slow season

there is no destination

Gustav Klimt, Music, 1895

I used to endure the winters in New York just to get to the glorious summers. This year, I’m leaning into the bleakest season. It’s a time for meditation and self-reflection, for journaling and clarifying intentions, for slow reading. I would never pick up War and Peace in July. Lugging such a colossus around in 80 degree weather seems silly, even if it’s just a file on my Kindle. I’d rather save it for the deep solitude of a January afternoon.

One of the things I appreciate about getting older is knowing myself better. I’m not as wishy-washy as I was at 20 because I know what’s important to me. It’s like developing a solid core. You become more grounded. You spend your time intentionally. You’re not easily blown off course by the opinions of others.

You can always tell when someone’s center hasn’t solidified. They say one thing and mean something else. They show up in a way that feels slightly disingenuous. It’s possible they haven’t clarified their values. We all had molten cores at some point.

Coming into yourself is a process of accepting who you are and who you’re not. Many people’s sense of identity stems from what they’re working towards, from a future idea of themselves. Ambitious people tend to fixate on a destination: when I arrive, my life will transform. I will have “made it.” They can’t get there soon enough, and so they work tirelessly, sometimes single-mindedly, toward their goal.

That used to be me. From 25 to 28, I dedicated myself to my job and to writing and left very little time for socializing and dating. I was convinced that if I managed to publish a novel and get promoted at work, I would suddenly have all the energy and confidence to turn my attention to finding a partner.

In college, many of my classmates had this idea that they’d join an investment bank and work the punishing hours of an analyst, then get promoted and move on to the greener pastures of a hedge fund, as if slaving away for a few years were nothing, as if those years were merely the prologue to their lives rather than life itself. Most of them ended up realizing they didn’t want to work in finance anyway. They confused what they wanted with what they wanted to want, with what everyone else seemed to want. They were working toward an idea of themselves that wasn’t true to who they were. You have to want things for the right reasons or you risk chasing someone else’s dream and waking up one day to find yourself spiritually impoverished.

Even if you’re absolutely certain about what you want, the pitfall is you might overvalue your “want” and devalue what you already have. The word “wanting” can mean both desiring something and a lack, a deficit. We want what we don’t have.

The Beast in the Jungle is a story by Henry James that has haunted me ever since I first read it in college (I wrote about it here). It’s about this guy, John Marcher, who believes that something extraordinary will happen to him. He doesn’t know what exactly it is, but he’ll know it when he sees it, and so he waits and waits for it to spring on him like a beast in the jungle, forfeiting his chance at love because how can he get entangled with someone when this great fate awaits him? In the end, the beast that blights him is the horrifying realization that he’s never truly lived (or loved), that he’s wasted his life away.

No matter how much I want something, it’s not worth sacrificing the things that are important to me. I no longer have the mentality of enduring the harsh winter to get to the glorious summer. Living authentically means that how I spend today is how I would spend the rest of my life. Of course, this is an incredibly privileged position. Millions of people do have to make tremendous sacrifices simply to survive, which makes it all the more ironic that those who can afford not to suffer would choose a path of suffering.

A friend sent me this video in which Alan Watts puts forth two opposing analogies for understanding life—traveling and music—and advocates for the latter. Life, like the physical universe, like music, is essentially playful. “We say you play the piano. You don’t work the piano.” The point of playing music isn’t to get to the end, it’s the enjoyment of music itself.

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.

— Alan Watts

If you’re doing something you enjoy, there is no destination. I have to remind myself of this because getting a book published the traditional way is such a monumentally difficult feat that it can feel like the whole point, when it really isn’t. Writing is the point. Laughing with your friends is the point. When you want something badly, you give it the godlike power to heal you and make you whole. You forget that you’re already doing the thing that makes you whole.