I have a lot on my mind. And somehow that has translated into silence. How to sift through the jumble and identify items worthy of sharing? I seem to exist in a fog of confusion, at least right now.
Last week was absorbed by creating a roster for this season’s soccer team. A painful, heart-rending process, in all honesty. Humbling and bruising, too. A large part of me rebels against the levels imposed by competitive sport that claim to filter children into good, better, best. It isn’t an objective process, yet it’s treated as such; worse, there’s an implicit assumption that the teams themselves are good, better, best, based on level alone, and that a child’s experience would therefore be improved by moving up, and would deteriorate by moving down. I know what I can offer, as a coach, but within the competitive framework, it often feels like what I can offer doesn’t actually matter.
I’ve been waking in the middle of the night, unable to fall back to sleep. Mind racing. Body restless.
Not thinking about these things, exactly, but about the everything, the jumble, the chaos of a world that claims to be about one set of rules and values, while operating on a completely different set of tacit rules and values. Winning. Winning by any means. Power. Shows of dominance, especially rage. Shaming. Placidly public corruption. Lies. Assume everyone is lying to you, or you’re naive. Well, dammit, then I’m naive! The values we encourage our children to adopt could almost appear cruelly out of step in the context of this greedy, ego-ascendant world: be kind, share, be trustworthy. But that’s what I want to be and to do.
That’s the space I want to hold open.
I keep picturing the frame we teach players to make with their arms, to protect the ball and box out the pressure. It’s a strong stance, but not aggressive or violent or dirty — you don’t lift your elbow to hurt the attacking player, you simply use the steadiness of your body and of this frame you’re creating to hold your ground.
The conclusion I keep coming around to, amidst all the confusion and noise, is: I want to be kind. It’s actually almost the only thing I want to be. I don’t think much else matters to me, in the end, and in the right now. I accept that kindness can go awry, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, that kindness, offered in ignorance, can cause suffering. And maybe I’m talking about something bigger, deeper, wider than kindness. Maybe I’m talking about love. Love; and attention. But it’s easier to start with kindness. Kindness is easier to grasp in the moment.
There is a mantra that’s been keeping me grounded, as much as it’s possible to be grounded, whenever it feels like I’m whirling away or spiralling down: I am loving awareness. It helps when I’m worrying about being judged, or am judging others, when I’m second-guessing my choices, or letting external pressures and feedback (real and perceived) affect my state of mind.
Here’s a ten-minute meditation to sit with.
(If the visuals in the video turn you off, just listen to the sound. Or don’t listen to anything at all, just repeat the phrase I am loving awareness, till you know it’s true.)
I’m fascinated by stories of people who are artists or who belong to other devotional professions that demand extreme discipline to a practice or a cause. I just finished reading a story in The New Yorker about the artist Vija Celmins, a woman now in her 80s, who paints, sculpts and draws the same subjects over and over again, sometimes for years at a time. She made bronze casts of 11 stones, for example, and spent years painting them so that they would like the exact replicas of the original stones. When she put the sculptures on display beside the original stones, people couldn’t tell them apart. Years! She also did a long series on spider webs, in which she would use an eraser to etch the web on a black/grey surface. She’s done paintings of the night sky, paintings of sand in the desert, paintings of small sections on ocean water, over and over and over again.
It’s funny, but I had a flash while staring at the lake last month, thinking about how impossible it was to try to capture the movement of water — yet that’s what she set out to do. I was mesmerized by the pattern on the surface of the lake, these symmetrical moving shapes, almost like ovals, all connected, that spread out across the surface of the water and both held and did not hold as they seemed to move and move and move, but also not change.
I can’t describe it in words.
I knew I’d need a photo, and also that a photo wouldn’t suffice, and I was tempted to try to draw it, but I couldn’t imagine the water holding still for me to be able to draw it. I would need the water to hold still. And I guess that also got me thinking about how impossible it is to describe a moment, even though that’s what I set out to do in the story collection I’ve been working on for five years now — trying to describe the intricacies of a sequence of moments. It all just falls to pieces. There isn’t time to grab everything. By the time I’d describe even a fraction of a moment, the moment would be very far behind me, and I wouldn’t be able to return to it. So it’s been an interesting exercise, but perhaps not one that can succeed. But I’m veering in the wrong direction. Success or failure doesn’t seem to be the point of what Vija Celmins (and others) are attempting in their devotion to a particular craft. Instead, there’s a common desire, shared by artists across mediums, to capture something ineffable by repetition. Or by a series of actions that will deepen our knowledge and experience of something particular, which can’t otherwise be named or known.
I don’t know.
Despite everything, something inside me still finds the stories I wrote vital and compelling. I continue to return to them, to work on them. Maybe they’re like the poems that I wrote all those years ago in young motherhood (never published) — necessary to my own survival, dull to anyone else. Who knows what pulls a person in, or why a subject demands one’s attention. It doesn’t have to be because it needs to be seen or known by anyone else.
Just now, in looking up more information about this artist, Vija Celmins, I came across this video of her talking about her work (link below). Listen to this: “Sometimes I think that the only part I think is of any value is the making itself. And the things about it that is — that are — interesting is that you’re making something that is basically unsayable.”
Is it strange to believe that sometimes a story can say the unsayable too?
Spending today drawing cartoons. Today, life is lovely and good, serious and moving, challenging and spacious. And slow. The pace is really really slow.
My word of the year is SPACE. What I didn’t expect to find within this word is its companion, SILENCE. Silence can be a challenging state to sit within. I don’t always want to hear my own thoughts so clearly, or recognize the distracted and tumbling, tangled nature of my own interior life.
We spent last week, the last week before school started, at the cottage that belonged to my stepmom, and still feels like hers, even though she’s been gone for more than a year now. We love going there, love being there. It’s been a gift to have this place in our lives, and the kids have memories that go back, now, 11 summers. It’s the kind of place that has become a touchstone, and returning is a kind of pilgrimage. Returning is a measure of time passing. While we’re there, though only for a week at most, it feels like we’ve always been there and will always be there.
You can only get there (easily, practically) by boat. About five years ago, Kevin developed an inner ear disturbance that’s triggered by boat rides, and each year the after-effects would last longer and longer (months, even), so for the past two summers, he’s hiked in on a path that literally no one else uses. It’s overgrown. It takes him about an hour and a half. And this year, it was occupied by swarms of insects. He arrived at the cottage looking like a wild man. He wasn’t sure he could manage the hike out, but on Monday, he and Rose trekked the path again, to save his brain.
The corollary to his necessary hike is that I’ve had to learn how to drive a boat (not high on my list of things I wanted to learn how to do). We do what needs doing to get us to this place.
There is plenty of space at the cottage. Space for the kids to play. A big lake for kayaking and adventuring, alone or together. Star-gazing at night. Shelves of books. Late, lazy mornings. Late-night all-family card games. We never seem to need anything more than what we’ve got. Even when meals get creative, by necessity.
Space, silence. Quiet.
I tuned out from the news, from podcasts, from the internet almost altogether. But I did listen to one podcast, On Being, on Sunday. The title was: Silence and the Presence of Everything.
Isn’t that something? How the themes of our lives get tied together by invisible thread? I’d been worrying about space and silence. Silence as a negative. Silence as too much space for my mind to listen, anxiously, to itself.
Silence. Presence. Everything.
“Silence and the Presence of Everything” was about listening. Not active listening for a particular thing you expect to hear, or have been told to listen for, or pay attention to. Listening to what’s there to be heard. Listening without judgement.
An interesting thing happened at the cottage. I managed to write a bit every afternoon, when no one was paying attention; no one even really noticed. What was strange and thrilling was how I would fall into the writing (fiction), almost as if by drifting toward an idea. An image would surface. I would let it drift. I would be resting or sitting by the water. And some small fragment would drift toward me. And then I would get up and write. The writing felt similar to listening.
It didn’t feel active. It didn’t feel forced. It felt like I’d tipped sideways into another time and place and body, and I was just there.
Now I’m here, home again. Dreading a root canal tomorrow morning, but otherwise glad for a day, today, in which I’ve done exactly what I want to do with all my new-found, new-made space: I wrote. I’d gotten up early to exercise with friends and by 10AM when everyone had left the house and the laundry was underway, I felt tired. So I meditated/napped for 10 minutes. And then I got up and wrote. I told myself: Remember to meditate/listen/nap before writing. Drift into what you’re about to do. Listen. It’s okay if listening turns into dreaming. Let yourself drift.
Space = silence. Silence = listening. Listening = drifting. Drifting = door opening to fictional world. Step inside. Space = writing.
Also, space = rest.
I’ll write another blog post (maybe) about what it feels like to let go of the need to pay attention to a particular something, and just be. It’s almost the opposite of striving. I’m such a striver. To be without purpose, listen without demand; it eliminates the task of waiting. It makes silence okay. Drifting toward mystery. Because mystery is okay too.
This is an ideal day, wide open, warm. I’m wearing shorts and a t-shirt and sandals. I’ve gone for a run in the park, walked the dog, hung the laundry, and meditated in the back yard listening to the birds and the traffic.
It is possible to be quiet and still.
And yet, there is an undercurrent of anxiety. Feelings of inadequacy, guilt, shame, grief, panic. When you strip away the layers of busyness, you have to look at yourself, pay attention, listen. Maybe you were busy for a reason. Maybe you didn’t want to scrutinize the uncomfortable emotions and their uncomfortable causes.
What hurts?
What a question. Oh boy. Rejection hurts. Not meeting my own expectations and hopes hurts. Feeling purposeless in my vocation hurts.
Is this true? Do you feel purposeless, directionless, or is your purpose and direction so attached to outcome that you’re standing in the way of recognizing what is before you? The here and now. Not what came before or what may come, but what is here before you in this very hour.
I come inside and draw a picture. I write this meditation.
I ask: Is my vocation, my purpose more closely related to being a writer, or to leading a life of contemplation? What connects these two points on the map inside my mind? What separates them?
A writer writes, of course, but more importantly, she publishes. Produces. Makes her ideas manifest on the page. Her work can be seen, recognized, appreciated.
What do you even call a person who leads a life of contemplation? How quiet and interior is a life of contemplation? How is such a life made manifest? Is it a life in which its purpose is entirely untethered from production, from recognition, from approval? Is it a life without notice? What would that mean?
Mini-meditation for today: Every experience is an opportunity to express and deepen your connection to your own values. Every experience has meaning.
As I drove the back roads, early this morning, following gravel trucks and farm machinery and backlogs of commuting traffic toward Orangeville, and beyond, to the 404 north to Barrie, where I was meeting a book club at a care home, I noticed my breathing. Sometimes I noticed that I was holding my breath. Sometimes I noticed that my breathing was shallow. Other times, I would draw air deeply into my lungs and exhale — and that felt good.
I was afraid of being late.
But what if I were late, would that constitute a crisis? No. Deep breath. Ah.
At the care home, I spoke for an hour to a group of older people, all women, who were interested in the life of a writer, and who indulged my passion for a feminist history of running and sports in Canada.
Driving home, my breath came more easily. I turned off the radio and let my mind wander. I thought about how my general life goal (if I were to put such a thing into words) is to express myself truly, to embody my values, to articulate in any setting my belief that experiences are what carry meaning in our lives, not things, not brands, not objects, but connections, being in the same place at the same time with the world that surrounds us, and being present there. In believing this, I open any experience to its potential to be meaningful, by which I mean: any experience has the potential to be purposeful, joyful, and deepening — to bring me closer to others, and closer to my hopes for who I might be becoming.
So this is my thought for today: Inhale, exhale. Be as present as possible under the circumstances. Inhale, exhale.
Mini-meditation for today: Recognize where you are, and what is real. Are you in a place of abundance, or scarcity? If you have enough, live like you have enough.
“Ya’ll better celebrate this shit for the rest of the summer.” – Fred VanVleet
“Have fun with it.” – Kawhi Leonard
Okay, this may be my first and last post on the Toronto Raptors, but I’ve been thinking about the players’ swagger and joy at the celebratory parade that took over downtown Toronto on Monday. Maybe there’s something profoundly insightful about the mindset of a professional athlete, a person who understands their body’s limitations, strengths, and frailties, and whose actual job is to be as present as possible in the big moments of a game or a match. If you win something big, like, say, an NBA Championship, you acknowledge and appreciate the work and luck it took to get you there, but you don’t let yourself get pushed out of the moment. You savour it. You go with it. You have fun with it.
You don’t let fear of scarcity get in your way. When I’m unable to relax and enjoy the beautiful things in my life, I notice that it’s usually related to an underlying fear of scarcity — even when I recognize it’s not true, my instinct is to keep preparing for the worst.
So this is my thought for the day: To notice abundance. To live inside of it. To be truthful to myself about what I have. To pause and smell the lilacs till the last petal is blown to the ground.
Wherever you've come from, wherever you're going, consider this space a place for reflection and pause. Thank you for stopping by. Your comments are welcome.
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About me
My name is Carrie Snyder. I'm a fiction writer, reader, editor, dreamer, arts organizer, workshop leader, forever curious. I believe words are powerful, storytelling is healing, and art is for everyone.
