Something strange happened when I wrote an essay about lightning for Catapult last year. After months of imagining the piece, I finally wrote it in October 2020. My ideas came together quickly, in three or four days. But after that initial burst of inspiration, the essay stalled out like an old car trying to reach the top of a hill. It slowed down, sputtered, and rolled to a stop.
My essay had an ending, but it left me wanting more. Something was lacking. Yet I could not think of an alternative, no matter how hard I tried.
Weeks and months passed. We moved through multiple phases of a global pandemic. I filled my days with little projects and big ones. I walked my neighborhood like my life depended on it and made dried beans five hundred different ways.
Along the way, I scribbled down to-do lists on torn bits of paper, like tiny road maps meant to guide my life. Writing was always on those lists, and for months they said: Edit lightning essay. Yet putting something on a list does not guarantee it happens.
Sometime the next year, tired of my own nagging voice, I finally did it. I opened the essay and made some changes, ready to cross it off my list. But the ending still did not feel right. My inner critic went wild: This essay must be horrible. Frustrated, I put it away again.
Once the piece found a home, and with it a deadline, I could not delay revisions any longer. This time, there was no problem. The ending I had always needed was obvious. It turns out I had not been waiting for my brain to have some revelatory flash; 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.” He stresses that we are best served to let life unfold naturally, without forcing its hand or grasping for solutions before they are 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 good advice, as I noticed when I lived my way into the ending for an essay that had been lying abandoned for months. When life unfolded, the answer became clear. Daoism recommends a similar approach to moving through life without forcing, as I once happily explored by the Rio Grande.
But seeking — searching for meaning, purpose, and direction — is a way of life, and it is 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 to notice answers when they appear? I have been holding questions about vocation and livelihood for six years, for example, which feels like a long time. If I am being honest, sometimes I want a break. To land in some answers for a while so I can rest.
Yet it seems I should never count on that, because periods of uncertainty — or as Pema Chödrön calls them, groundlessness — are simply part of being human. In When Things Fall Apart, Chödrön says:
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 equates living to being 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 this wild 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, 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 swallowed by uncertainty.
Sitting 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. To create entire worlds that are flourishing and joyful whether the questions they carry are resolved or not. In my personal life, 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 that yearning will never 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 holding me steady right here, and right now.
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