View from My Flat. Leamington Spa, England, March 2008
My flat is barren. It just holds the cold, scattered pieces of furniture which were shoved inside when the place was birthed from brick and plaster. We have no phone, no television, no internet. Short wires jut out from a hole in the wall, like veins of an amputated arm. Potential power cut short. The walls are white. The floorspace is expansive. I could do cartwheels if I wanted to. But I sit and look out the window at the houses across the way.
They are sloping, red-roofed British houses, so un-American. Their thin bodies squeeze in beside each other. They touch shoulders. They huddle together against the cold. But inside, they must be toasty. In this grey evening which has followed this grey day when the weary sun was just a smudge on the grey sky and the grey clouds pulled a taut canopy over my head, I still believe that there is warmth on the inside. Glowing firesides. And somewhere, human commotion, hearts pumping blood, rosy cheeks full of good cheer and good food.
Perhaps he is a painter, circling his canvas that lies, spread out on the floor before him like cringing prey, waiting for that first violent sling of paint against its white face. The pacing painter is trying to figure out where to start it, or where to end it, or where it all went wrong.
My gaze moves on—through the dark, intangible air of fallen evening and through the smoke curling up from clay-capped chimney tops—to the school building down the road. In daylight hours, its playground bursts with screams of children. The screams do not ebb and flow, rise and fall like an ocean of sound. Instead, against scientific odds, their sound reaches a certain decibel level and stays there. Constant cacophony. When three throats stop, three more must start: joy and anger rise, invisible energies which scrape the grating board of the throat before their shards are launched into still air. On these winter days, this crystalline air feels as if it could be cracked open. But now the schoolyard is empty. Squeaky swing sets huddle in the eerie glow of streetlamps.
The school building’s windows are rows of black teeth, save one. A light burns on the third floor. Sourceless it seems, this light bathes its room in a soft green glow. In the screening room of my mind which resides between vision and rational thought, images flicker by: bubbling test tubes; Bunsen burners; eye droppers of acid; the strangling smell of formaldehyde; pickled animals in jars, their skin leathery and cold; a mad scientist cackling to himself, scratching his wild, spiky hair as he plays God and performs dangerous, genius experiments late into the night, above a schoolyard playground. But, really, there is no one there. The room is empty. I am alone staring at a green light, full of unspoken desire, waiting for something to happen.
The problem with those essential life questions: "Who are you?" and "What do you want?" is that our senses of self are constantly being destroyed by the world, the events, and the people around us. We reinvent ourselves on the fly — constantly working off old models of ourselves, some former shell of a shadow self full of particular ideals.
But we cannot live off ideals alone.
Our beliefs and morals are constantly challenged by a messy, intertwining world of unpredictable circumstance, and so standing boldly by pristine philosophical ideals in the face of multiple complexities is not only a fools' errand but a bumpkin's task.
Change is essential, flexibility necessary, ambiguity beautiful (even if frustrating).
The world, our lives, ourselves are not cemented or static. We have freedom and choice, even as seemly unpredictable and unpreventable challenges (things we didn't choose) crash against us.
--I had a basketball coach remind my team that "life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it." Cheesy but true, I think, even if the star player with the season-ending ACL injury didn't quite agree with him yet.--
We must move on, carrying our morals under our arms like schoolbooks, sticking out our other arm in a Heisman-style, street-smart block, and using both our head and our heart to really feel and figure out these changes and choices to make.
Within us, we hold past, present, and future; within us we hold things ingrained, learned, felt, and figured out, and most importantly: things yet unknown.
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