Moving (E)Motions

On NPR earlier this year, Sebastian Junger discussed the death of his friend Tim Heatherington, a journalist killed. He used a phrase to describe the pace of fear in combat - "[combat is] scary beforehand, the anticipation is very scary, and afterwards the fear catches up with you." The idea of an emotion catching up with you fits exactly with my experience of grief. I didn't have a lot of time to grieve when my mom was sick. I did it alone, at home, when I wasn't with her. I cried in hospitals, but I mostly tried not to, and tried to send all of my energy to helping her and hoping for her recovery.

Now, a little over nine months after her death, I'm grieving. (I could say I'm still grieving, but I hate the implication of "should be ending" that that little word adds. I'll grieve for the rest of my life - in healthy and productive ways, to be sure, but it will never end. The only way grief ends, I think, is if you don't love the person anymore.)

Compare Junger to this line from Fitzgerald's "The Crackup": "The world only exists through your apprehension of it." The first time I read that, I defined the second noun - apprehension - as understanding, as I think he intended. The second time, I thought of fear. Fear certainly creates worlds for some people. We talk a lot in yoga about letting go of fear, but it's not always so easy. When I was faced with the prospect of losing my mom's physical presence, I was more afraid than I've ever been. Now, just like grief, the fear is still with me - because the world without her is a scary place.

What fear and grief both do over time, rather than disappear, is shapeshift and change. They mold themselves to changes I'm making in my life. They shift a bit to the background, hovering, when I share happy memories of my mom or think of how earthshatteringly proud she'd be of me and all that I'm managing to handle without her.

Just as my fear and grief are unending, so does my mother surpass all boundaries. She is in the air, the sky, the sun, my smile. This isn't what either of us wanted, but it's what we have to handle, and I'm handling it in all the ways she taught me.

Research Errata

I'm currently going through citations collected by another research assistant. I'm also taking some time to add in new citations, and the process makes me think: how can we determine the search parameters of a previous person?

The answer seems obvious: from the results. I think it goes deeper, though. There's a kind of looking backward that puts you into that other person's head for a minute. Why did she choose this article? Did she overlook this other one, or did she just think it wasn't helpful? Which articles have been published since she worked on this?

I'm also getting into my professor's head a bit. Even though she encourages me to gather all I can, I'm trying to use what I know of the shape of her book to gather items that would be most helpful. Sometimes I come across something I think might give her a new insight - it will be very interesting to see what comes of those. She also encourages me to use the articles for my own research, which I deeply appreciate. 

The Shape of Surprise

I'm a schedules person, generally, and I set goals. I like to have plans and I like to accomplish things. I am not fabulous at relaxing without another person to motivate me. (Motivate me. See? Even relaxation can be a goal - even when it should, arguably, just be.)

To honor the beauty that I know exists in openness (as yoga and my upbringing both teach me), I'm setting myself some mid-fall non-goals. They're only goals insofar as that's how my brain works. They aren't check off-able, or schedule-able. They just exist.

Make room for serendipity - and room within time, really.
Breathe more deeply.
Know that most things return. Most experiences repeat.
This is the life you're living. Live fully within it.
Nobody's keeping score but you.
More people admire you than you even can imagine.

Blogging Thoughts

It's been about two months since I wrote my first public blog post for a class in my doctoral program. I have been blogging for personal edification for about a year, and I've used Blackboard to post discussion questions for my previous master's degree. Blogging as a community in a context that only that community is familiar with, really (those of us in the class), is a fascinating web of meanings, interpretations, and author/audience interactions.

Taking the last point first, it seems that if we have any readers at all, they are also CUNY faculty or graduate students. Just as in a seminar class, we are our own audience, constantly taking turns shifting the course of the discussion by what we choose to declare or to ask. The structure that surrounds our writing environment is pretty open, too. Our professor's RA, who is also in the class, posts a web of references for the works we are studying, and we are meant to engage with at least one reference per week and comment on it. In addition, we're free to post on anything relevant to the course, and then other students (and our professor) can comment on that as each of us sees fit.

This web of connections is very different from the way I write my personal blog. I haven't quite figured out how to tip over to an astonishing (or even respectable) number of viewers/readers, so I often feel as though I'm blogging to myself. One might argue that all blogging is like that, except for people like Nick Kristof. One might point out that I'm free from the often insidiously vilifying comments that some people seem to spend all day on their computer in order to post. What I would like is to develop a reading and writing community around my blog - perhaps even a network of several blogs where we all follow each other. I'd rather be in dialogue than monologue.