“Life is a river. You’re floating, beating back the current. A man, standing, canoes by. He runs into a rock and falls on his ass. His dog paddles up to him. Your friends are behind you. They are there, but they are not you.”
This was the line of thinking my brain found its way to last weekend, on the James River in Richmond, Virginia. It started as a reflexive sardonic reflection on my actual place in space-time, a supposedly meaningless mocking of the wuji bullshit that my Western, science-loving ass sometimes reaches for, despite (or maybe because of, given how much I enjoy self-derision) my proclivities towards intentionality, meditation, awareness, and acceptance.
I mean, I was literally wading in a river. And, yes, I watched a guy take an unexpected seat in his canoe. (I laughed.)
But, like so much of my life that seems incidental or that I want to keep meaningless, the kind of seemingly profound realization that comes only in moments of supposed clarity washed over me. My friends aren’t me – and yet I wished they were. I wanted them to be me, for me to be them, for them to be subsumed into my identity and vice versa. I felt a desperate need to be near them – a familiar feeling in group settings – to talk with them, fill the silence and empty space between us with something, anything. I looked towards them for physical comfort, in the same way I look towards them to affirm my decisions and worthiness.
And then I realized that my desperation to be subsumed into them was only a layer resting on top of the true bedrock here: I didn’t want to be me, and so I was looking to be entombed by someone or something else.
Of course, this consistent desire has led primarily to my feeling incredibly aimless, lost, and unsure. (Here I think of some Dr. Dog lyrics: “When you can’t be yourself, there’s just too much to be.”)
And, moreover, it’s an almost unbelievably childish impulse. It’s almost comical in the way that it invokes a womb. (“Envelop” is a word that comes to mind.)
An example: Recently, I finished David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. Near the end of the unfinished novel, a character, Meredith Rand, describes her stay in a psychiatric home, her conversations with an orderly (who she would eventually marry) there, and her ensuing realizations.
She describes one such realization: “The only way you can be mean to yourself is if you deep down expect somebody else is going to gallop up and save you, which is a child’s fantasy. Reality meant nobody else was for sure going to be nice to me or treat me with any respect—that was the point of his thing about growing up, realizing that—and nobody else was for sure going to see me or treat me the way I wanted to be seen, so it was my job to make sure to see myself and treat myself like I was really worthwhile. It’s called being responsible instead of childish. The real responsibilities are to myself.”
And there I was, conversing with a river, realizing how much of a child’s fantasy I had been wallowing in for years. And now the real responsibility starts.