I noticed a gray hair on the top of my head the other day. I tried to leave it there but I couldn’t resist plucking it out — not because I wanted it gone, but because I wanted to examine it. Between my fingers I held this shiny, coarse, coupla inch-long thing that tells me time is moving forward. This wasn’t here before and now it is. I’m older than I was before.
How obvious, I know. But I have a hard time wrapping my head around time. I sometimes forget that time moves forward, that it’s always progressing, every, every minute. Not all the time, but sometimes, I forget that my grandpa has died; I forget that I don’t share a room with my brother; I forget that I’m not in college. Don’t you have moments like that? Moments when you think something and then you remember: wait, I’m not in that time anymore?
Thoughts swirl around loudly in my head almost all the time, but when I look at this gray hair, they feel lovingly quiet because this gray hair makes me think one thing only: how lucky am I to be getting older, how lucky am I to know that for sure.
The feeling I feel for this gray hair is love. Before I plucked the hair from my head, it looked like hair tinsel; I felt like Anora. I promise myself that next time I see a gray hair on my head I will not pull it out, because I want it to get longer than three inches. I want it to get as long as all my other hairs! Then I’ll really have hair tinsel.
When I think of that line in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, I think of this nine-year-old girl asking it so earnestly during a piece created at Andy’s Summer Playhouse last summer: Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute? Every night, she stood up and stared down the audience, brow furrowed in existential desperation, gesticulating firmly like, well, DOES anyone?!?
Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager first answers Emily’s question with a simple: No. But then he qualifies: The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.
I remember an English teacher in high school or college teaching that the best essays explore to what extent something is true or possible, rather than whether or not something is true or possible. So I find myself wondering, to what extent can any human being realize life while they live it — every, every minute? To what extent can any human being be a poet and/or a saint, if not all the time, then some of the time?
I hope that every person is a poet or a saint for at least a few minutes of their life. I think it is not only possible, but actually, likely that any human being is capable of being a poet or a saint for a few minutes. If not a few minutes, certainly a few seconds. You can be a poet for a few seconds; you can be a saint for a few seconds. It’s too short of a time to feel impossible to me.
Some of you might remember when I wrote about the mushy place a while ago. In the mushy place, everything looks and feels beautiful and sad. I’m not in the mushy place when I behold this gray hair that I plucked out of my head or when I watch CHEAF (yes, that is the name she gave herself, yes, spelled like that) deliver her line. I’m in a place that I haven’t found the name of yet. I can’t tell you the name, but I can tell you how it feels. It’s like the mushy place, but instead of things feeling beautiful and sad, things feel beautiful and joyful.
When I’m in this place, I am fascinated, I am in love, and I am hopeful. In this place the unknowability of people and things feels sacred rather than hopeless. The sliver of knowability is enough; how lucky are we to know anything at all.
Maybe I should call this place the realizing place.
In this place, I realize:
the semi-translucent softness of the back of my mom’s hand;
the dampness of the air in the Rose Garden;
Buckett’s tiny gulp;
the warmth of making and serving Carbonara pasta;
how the light in the sunroom dapples my skin and the plants alike;
how calm I feel running my hand along your hair;
the unfettered joy of hearing the doorbell ring (and I didn’t order anything); I love running down the stairs; I love the moment right before I open the door and see —
my broccoli tattoo slant rhymes with my birthmark, one on each arm.
I agree with the Stage Manager: no, we don’t realize life while we’re living it, not every, every minute. But we do sometimes. We have some minutes where we are poets or saints.
I would love to know what you realize in the realizing place — what you see, hear, touch, smell, feel. If you’d like to share, fill in these blanks before the end of next week. I’ll share out the found poem in next week’s newsletter.
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