Something strange happened when I wrote the essay Catapult published last week. After months of imagining a piece about how my mother getting struck by lightning shaped my life, I finally wrote it in October 2020. My ideas came together quickly, in a span of three or four days, and it felt important. But after that little burst of inspiration and momentum, the essay stalled out. It reminded me of an old car trying to reach the top of a hill. It slowed down, started to sputter, and rolled to a stop.
Initially, the essay had an ending, but it didn’t feel satisfying. It left me wanting more. I knew something was lacking, but I couldn’t think of an alternative, no matter how hard I tried.
Days, weeks, and months passed. We entered phases three, four, and five of a global pandemic. I filled my days with big projects and small ones. I walked around my neighborhood like my life depended on it and made beans five hundred different ways.
Along the way, I scribbled down to-do lists in journals and on torn bits of paper. They were little road maps, meant to steer my intentions out of my heart and somewhere into reality. Writing was always present on those lists, and for months on end, they included these words: Edit lightning essay. Yet putting something on a list does not always guarantee it happens.
In February 2021, tired of that nagging voice in the back of my head, I finally followed my own direction. I opened the essay and made small changes, which left me feeling pleased, ready to cross it off my list. It didn’t take long, though, to realize the ending still didn’t feel complete. My inner critic — that persistent devil on my shoulder — went wild. This must not be any good, I thought. If you were serious about writing, you would get this done. Frustrated, I put it away again.
It wasn’t until November 2021, a year after I’d first written the essay, that I understood why its engine had stalled. The time to make revisions for Catapult had come, because once the essay found a home, and with it a deadline, I couldn’t put them off any longer. This time, there was no problem. The ending I’d needed all along was obvious. It turns out I hadn’t been waiting for my brain to have some flash of inspired revelation; the essay is, in part, about my relationship with my mother, and unbeknownst to me, I had been waiting to actually live the ending before I could write about it.
***
In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Marie Rilke famously implores his admiring friend to “have patience with everything that is unsolved in” his “heart and try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms.” He stresses that we are best served to let life unfold naturally, without forcing its hand or grasping for solutions before they’re ready:
Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is about living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then, without realizing it, one distant day live right into the answer.
This is valuable advice, as I noticed when I lived my way into the ending for an essay that had been lying abandoned on the sidelines for months. Once life unfolded, the answer was very clear. Daoism recommends a similar approach to moving through life without forcing, as I happily explored by the Rio Grande in Taos last September.
But seeking — searching for meaning, purpose, direction — is a way of life, and it’s one I know well. I am always “living the questions,” as Rilke describes it, sometimes to the point of driving myself mad.
Now I am wondering something else. Is it possible to spend so long living the questions that you forget how to recognize answers when they appear? I have been asking questions about vocation, livelihood, and where we should live for five years, for example, which feels like a long time. Before that, I had similar chapters of navigating my way through music and a corporate career. If I’m being honest, sometimes I just want a break. To land in some answers for a while so I can rest.
Yet it seems I shouldn’t count on that, or wait for it, because periods of uncertainty — or as Pema Chödrön calls them, groundlessness — are simply part of being human. In When Things Fall Apart, Chödrön puts it like this:
To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh.
Thrown out of the nest. Wandering no-man’s land. That feels familiar. In Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change, she continues:
Our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness. When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. Another word for that is freedom — freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human.
In her book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard compares the writer — which correlates here, for our purposes, to simply being alive — to an inchworm hanging off one blade of grass while frantically searching for another:
The wretched inchworm hangs from the side of a grassblade and throws its head around from side to side, seeming to wail… It searches everywhere in the wide world for the rest of the grass, which is right under its nose. By dumb luck it touches the grass… Its body makes a loop… All it has to do now is slide its front legs up the grass stem. Instead it gets lost. It throws up its head and front legs, flings its upper body out into the void, and panics again… The blind and frantic numbskull makes it off one grassblade and onto another one, which it will climb in virtual hysteria for several hours.
When the inchworm locates one certainty, a slice of firm footing in the world, it immediately busies itself looking for another. It spends most of its life in this embodied state of panic. That, too, feels familiar.
“Few sights,” Dillard writes, “are so absurd as that of an inchworm living its dimwit life.”
***
My own dimwit life, spent creeping and flopping towards the next grassblade, whatever that might be, occasionally feels frantic. I am the numbskull inchworm. As soon as I get an answer, I ask another question, my tongue constantly leaping in front of my body, ahead of my sea legs, way out in front of my heart. I am often swallowed whole by uncertainty.
Coexisting with my lightning essay for so long was uncomfortable; I was certain its stagnancy was caused by some personal failure of talent or discipline. After all those months, watching its ending appear simply because I waited long enough to experience it taught me something about hanging in there.
Life guides art, and art guides life. My questions guide my experience, and my experience guides my questions. Everything beautiful takes its time.
My hope is to keep writing unfinished essays, so to speak. To create entire worlds that are flourishing and beautiful whether the questions they carry feel answered or not. It’s just as necessary in my personal life as it is in our collective one, which requires us to find everyday equilibrium even as we face climate destruction and all manner of political turmoil. In my personal life, I understand that if something is unclear, then I likely have all the answers that, as Rilke puts it, I am prepared to live right now.
Solid ground will always be desirable, and I don’t expect that yearning to disappear. But the grassblades of life will never stop moving, and we inchworms can only try our best. As I wait for the next one to arrive — a firm and holy footing — I will stop and say a prayer of thanks for the bright green blades that are holding me steady right here, and right now.
Between you and me—
About today’s art: I am fascinated by Thought Forms, a manual that explores the way our thoughts, experiences, and emotions manifest in shapes and colors on the astral plane. Its clairvoyant meditations were captured by two well-known Theosophists, Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, in 1905 and went on to influence a number of twentieth-century artists, including Hilma af Klint. “The Intention to Know,” shown above, looks remarkably like our inchworm!
On Tuesday morning I became captivated with “I Believe,” Jim Harrison’s poem about stunted lilac groves and leaky boats, which are, to my mind, not very far from numbskull inchworms. I enjoyed an old interview he did with the Los Angeles Times.
If geopolitical intrigue is your thing, here’s a tidbit for you. I have been paying close attention to current events for bizarrely personal reasons. A few years ago, I put myself on a mission to take John to see all the great living conductors. We (especially John) watch them on YouTube all the time, but experiencing them in real time is different. There’s an aliveness and an effervescence, an in-the-moment transcendent quality that’s possible, but not always attained, in live performance. We’re always looking for it. Each conductor we’ve seen thus far has left us with an important nugget to take away.
For Christmas I gave John tickets to see Valery Gergiev (who famously conducts with a toothpick as his baton!) with the Vienna Philharmonic next weekend at Carnegie Hall. If there’s one thing people know about Gergiev, it’s that he is very Russian. Like extremely Russian. We have been following his movements closely, and this week, he cancelled European engagements for suspicious “health reasons.” It’s looking more and more like his performance in New York will not happen — because of war! In the Ukraine! I have no words. The whole thing has me singing an old song on repeat.
And with that, it seems fitting to end by wishing you — and all of us — peace this week. Peace and blessings. Take care out there.
The audio version of last week’s essay, with a bonus impromptu pep talk, is available on Spotify, Apple, Substack, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
WE’RE ALL FRIENDS HERE is written by Lauren Maxwell. Help us grow! Send this to the friend on the blade of grass beside you and ask them to subscribe. You can also become a paying sponsor, which helps keep this column free for readers and compensates me for my time. Every gesture of support is appreciated.