I wonder where my grandmother is now. I had a dream about her in which I discovered she was still alive, one hundred and two years old! I was elated. We were sitting in the guest bedroom of my childhood home when she began doing push-ups, as if to display just how alive she was. Her spine was no longer turned over like an autumn sunflower but straight like a tree. Her skin was as luminous as always, moist like milk. She had kept it a secret, her livelihood, because she found out that by doing so she was able to live a new life. In old age, old old, she emphasized—as if to say the years after you die—she had become more playful, more crass. She had made many friends and was on her way to a dinner party. She told me that she would see us soon, but she wanted to keep her new life separate from her old life for now, because everyone and everything from before was too serious. Her new friends, and her new life, was filled with a humor we would not be able to understand.
I woke up wanting to return to the dream, so that I might prove to my grandmother that I could be silly too, that I understood the humor she was speaking of, it just slipped out of my grip every now and then. When I worry about this or that. When I need a nap. When I become too wrapped up in the business of being.
I still like to think that whenever I dream of someone, they are visiting me. Even if it is someone who is alive, a friend I have not spoken to in twenty years or a person I saw on the street, I like to think we are visiting each other, the parts of ourselves that exist in the subconscious, the parts of ourselves that are so close to us that we cannot see them clearly.
The following day I thought to myself that my grandmother chose to visit me for a reason. Perhaps I have been too serious this past month, or this past year, or this past decade. Perhaps I have always been toiling with the seriousness of living, which always seems to be a byproduct of thinking about things we cannot control. How to be this or avoid that, how to change this or attain that, how to stop thinking about how to.
Over the past several months I have taken a break from my usual employment, which has allowed me to write a great deal of the material that I always assumed my future self would have written whenever I imagined living as a writer. I realized, only recently, that in order to reach that future, I will need to have spent many days, months, and years writing. It is difficult to find the mental and physical energy to write the amount of words that is required to become a writer—which, in my perspective, means writing something, rewriting it, rewriting it again, and then writing something else, and repeating that process until you finally shape the clay into a figure, and the figure into a story—when you are working for someone else, when a pretty paycheck convinces you that the majority of your hours should be spent thinking about how to prove that you deserve to continue earning that paycheck, if not a prettier one. You have to write a lot to be a writer. At least, to be the kind of writer that I want to be. So I have attempted to forget about shoulds, should nots, outcomes, and accolades and focus on the process. That is: write.
In writing and rewriting and writing some more, there are days in which I feel energized by the words that jolt from my brain to my fingertips. Other days, I wonder if I am illiterate, or if I am somehow becoming worse at everything as the hours go by. Although I understand that my own validation is the only prize that matters, for it is the only thing that enables us to create art in the first place, some irredeemable part of myself holds onto the stubborn belief that nothing begins until it is seen, the worst part of the belief being that it applies to not just art, but to ourselves.
So I am waiting, and writing, and waiting, and writing. Waiting for an agent to tell me my book is good, for a publisher to pay for it, and for people to read it, despite often thinking that when the day such approval arrives, its goodness will only last for twenty four hours, and afterwards, my life will resume its familiar shape: Writing, being, enjoying, waiting (for what?). We spend so much time feeling like caterpillars when we already have wings.
When I glance at my life from a meditative angle, I am aware that, in many ways, I already have what I want: Friends I cherish, family I love, food, freedom, and a place to call home. Yet, depending on the hour or the day, life can still feel mundane. A bubble that has yet to form. But hasn’t it formed, doesn’t it shine? I am living in a world filled with things I want to do and places I want to go. It is confusing because I am happy. It is confusing because I look in the mirror and sometimes think, despite feeling happy, Now what?, blowing so hard to make the bubble launch further into the air that it ends up popping before it can float.
The moments in which I feel that I am not living as I should, or that I am missing out on the millions of other possibilities that are, in some way, already being lived by us (for in order for those possibilities to exist, we have to be living in this one—the anchor to our imagination is our current life), I think about a happy moment. A moment in which I was doing something, meeting someone, or going somewhere. A moment in which the action of the world prevented my mind from attempting to measure its meaning.
Usually this happens when I am brushing my teeth, when I am bored, or when I feel that I have been sitting in the same place for too long. When I think about that happy moment, I realize it exists on its own, for its happiness, despite how bright or shiny, does not outweigh the current dullness. So many happy moments have occurred in my life—last year, last month, last week—and I am still here, brushing my teeth in the mirror, wondering if I am boring. As I look in the mirror and think about all of the things I have lived, considering how that is true (I am so grateful for life!), yet this is true, too (Am I a loser?), I remember that every moment we live exists on its own. That me writing this and you reading this exist on their own, too. There is no story to our lives when we zero in on the present, rather, there is only that instance, that moment of our being, and so our lives become moments that are arranged in no particular order, no orientation by which a measure of good or bad can be made. Which means that we have the choice, in every moment, to be however we want to be. To laugh, to play, to enjoy.
I believe that this is what my grandmother was saying: The living are so occupied with attempting to do so artfully that they forget how to live in the first place, whereas the dead know how to have fun. Once we die, what is there to worry about? Of course, she was also saying that living in a state of perpetual presence, the constant realization that we always have a choice in how we are, is impossible. She does not expect it of us, for she did not perfect it herself. Nobody can.
Living is the classroom in which we attempt to learn how to be present, and from a young age we are equipped with the weapon of storytelling, a tool that anchors us to one place, the way a box is glued to the ground by gravity. Stories make us believe in things bigger than ourselves, they allow us to calculate sense from grief, bury experience into acceptance and sprout something new, something like forgiveness, something like love. They tell us who we are, what we are doing, and where we have come from, so that we can carry on without question. That is, until we learn to stop questioning altogether. Until we find that requiring stories from ourselves and others is no longer necessary: we can accept, forgive, and love without a narrative arc.
In that sense, death is our final education. It forces us to stop telling stories, to stop anchoring ourselves in the past and the future so that we can finally, I hope—in imagining all those we love who have moved beyond us—be, without worrying about the who, what, and where. Our continuous education is to learn how to do this while we are alive. To forget it and learn it again, for education is a perpetual process of trial and error.
The single phrase I heard my grandmother say most was “remember to have fun.” Despite this being her parting motto at the end of every call, visit, or birthday card, I remember every version of her face, not just the one that had fun. There was the one who was annoyed at the Hawaiian Airlines clerk, the one disturbed by the scolding voice of her son, the one upset that so and so got too fat or too skinny, the point being that life is not only fun. It is a series of varying events, fortunate and unfortunate. And yet, whenever I imagine her, it is not her face that represents her life, but the way she moved through it with determined joy, meeting every harsh encounter with an ocean of strength, currents of play and humor underneath. It is this stoic belief that life is something to be grateful for, and that this moment is good, despite the story it tells us, that I believe can carry us all the way through.
Whether I will remember all of this over the next few days, months, or years is beside the point (I will not). However, in the moments I do remember, I will scream at the top of my lungs and sing a silly song. I will forget about whatever is occupying my mind and remember to dance, to joke, to smile, because that is the rhythm that keeps this all afloat. And if I forget for too long or begin judging my life through stories, wondering why or how or when, I will lay on my pillow and rest my brain, expecting a visit from my grandmother. ☷
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With love,
Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane
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This one is so good Travis!