Lent [Day 9]: Of Bracelets and Space

Statue of St Peter, The Vatican

Several years ago, I discovered that my wrist had amassed a collection of hand-knotted friendship bracelets from some of my most cherished students.  It was a peculiar claiming of territory, of sorts - as if they'd written "Andy" on the bottom of my shoes.  I wore them constantly - they were tied onto me, after all - quite literally all across the planet, for about two years, by which time they had all fallen apart and even the tan lines they left had begun to fade.  I loved those damn bracelets, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little heartbroken when each of them finally broke.  A tangible reminder that extended their creators' physical presence long after they'd moved on.  The weight of which was perhaps too great for the tensile strength of embroidery floss and hemp cord to bear.

[Young people] seek out professors with whom to have relationships, and we seek them out in turn. Teaching, finally, is about relationships. It is mentorship, not instruction.  Socrates also says that the bond between teacher and student lasts a lifetime, even when the two are no longer together. And so it is. Student succeeds student, and I know that even the ones I'm closest to now will soon become names in my address book and then just distant memories. But the feelings we have for the teachers or students who have meant the most to us, like those we have for long-lost friends, never go away. They are part of us, and the briefest thought revives them, and we know that in some heaven we will all met again. (William Deresiewicz, "Love on Campus", The American Scholar, Summer 2007.)

All this presence and absence (physical or symbolic) naturally calls to mind Henri Nouwen and his writings on presence and absence of God, as well as and the presence and absence of each other in ministry.  All very timely in this Lenten season, as we are preparing, liturgically, for the absence of Jesus.

The great temptation of the ministry is to celebrate only the presence of Jesus while forgetting his absence.  Often the minister is most concerned to make people glad and to create an atmosphere of "I'm okay, you're okay." But in this way, everything gets filled up and there is no empty space left for the affirmation of our basic lack of fulfillment.  In this way the presence of Jesus is enforced without connection with his absence.  Almost inevitably this leads to artificial joy and superficial happiness.  It also leads to disillusionment because we forget that it is in memory that Jesus Christ is present. If we deny the pain of his absence we will not be able to taste his sustaining presence either.  (The Living Reminder)

And...

Discipline is the mark of a disciple of Jesus. This doesn't mean, however, that you must make things difficult for yourself, but only that you make available the inner space where God can touch you with an all-transforming love.  We human beings are so faint-hearted that we have a lot of trouble leaving an empty space empty.  We like to fill it all up with ideas, plans, duties, tasks, and activities. (Letters to Marc About Jesus)

Having recently marked one year in a new job and a new home, I've been reflecting on what that year has taught me (other than how screamingly FAST a year can go), and, well, the meaning-junkie in me has been hard at work trying to ferret out the larger purposes in all the change.  A friend asked me this week about my job, and I commented to her about the amount of free space and time I have now.  Evenings and weekends that were over-capacity with grading and lesson-planning and - let's face it - a good amount of internet ministry, are now wide open.  And I fret about not filling the space suitably, now that I have it - that I might squander it.  I realize I needn't be so swift to fill the space, but that requires a practiced restraint.  The absence here is a gift, so I feel the responsibility to be a good steward of it.  I miss the classroom, the daily collision with students' lives.  I've made known my ability and willingness to pick up an adjunct-professorship in the evenings to satisfy that desire, and I haven't exactly canceled my daily teaching-job-search-agent emails.  But I'm not knocking down doors to rush back into it, either.  It will happen in the fullness of its own time.  Meanwhile, I live in a paradise that is lovely beyond belief, AND I've been given the gift of time and space to enjoy it.  What overwhelming divine generosity!  

Surely I was touched by Jesus's all-transforming love when my physical world was overflowing with people I had such great occasion to love and be loved by.  But presence necessitates absence.  And His all-transforming love can touch my heart in the absence of His holy messengers and recipients and tasks.  Ministry will still take place in and through me.  All I must do is be present with the absence.

The Scent of Trees

This morning, on the way to school, I was singing in my car - as I do, loudly - when I drove through the orange groves on either side of the road. The scent of springtime orange blossoms is enough for you to stop your car in the street, but all I did was stop mid-verse to breathe in. Later, on the way home, passing the trees again, the stirred-up atmosphere made for more fleeting fragrance - far less intense than the heavy velvet of scent hanging in the still and dark air. But just enough of a flirtation to remind you of its presence. However long it lasts each year.

I am reasonably certain heaven must smell like an orange grove in blossom on a warm spring evening.

Or else like a eucalyptus grove.

The scent of central-coast eucalyptus was even more pervasive, in that it is fragrant year-round, not just for a season. Always present. The cool, humid air forever thick with it. It reminds you where you are. It reminds you of where you used to be.

Commencement

Graduation is today.  I adore graduations, as I do most ceremony.  (Okay, partly because there is costuming involved!)  The symbolism of academic regalia.  The families and the accomplishment and the transition.  The pomp.  The circumstance.  

The tears I shed are from an overflow of feelings, not exclusively sadness.  I never fail to find myself swept up in a tempest of emotion.  Sure, there is sadness for the loss of the everyday presence of some very special individuals.  But it's tempered.  By excitement for students concluding this chapter and outlining the next.  Pride in some students' extraordinary stories and the joy of participation in them.  Love.  

In the words of Dr. Seuss, which will inevitably be used in commencement addresses worldwide: do not cry because it's over - smile because it happened.

Congratulations, Class of 2009.  Go, and take flight.  Travel lightly, but keep some souvenirs of these four years tucked in your suitcase hearts.

On the Nature of Incremental Change

I've recently seen photographs of several friends and acquaintances I haven't seen, in person, in at least ten years.  (mostly a result of certain social-networking sites)  Clicking through their photos, I'm struck by how much they look like grownups.  I'm not saying they haven't aged well - it's just that they don't look like they're in high school or college anymore.  My mental image of them hasn't changed since I last saw them, but obviously, we've all gotten a decade older.   Same thing happens with my cousins - and they're young, which amplifies the phenomenon - my mental images of them are as toddlers, but they're in upper elementary school now. Anyhow, when I look at pictures of myself, I don't marvel at how different I appear from ten, fifteen years ago. I mean, I know I've changed, but I've been present for the changes.  It isn't until I see a photo from 1997 and I can't help but notice how much younger I appear.  And that's not entirely true either.  When I look at that photo from 1997, what catches my eye is how much younger the other people appear.  Only then do I think, "oh, yeah, me too".

I don't mean for this post to come across as a lament of the aging process - I don't have a problem with growing older.  What's interesting is my tendency to not age-progress individuals, and how surprised I am when I see that they're adults now.  It's clearly a function of how often I see someone.  Incremental change on the order of days or months is significantly smaller (and less noticeable) than that on the scale of years, even decades.

The shift of plates goes unnoticed until a dramatic event.

There's another strange time phenomenon going on in my head. I occasionally manage to neglect a four-year chunk of my life, the California Years.  From time to time, I simply forget we lived there.  I remember the people and the places, but sometimes, when I'm going through my mental timeline, I find I just close the gap between college and Florida.  This happened most noticeably the year I spent advising college-bound high-school seniors.  The more I talked about college and thought about what it was like to go off to college, the time gap between now and then started to shrink; when I caught myself, it was with marvel that there was a chunk of four years (and even a couple years here) that I just glazed right over as though they were insignificant.  Which they weren't.

Time is a transparent film, stretching and shrinking.

I was asked recently, on the occasion of my ninth wedding anniversary, how my marriage had changed over time.   It was a more difficult question than I expected it to be.   I know there has been change, but I can't articulate it, and I certainly can't divorce it from our own individual changes.  It's a kind of relative-motion frame-of-reference problem, because our relationships evolve as we are changing, too.

A person walks at a speed of 2 m/s relative to a moving sidewalk. If the sidewalk is moving at 3 m/s relative to the ground, what is the person's velocity relative to an outside observer?

I couldn't answer her - there seem to be too many variables to come up with a meaningful answer, relative to an outside observer.

[Originally drafted 25 July 2008]

On Keeping a Notebook

Yesterday, a friend mentioned a student of his who once began writing in a notebook - specifically, writing everything that needed to be said that day in the event he didn't have another.  At first, that sounds noble and smart, however, it also seems fatally overwhelming.  I try to do that while on travel - to record everything that I saw or that happened (plus my reaction) in my travel journals.  But it takes me hours every night to record the day's adventures.  Usually I reach critical mass after about five days, and I start leaving big gaps when I save the writing for the next day... and for the next...  I tried to stave this off on my last trip by at least making short notes on the days I didn't feel like writing full entries, so I wouldn't later forget what to write.  I had the intention of synthesizing my quick notes into longer writings, but here I am, four months later, with just a random collection of notes.  And this isn't limited to my travel journals.  I have loads of notebooks and envelopes and glove compartments full of scribblings and cryptic notes, filed away for later development.  But I rarely revisit them.  And when I do, it's never to write them into something more formal; it's more like visiting a museum of me, in which there are no pieces to display - all that's there are the curator's notes on the wall.

Why this drive to record all detail?  It's part of my personality, I suppose.  Like Didion, I want to remember what it was to be me at that time and place.  And I have this compulsion to record every detail - because without the context, the significance of a particular thought is sadly diminished.  I am decidedly unabridged.  I often give up telling stories because I can't adequately Cliffs-Notes it for others to easily digest.  For my audience to understand an event, I have to convey every minute detail and most of the back-story.  A six-sentence story for another person is a six-minute yarn for me.  

I leaf through these notebooks and rediscover these fragments of memory that had been lost to time.  Maybe I'm the only one who cares, in which case, why am I writing all this detail for myself to enjoy later?  Or, I'm making field notes in some experiment, and eventually, I will be able to see patterns and draw conclusions and will be glad to have a rich collection of data.  I want everyone to understand the complexity of a situation.  Apparently, this extends to my future self, with how I write in my notebook.  Presumably, my notes are only for me, but I still often feel like I write for an audience outside my head.  And here, on this blog, I have a faceless audience for whom I am writing - which perhaps provides the impetus to bring all those scrawled scraps of memory into some cohesive work.  But does someone else actually need to read it for it to have worth?  Would I have any internal motivation to collect notes into something coherent if I didn't have an audience?  Probably not.

Perhaps the volume of detail I feel compelled to record is to stave off the natural paring and preparation of information for long-term storage.  The brain distills things down into a small remnant of memory, and there's no predicting what that will be.  Zoe Heller, through a character in her novel Notes on a Scandal, says this of memory-crafting: 

I keep staring at things, willing myself to remember them: the faded blue dressing gown that Sheba is always leaving draped across the sofa; the antique Moroccan tiles in the kitchen; the velvet-clad hangers in the closets.  Of course, memory is not really as obedient a faculty as that.  You can't consciously decide what is going to adhere.  Certain things may strike you at the time as memorable, but memory only laughs at your presumption.  'Oh, I'm never going to forget this,' you say to yourself when you visit the Sacre-Coeur at sunset.  And years later, when you try to summon up an image of the Sacre-Coeur, it's as cold an abstract as if you'd only ever seen it on a postcard.  If anything unlocks the memory of this house for me, years from now, it will be something - some tiny, atmospheric fragment - of which I'm not even aware at the moment.  I know this, and yet I still persist in making my little inventory, trying to nail down my recollections.

I tend to remember overtones, not details.  My reaction to a situation, not the specifics of the situation itself.  How people say something, not the words they say.  How I feel about something, not the something.  This is also why I'm terrible at describing plots of stories or films - all I can remember is my overall impression, or what I was thinking at the time.

It's difficult enough to craft one's own memories; it has to be impossible to manufacture one's own legacy.  Sam Beam implores a longtime love to remember him in a very specific way.  I am fascinated by things that others remember.  Reminiscing about grad school with a friend last weekend, she recounted a story about the two of us to her son.  On my own, I never would have remembered the situation she described, but of course I knew it once she mentioned it.  It was neither good nor bad, but of all the possible memories of us, it's interesting that that particular incident is part of her inventory.  I am loathe to say I want to control what others think of me, but I will admit I want that impression to be accurate.  It bothers me greatly when people misinterpret me.  As in the song, can we really instruct someone to remember us in some way, or, for that matter, even maintain the same catalog of memories?  Should we even care that different curators organize the collection differently - the prized acquisitions in our own exhibits are relegated to an out-of-the-way room in someone else's.  I wonder whether others would be as surprised (as I am at theirs) at my memories of them, and what triggers them.  

I certainly want to be remembered fondly for specific events.  I certainly want to be remembered seldomly for the times when I was not the best version of myself.  I edit my own memories over and over, leaving a tight, streamlined work that pleases me.  Do others do the same?  I own several pair of rose-colored glasses - ever the idealist, I usually look back on things and see the good.  Even in a current situation, one in which I really want to see and remember the bad because I think it will make it easier to let go later, I am having a really difficult time doing so.  Almost as if the harder I try, the stronger the good shines; the rosier things crowd everything else out of view.

For someone who teaches a laboratory science, I sure have no clear need for objective accuracy.