All life is math, really

 

I admire commitment.

I’ve always suspected I haven’t got what it takes, and the dozen unfinished posts in my blog folder are pretty strong evidence that follow-through and staying power are not my strong suits. There are people out there in the World Wide Wilderness who are so absolutely reliable about writing that I wonder if they ever do anything else. And if the signal of their latest post pricks my mild resentment – that grubby cohort of envy – it’s only because it means I’ll have to use some of my writing time to read and comment. 

Writing a recent draft on the magical aspects of analogies, I couldn’t decide where it was going. I like things to be joined up and for essays to circle back and complement themselves, which might be the only lesson from high school that has stuck, apart from remembering how to solve a quadratic equation. (I’m not saying that to show off but to salvage my own self-respect. ‘You don’t have a math brain’ remains one of the most egregious insults I can imagine. Despite thinking, back then, that learning how to manipulate X and Y was a waste of time, I did have reason in 1987 to formulate my very own equation in order to solve a word puzzle in the International Herald Tribune. That gave me pause, and in the years since I have reconsidered my short-sightedness about mathematics).

The analogy I had fixed on was particularly apt to my situation and I was able to explore and develop it for some nine hundred words before reaching a dead end, where the grit of true commitment abandoned me, again. I didn’t really want to give it up, but neither could I find the motivation or the energy to do all the thinking that was needed for the whole thing to make sense, to give it some meat. To maybe even be the catalyst for some reader’s Aha Moment.

But I made myself go back to it day after day, or, more precisely, morning after morning. Afternoons and writing are mutually incompatible, I have found, and there are better places to nap than on my computer. The weeks sped by while the essay inched along, on average, by twenty new words a day, nullified by the thirty or so old ones that were rearranged, reconsidered and often rejected. This process – if it can even be called something so constructive – is somewhat discouraging, although I recently discovered that, for Kurt Vonnegut, writing makes him feel ‘like a legless, armless man with a crayon in his mouth’. I felt better knowing he and I shared some common ground. 

I had been writing about a real-life adventure on a river which involved being swept along by the current while, by contrast, others in my group diligently practiced manoeuvres with the aim of becoming better practitioners of their sport. Gradually, I began to realize that my little treatise on the analogy of life as a river and me as a kayak was linked to an existential question.

I wanted to take the literal meaning and figurative sense of ‘going with the flow’ and develop that theme, with some background music appropriate to my (mild) anguish over my difficulty to be self-directed. You know what I mean, don’t you? After the rush and tumble of white water rafting, haven’t you ever found yourself drifting in a limpid pool of placidity, unable to do much more than raise your head now and then to sip your lemonade?

Having moved from analogy to metaphor, and never sure where the line is between the two anyway, I think it’s better to speak plainly.

Mid-life. Retirement. Le troisième age. You’d done your growing up, helped the kids to do theirs, maybe gone back to fine-tune your own again, and now you realize that many of the imperatives of your life-thus-far have up and left. And if, belatedly, you recognize that all that time you spent looking after others was pretty gratifying (even though at the time you might have resented not having any time to yourself and might even have suspected that your very self would be permanently subsumed by the general stuff of life), you also have great hope about the potential that lies in these calmer waters.

It might even have been an exciting thought. At last there would be great chunks of time to devote to what had heretofore been only dreams. Things you had only thought about while swimming laps and waiting at long red lights. Something you might have confessed to a friend, self-consciously , over a coffee at Starbucks. I’d like to write. Um, yeah, I have an idea for a book. Rolling your eyes, before she could do it for you.

At first it seemed do-able. You might even have got to the point where you described yourself as a writer, because in the void left by the departure of children and the close of a career, you did more writing than anything else. And that’s what makes a writer, isn’t it? The act of writing. It might even have felt like a reasonable truth after a few repetitions. The novelty of it carried you along for a good while, and when your interest began to falter, you gave yourself the first of a series of pep talks.

When you found out that you could commune with others like yourself, you learned that self-doubt is pretty much a given in this solitary, reflective occupation. And that it’s often hard to feel like you’ve accomplished anything at all, even when forty thousand words have somehow managed to accumulate in a folder optimistically – euphemistically, even – entitled ‘The Novel’.

That’s where the existentialism comes in. (I admit that my grasp on what ‘existentialism’ really means is tenuous, and that this disclaimer may be  redundant for those of you who do understand it).

Eventually the leap is made between ‘what have I accomplished?’ to ‘why am I doing this?’ And as you know, that’s sometimes a ‘what’s the purpose of life?’ question in disguise. And what a humdinger of a contemplation that is! I don’t know the answer and am sure that, even if I devoted my remaining years to serious study of the issue, I would never arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. The relatively little time I’ve already spent thinking about it has only convinced me that whatever rationale I could come up with would only be valid for me, and wouldn’t be provable, in any case.

You don’t have to be a writer to get into this morass. You could be doing something far more helpful, making your corner of the world a better place, for instance, and be faced with the same conundrum. You might spend your days mentoring wayward youth, keeping the wolves from other people’s doors and knitting teddy bears for African children and still be unsure that a backward look would leave you satisfied with your contribution.

But of all the things it is possible spend time on, writing seems particularly useless. Self-indulgent. Pretentious. An activity without any particular benefit to anyone, save a momentary pleasure if the result is well-crafted or illuminating or funny. And I’m not even talking about pleasure for others – let the writer among you who has never re-read her own emails just to snuggle up with her own cleverness raise her hand!

And while we’re at it, how about all those ideas you’ve talked yourself out of writing about because they weren’t fresh or original or interesting to anybody but you? And how far down that road did you go? Did you get to the point where you questioned the worth of all but the most luminous or learned writings? Were you ready to write off – pardon me – your blog, blogs in general, writer’s workshops, creative writing classes, writing just for fun (my favourite contradiction in terms) , and especially writing for profit?

Not having the requisite mental firecrackers to consider how all of this ties in with the raison d’être of the human race, I took a philosophical shortcut. Never mind if I don’t have a calling, a higher purpose or even a really good reason to get out of bed in the morning. Never mind if my most useful moments on earth have been spent in the service of small children, or that I can’t envisage ever being or doing anything that will change the world. Never mind that when my kids’ memories fade to black, all trace of me will disappear.

Some might build bridges, solve unsolvable puzzles, find a cure for apathy, and for their contributions they’ll be rightfully lauded. Some might go to sleep most nights knowing that they have helped someone feel good, made a life better, or at least be relatively sure that they’ve done their best at doing what they do.

But for me, the trick is to think that, despite not believing I’ve been put here for any particular purpose, I am free to create one. To commit to doing what I do, no matter how often I suspect the futility of it. To pack up the doubt and the cynicism and the unanswerable questions about the meaning of life and just get on with it.