have records going back, say, a thousand years — that’s only 365,025 data points. Not bad. But I’m not sure that’s El Capitan-worthy.

To which one might say: well, how many data points do you need? And this is the catch: there isn’t a set number. And this isn’t the random muttering of a crazy man who lives amidst boxes of newspapers from 1978 and two-dozen cats (I have neither, thankfully.) This is simply nonlinear dynamics. There is a lovely description of one of the simplest equations that quickly goes off the rails here: https://ghannami.com/chaos-in-one-innocent-equation.

But so what, right? I mean, okay, yes, fine — chaos theory shows us that at any moment the earth might lose its center and go spinning off into oblivion. So what?

And that’s true. But it seems, at a minimum, we should update our iPhones and place a little asterisk next to those so-called facts, and then update the Terms of Service with a tiny footnote. It can read: “we’re super proud of ourselves for making this little machine, and golly it’s cool, right? But for the record: we’re kinda just blowing smoke around the whole ‘the sun will come up at such-and-such time’ feature. Honestly we have no idea. Limits of human knowlegde in general, especially around mathematics, and especially around nonlinear dynamics. But whaddya gonna do? We put a cool graphic on it anyway.”

Just saying. If we’re gonna have a giant Terms of Service that nobody reads, well, let’s be honest around it at least.

In the spring the bright-red robin returns to its nest to feed its young. The little birds open their mouths wide for the worm, crying out for nourishment.

Years ago a baby giraffe was born at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. I saw a video of the experience, a giant teardrop of bony legs falling to the ground. Within twenty-four hours the baby giraffe could stand.

A dear friend explained to me recently that we are not a single Self but many, and each requires care. But care by whom? Certainly the baby chicks cannot look after each other, and the giraffe must learn more than only how to walk in order to survive.

So there must be a parent in the room somewhere. An adult. And what makes an adult if not a lifetime of experience and wisdom?

Our Hearts are our adults, our parents. This isn’t mysticism. The Heart is the name we give to the Wise One in us, that part of ourselves that gets passed down fully-formed through the generations. Tell me, who taught those birds to open their mouths when the robin returned? Who showed the baby giraffe how to walk? Minds must learn. But the Heart already knows.

And so we find ourselves here: each of us a wise Heart (or, perhaps, several) tasked with raising our group of precocious Minds. Each of our Minds like a baby bird or giraffe, aware instinctively of some things but needing to learn others. Each Mind, each “self,” needing to be fed, needing to be taught, needing to be disciplined.

Our culture has largely missed the point here, it seems, with its preoccupation on Entertainment and Science. These are the words immature Minds might guess to be its goals, but they are wrong. Our Hearts know: not Entertainment but Playfulness, and not Science but Wonder. Baby Minds are easily distracted by each other and easily impressed by themselves, and so their focus becomes small, unsatisfying.

But mature Hearts know: we are here to play, together, in the ecstasy that surrounds us, and that ecstasy crosses-over through the generations.

Minds can find themselves stuck in the nest, afraid of falling out. But the parent knows: eat up, gain your strength, and one day you won’t fall. We will fly.

During one strange year I lived in a small bungalow in Wine Country. The kitchen opened onto a wooden deck, and next to the deck was a purple-flowering shrub the owner referred to as the Butterfly Tree.

Most afternoons I would sit outside in the sunshine and soon enough two butterflies would arrive, flitting about between the flowers. I guessed every day they were the same two, making their rounds.

I never thought to ask them their purpose or inquire as to their future plans. What future could there be that was better than this? A joyful late-afternoon dance with each other and with the tree, the three of them silently nodding to me in the long light under that infinitely blue sky.