Walking, Walking, Walking

At the recommendation of several friends I recently read The Salt Path by Raynor Winn. It’s about a couple in their mid-50’s who lost everything, including their home, simply because they had signed a contract backing a friend’s business and when that business went down so did they. When this terrible thing happened, instead of collapsing or giving up or lying on a couch forever watching TV or any number of things that I or many of us would likely do in the direct aftermath of a terrible or even mildly distressing event, they instead went on a 630-mile walking journey around the coast of England. They took a tent and camped at wild sites. They didn’t stay nights here and there at Airbnbs or hotels to give themselves a break. They didn’t order carry-out food to take and eat under the stars. They carried everything; they lived on little food (mostly noodles); they bathed by jumping in the ocean. They chose to do a hard thing. They did a hard thing.

At the end of the book they were changed, as in any journey story. And their journey changed me. It made me a bit braver in my own journeying, or at least made me want to be a bit braver.

“We hadn’t been afforded the luxury of time for the shock waves from our past to play out and then—as in any good nature-redemption story—to go off into the wilderness to refind our way in life. But things had hit us in the face like a tidal wave and would have washed us away if we hadn’t found ourselves on the path. Our journey had drained us of every emotion, sapped our strength and our will. But then, like the windblown trees along our route, we had been re-formed by the elements into a new shape that could ride out whatever storms came over the bright new sea…. At last I understood what homelessness had done for me. It had taken every material thing that I had and left me stripped bare, a blank page at the end of a partly written book. It had also given me a choice, either to leave the page blank or to keep writing the story with hope. I chose hope.”

Once, I experienced a deep and sudden sorrow, and a friend who had gone through the same thing called me and told me: Walk right through it. Walk right through it as opposed to trying to avoid the pain, as opposed to hiding from it, as opposed to drowning it in one thing or another. I followed my friend’s advice the best I could and thought of it when reading these pages.

Isn’t it a good rule for all of life to keep walking right through whatever happens, literally or figuratively? To walk through to whatever is next, and maybe it is in the walking that recovery happens, that meaning gets made.

(As an important aside: There’s an interesting story of physical healing in this book as well.)

~~~

[Photo: A bright and delicious joy that each winter the cold north receives from the warm west and south, with thanks.]

Sally Franson's "A Lady's Guide to Selling Out"

I read a fun book over the holidays. A Lady’s Guide to Selling Out by Sally Franson. A friend told me about the book, which she had read after seeing Franson on the Swedish reality show, “Allt för Sverige” (The Great Swedish Adventure; season 10), a show that features Americans of Swedish descent who go to Sweden to learn about their family histories and that I have yet to watch. But back to the book. Casey, the protagonist, is an advertising executive working on a campaign to link literary authors with products their words will help sell. The strategy is genius until it’s not. Then Casey has to find her way out and save herself in the process. 

Franson’s writing was an intriguing blend of chick-lit plotting punctuated with deep literary reflection, something I didn’t expect in a book with the cover that it had. 

For example, while attending a reading in a bookstore, Casey, thinks about what it takes to mend when you’re broken. Because she is broken, because she is mending.

“But for a second there, in the bookstore, when time spanned vertically instead of horizontally, and love was at the center of the line, I forgot all about that.

It’s so simple, I know, but perhaps all it takes to mend, in the end, is people who love you. Who find you when you are lost, who come out with a flashlight when you’ve gone too far into the woods. They call out your name, you hear it, you are reminded of yourself. They remind you. They remember you. They re-member you.

And so you return the call. You put yourself back together again. Because, my God, you love them too.”

~~~

The Clean Daughter by Jill Kandel: A memoir of adventure, grief, and mercy

My friend Jill Kandel has just released her second book, The Clean Daughter: A Cross-Continental Memoir (North Dakota State University Press). Her new book is a memoir that tracks a couple different aspects of Kandel’s life. It is about her cross-cultural marriage, Jill from North Dakota and Johan, her husband, from the Netherlands. It is about living in other foreign cultures, with Johan’s job taking them to live in Zambia and Indonesia. (If you’ve read my blog for awhile you may remember that I wrote a post about her first book, So Many Africas: Six Years in a Zambian Village.) It’s also about Jill’s difficult relationship with her father-in-law, Izaak, a “judgmental and arrogant” man who made a controversial final decision about his life. This is the thread that interested me the most.

Years after her father-in-law died, Jill set about trying to learn more about who he was and why. She spent years researching, traveling, talking to relatives and family friends. She uncovered the story of his life as a teen and young man as Nazi Germany took over the Netherlands and the years of recovery after Germany was defeated. She learned of her father-in-law’s heroism, his generosity of spirit in those dark days. Although the hurt she experienced from her father-in-law never completely went away, she came to see her father-in-law in a new light. She came “[t]o see him as human, both frail and strong, with foibles, faults, quirks, and grace.” She came to see her own judgments and arrogance in relation to him. Her story made me wonder about the unknown stories of people with whom I’ve had trouble relating. The stories of people whom I’ve judged. The stories of people I haven't paused to consider.

Just this last week my father and I have spent time thinking about and discussing a woman in our family ancestry about whom we only knew a bit of story. We started probing those few lines of story. We started wondering about and talking about what that story would have required of the woman. The shape of her life has now grown in substantial magnitude in my mind from what it was before. Whereas this woman had been little more than a name on our family tree, now she was a woman of great strength and bravery. We spent a couple hours; Jill spent years.

In the final pages of The Clean Daughter, Jill writes, “I’m learning to value mercy and to extend grace to both Izaak and myself.”

Work and Burnout: A New Book by Jonathan Malesic

There’s a new book out about work burnout and it's high on my list of books to read, The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives by Jonathan Malesic. Last September I’d read an opinion piece Malesic had written in the New York Times and found it resonated with some of my thoughts in Finding Livelihood. Here are a couple paragraphs from Malesic’s piece:

“As it is, work sits at the heart of Americans’ vision of human flourishing. It’s much more than how we earn a living. It’s how we earn dignity: the right to count in society and enjoy its benefits. It’s how we prove our moral character. And it’s where we seek meaning and purpose, which many of us interpret in spiritual terms….

But work often doesn’t live up to these ideals. In our dissent from this vision and our creation of a better one, we ought to begin with the idea that each one of us has dignity whether we work or not. Your job, or lack of one, doesn’t define your human worth.”

Does that resonate with you in your work and life experience?

Malesic went on to write that our work should be subordinated to our life, not the other way around. He suggests we need each other for that:

"That means we need one more pillar: solidarity, a recognition that your good and mine are linked. Each of us, when we interact with people doing their jobs, has the power to make their lives miserable. If I’m overworked, I’m likely to overburden you. But the reverse is also true: Your compassion can evoke mine."

~

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Daniel Bowman's On the Spectrum: Autism, Faith, & The Gifts of Neurodiversity

Daniel Bowman, associate professor of English at Taylor University, editor of Relief Journal, has written an important and captivating memoir in essays, On the Spectrum: Autism, Faith, and the Gifts of Neurodiversity (Brazos Press), about his experience as a creative writer, professor, husband, and father after receiving a diagnosis of autism at the age of 35.

Through his experiences, he guides the reader to think about autism not from a pathology model but from a paradigm of neurodiversity.

Here's the thing: Neurodiversity is real, it's not going away, and people ought to be excited about such a momentous breakthrough. We are unveiling layers of mysteries about what it means to be human....

[L]et's be curious; let's be in awe of how complex we all are. Let's get excited when the frontiers of knowledge open up even just a little. And let's be aware of what it means: that for the first time in human history, a certain group of people have a better chance to be understood and affirmed and to get what they need in order to flourish and contribute to the flourishing of the culture. That's a wonderful thing.

After reading Bowman’s book, I’ve been thinking about relationships I’ve mishandled or people I’ve misunderstood. About how easy it is to wrongly assess a person or situation—or to be wrongly assessed oneself. On The Spectrum teaches its readers about autism but it also models and calls out humility and compassion, persistence and calling, friendship and joy.

Covid and Camus' The Plague

Given the success of the vaccine in reducing the rate of new Covid cases, life has opened up substantially where I live, and I hope it has where you are as well. The relief has reminded me of the last handful of pages of Albert Camus' The Plague, which you probably remember is a sobering and frightening novel about a mid-twentieth century plague in a town in Algeria. Finally, the plague did lift, however, and the roads and the railroad tracks into the town again reopened, and the people returned to moving about the streets. In the days just before the gates allowed entrance, for Dr. Bernard Rieux, the story's narrator, "the prospect of imminent release had obliterated his fatigue."

"Hope had returned and with it a new zest for life. No man can live on the stretch all the time, with his energy and will-power strained to the breaking-point, and it is a joy to be able to relax at last and loosen nerves and muscles that were braced for the struggle.... Indeed, he had a feeling that everyone in those days was making a fresh start."

If you've read the book, you know it's not a fairy tale and not everyone lives happily ever after, even with the plague lifting, but still, joy returned.

"[T]he moment they saw the smoke of the approaching engine, the feeling of exile vanished before an uprush of overpowering, bewildering joy. And when the train stopped, all those interminable-seeming separations which often had begun on this same platform came to an end in one ecstatic moment, when arms closed with hungry possessiveness on bodies whose living shape they had forgotten."

The Trajectory of a Subtle Pivot

I’ve been reading The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson (2021). My father gave it to me, and he and I have been talking about it in the evenings on the phone as we go through the book. One small scene towards the beginning of the book has continued to hum in my brain, although it has nothing to do with the work of mapping the structure of RNA, the theme of the book. In reality, however, this small scene has everything to do with that work, which means it has everything to do with the fact that we now have a Covid vaccine.

Jennifer Doudna, PhD, the subject of the book, and her colleague, Emmanuelle Charpentier, PhD, won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their invention of an RNA-guided gene-editing tool, which played a key role in the development of the Covid vaccine. The scene I’m thinking of was when Doudna was in sixth grade, and her father gave her a copy of The Double Helix by James Watson, a book that detailed the discovery of the structure of DNA. Reading that book was a pivot point for Doudna. While it didn’t give an immediate 180-degree shift in whatever her sixth-grade self was doing or aiming at, the shift carried her somewhere.

The trajectory of any subtle pivot, carried over many years, changes everything. Take a piece of paper and draw a dot on the left side of the paper and another dot on the right side. Now draw a line between the dots. Next, draw a third dot just a tiny bit above the dot on the right side. Finally, draw a line between the original left dot and the new right dot. Imagine that the lines go on and on beyond the page, and think about how those two lines would travel out across time with the distance between them growing. It makes for an interesting assignment: think back to childhood, or later, and consider what was the toy, the book, the conversation, the game, the film, the scene that nudged you ever so slightly or is nudging you even now.