Begin It

"Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it.
Action has magic, grace and power in it."
(Goethe, qtd by Dani Shapiro in Devotion, 236-237)

I have begun bgfay.com and have 49 subscribers. I've begun a writer's Twitter account and am getting the hang of providing a service to other writers. I have begun the difficult process of quitting my job before it debilitates me even further than it already has. I'm meeting with two friends to discuss a business idea that felt almost too foolish to say out loud but which, now that I've had the courage to say it, they think is an idea worth exploring.

Nothing is done. Nothing will be done. Not until death. Aiming for done is foolish, dangerous. I'm never done.

That bothers me more than I would like. By now I hoped to have accepted such things. Acceptance is another thing that is never done, damn it. I am always in the process of learning to accept. It all feels like failure but might instead be growth. Slow growth but growth nonetheless. Still, it feels like failing over and over every day of my life.

Having begun, I am finding new ideas. Hundreds of things come up for the blog. I keep finding things I to give on Twitter — not just post but give — because one thing leads to another. Talking about how difficult my job has become, how ill it is making me, has led to possibilities I didn't know before. I thought I was trapped. Beginning releases me. My friends and I have talked for an hour about the business idea. We will talk more and draw up plans.

Action begets actions. Beginning is progress.

I began the morning with slowly realizing my alarm was sounding for a second time. My first decision of the day was to turn it off. The second decision was more challenging: get up despite how tired and anxious I feel or stay in the warm comfort of doing nothing? I chose to get up and began doing it. I began the day.

Beginning, moving into action has left me touched by magic, grace, and power. What else can I do? What else might I begin?

Shoveling the Driveway After A Terrible Snow As Night And The Temperature Descend Into A Cold Fit For The Dead

I hold the snow shovel in my corporeal and gloved hands. The snow is terribly deep. It's beyond pushing down the drive and into the road and has to be taken one shovel at a time. It's nothing that can be done quickly. There is a process to it. A slow process. I lift a shovel-full and throw it high over the wall feeling it throughout body, mind, maybe even heart and soul. It's all too much, I think, this snow that I have to clear. I couldn't possibly. Then I dig the shovel in and throw it again.

Dad leans reluctantly on his old metal shovel with the wooden handle he wrapped in black tape where it began to split forty years ago. There's a chunk out of the metal edge where he tried to pry something up with it. Maybe ice. Maybe something ridiculous. The shovel and he have come back looking just as they had the day before he died or whatever day it was that he and I last shared this life. He would have preferred to come back younger, stronger, but the living bring back the dead as they wish, never the other way around. Dad excepts this, accepts what I've given him.

He has taken up smoking again. Why the hell not, his expression says as I watch him strike the match and cup it close to his face where it shines in his glasses. Then the smoke hides his eyes and blows out past me. I can't smell anything and wonder if it's just his breath floating on the frozen breeze like mine. No, I think. It's certainly not that. Right Dad, I say. He wipes his nose with a gloved hand. That old leather glove is worn, stained with grease and oil. He touches the top of the old knit hat he still wears. It's one I cast aside at ten as unfashionable. Nothing wrong with it, his shrug says. I exhale and it's as if he has blown a cloud of smoke across me.

I survey the driveway I've cleared, the snow left to shovel. Percentages, that's what I'm calculating. Dad looks. He thinks in fractions. I say, about two-thirds to go, my breath blowing hard away from us. He nods. The afternoon sky has gone dark and the snowstorm is giving way slowly to falling temperatures. We're headed down below zero, frigid, breath-stealing cold.

Dad finishes his cigarette and tosses the butt in a pile of snow I've thrown over the wall. It doesn't fizzle but disappears. He holds the handle of the shovel like a tool but uses it as a staff, something to hold him up or hold him here. I tell him to rest, just take it easy, Dad. Be here with me.

I dig in the shovel and throw snow high up out of the driveway. Again and again. Dad stands and watches. There's no hurry. The streetlight at the foot of the drive flickers to life as I throw another shovel of snow up high over the wall. The wind catches it, blows it back at me, right through where Dad stands. That snow blinds me. I'm so tired. I rub my eyes with the back of my glove and open them again worried, anxious that I'm alone. The night is growing so cold and though the streetlight illuminates all the work left for me on this Earth it has put out every single star in the heavens. I dig the shovel in and throw it hard against the blowing wind.

Diagnoses & Cures

For as long as I have known her, my wife's eyes have itched. In college I remember her enjoying a good eye rub the way a dog enjoys a belly rub for as long as you'll give it. There were times when her groans of pleasure as she rubbed her eyes were almost obscene. Her eyes, almost always behind glasses or capped in contact lenses, have never been kind to her though I've always found them lovely, penetrating, and warm.

Lately though her eyes just hurt. Something has been really wrong. After rubbing she clenches them closed, grits her teeth, and shakes her fists, pain radiating from the sockets. Often, reaching to rub them, she catches herself and its as if she's tying herself to the mast. Must not rub, she tells herself. The pain and burning go on and on.

We had a snow day this week. She and I are paid to teach and did the usual dance of having a surprise day off. I sat down to write (trying to write my way out of teaching) and she grabbed her phone, called the eye doctor, and asked for an emergency appointment. They had one that morning and she took it, got ready and went out into the horrible cold.

She has long figured she's allergic but a downside to living in Syracuse is that we don't have the best doctors. So far no one had determine that she is allergic to anything. But just look at the skin all around my eyes! she says. The doctors shrug and leave her worrying that she's making it all up, that she's weak, or that this is just bad luck. She knows it's not make believe but hasn't found any help.

At the appointment, the eye doctor figured it out: contact lenses. She is allergic to the contacts she has worn nearly every day. They've aggravated her condition like tearing at a scab every day. The doctor prescribed drops, daily (disposable) lenses, and a return in a few weeks. We picked up the prescription at Wegmans and she started on the drops right away.

Oh my God, she said. My eyes don't itch. They don't hurt.

There weren't the moans of her eye rubbing days, but the relief and wonder were a magic to behold. One trip to the right doctor, a few drops, and already relief. So simple yet so elusive.

---

I have taught in the same school system since 2001 and felt it to be the wrong place at least since 2006. Sunday through Thursday nights I get maybe five hours sleep and wake often, sometimes restlessly shifting from two until four in the morning when I finally get up to write. I wear a nightguard at night because I have ground my teeth down measurably. Since September I have gained up to fourteen pounds. I've seen my therapist every two weeks for more than a decade because I feel anxious and removed from real contentment and balance. I sink regularly into depression, sometimes for weeks.

I feel these things except when school is on break. Summer, I'm a healthy man. Christmas, February, and April breaks I'm a happy man. On the weekend I'm almost happy and healthy but the school week looms large and I cannot come all the way down from anxiety. This seemed like regular life.

My new dentist mentioned my grinding. I asked, "any ideas what I can do about it?" He said, "reduce stress?" I rolled my eyes and, now that I think of it, clenched my jaw. I'm clenching now. A previous dentist suggested a glass of whiskey before bed. There doesn't seem to be enough bourbon in all of Kentucky.

No amount of rubbing makes it any better.

Two weeks ago, writing an assignment from a book, I decided to quit my job. It won't take effect for a few months, but I won't go back next school year. I felt better. Suddenly. Measurably. That feeling surprised me enough I stopped writing and sank warmly into that feeling. The clouds parted. Blue sky. Sunshine. Warmth.

I told my wife and kids. I told my brother and mother. I told friends. I told colleagues at school. This is it, I said. I revised my resignation letter. Each mention of my plan was frightening but leavening. I felt myself rising, buoyed up toward the surface. I ordered business cards to hand out at my next writing conference and will no longer introduce myself as a public school teacher affiliated with that job. Every step felt like a release, a benediction, a healing.

Oh my God, I think. I'm not filled with dread. I don't hurt.

Friday night I read Dani Shapiro's Devotion until I was tired enough to turn out the light. My wife dropped medicine into her eyes. "How does it feel?" I asked. She said, "it burns a little, but the relief—" she shook her head and smiled. I closed my eyes. My thoughts drifted away. I was quiet. The night was still. I slept through the night and rose Saturday morning ready to write, feeling no pain.

Head In The Sand

Alan Jacobs writes in his January 23, 2019 newsletter:

"On Tuesday morning, January 22, I read a David Brooks column about a confrontation that happened on the National Mall during the March for Life. Until I read that column I had heard nothing about this incident because I do not have a Facebook account, have deleted my Twitter account, don’t watch TV news, and read the news about once a week. If all goes well, I won’t hear anything more about the story. I recommend this set of practices to you all."

My first thought is to agree with this but that's followed hard upon by the notion that Jacobs and I have our heads in the sand. It can be some of both I think. There may be benefits to having my head in the sand when it comes to the news which often has the appearance of and is as insubstantial as gossip.

Like Jacobs I also wrote about that confrontation on the National Mall and have since avoided all news of it. My brother brought up a couple points about it but that has been the sum total of my reading, listening, or viewing of the event since the morning after it happened. I liked what my brother said about it being the perfect news story for our times because absolutely no one, not even the participants, can say for sure what happened and there is nothing we can believe about it other than the assumptions we brought to it. My experience with difficult students colored how I saw and reacted to the situation. The story wasn't about anything that happened far away. It was all about what I feel is happening near and to me.

Look at me with my head in the sand. Alan Jacobs is there with me somewhere. Neither of us deny the crises of the moment, the evils perpetrated by too many in power, the problems plaguing our world, but rather than focus on the minutia of whatever just happened I want to consider a longer view if for no other reason than I have felt how easy it is to be manipulated by this Republican administration that distracts from their intentions with antics and ridiculous rhetoric.

Jacobs quotes Brian Eno:

We don’t yet, however, live in The Long Now. Our empathy doesn’t extend far forward in time. We need now to start thinking of our great-grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren, as other fellow-humans who are going to live in a real world which we are incessantly, though only semi-consciously, building. But can we accept that our actions and decisions have distant consequences, and yet still dare do anything?

and responds:

My question for Eno: Is it possible to think constructively and empathetically about our great-grandchildren, and their great-children, without also thinking constructively and empathetically about our great-grandparents, and their great-grandparents? I suspect it is not possible — that without understanding our past we will be unable to wisely direct the future — and that’s one reason why I’m writing the book I’m writing.

I like the idea of considering this moment in terms of the far future and distant past. I like imagining my great-grandchildren and great-grandparents neither of whom exist in the world in this moment. I never met my great-grandparents and don't even have grandchildren yet. Holding these people in mind is a challenging act of thinking, imagining, and empathizing. It requires I thoughtfully consider my place in a very large world one that not only extends around the circumference of the Earth but reaches far back and forward in time. It affects how I feel about even mundane things like shopping.

Friends wonder why I link to Indiebound.org books when I would likely make more sales through Amazon. I avoid Amazon because when I consider the times of my great-grandparents and the lives of my great-grandchildren I'm disturbed by the ideas Amazon represents. I don't want to get on a soapbox (not today anyway) about Amazon but thinking long-term has me shopping elsewhere (or not shopping at all). I've long been a person unwilling to delay gratification and so everything Amazon does satisfies those desires. Resistance isn't easy but neither is it futile.

I've recently made a big decision about my future. I considered how I was feeling in the present, what my past has indicated, and what I want from my future. The decision has been made difficult for years because of everyday distractions some of which are important (paying bills, providing the family with healthcare, saving for retirement). Being in the moment when I'm holding the bill or looking at our checking account balance, I haven't been able to think past those immediate emergencies and have pushed the decision to a time when I'm not distracted, a quieter time. That quiet time has yet to come but I've been brought to thinking back on the example of my father and forward to the examples I want to set for my children. I have been confronted by my long-term desire. It's not enough to be concerned with whatever happened ten minutes ago on Instagram, in The New York Times, or along the National Mall. There are larger issues to address and on which to focus especially in the locus of our individual lives.

There is no shortage of crises. Even with my head in this sand I can still see and feel that. The crisis on which I'm most focused at the moment has little to do with the morning news or anything on Twitter. It stretches from a much more distant place and out into the great unknown. Instead of the news I'm listening to jazz on vinyl from 63 years ago. It sounds good and clear. No sand in my ears. Maybe I don't have my head in the sand so much as I'm lying somewhere on a beach looking up into the infinite sky and listening to the waves which have pounded that sand seemingly since time began.