The More You Love
Planning, Not Planning, and the River of Managed Chaos
“Hopscotch is played with a pebble that you move with the tip of your toe. The things you need: a sidewalk, a pebble, a toe, and a pretty chalk drawing, preferably in colors. On top is Heaven, on the bottom is Earth, it's very hard to get the pebble up to Heaven, you almost always miscalculate and the stone goes off the drawing. But little by little you start to get the knack of how to jump over the different squares (spiral hopscotch, rectangular hopscotch, fantasy hopscotch, not played very often) and then one day you learn how to leave Earth and make the pebble climb up into Heaven… the worst part of it is that precisely at that moment, when practically no one has learned how to make the pebble climb up into Heaven, childhood is over all of a sudden and you're into novels, into the anguish of the senseless divine trajectory, into the speculation about another Heaven that you have to learn to reach too.”
Hopscotch (Julio Cortázar)
I’ve never been a planner. Call it my spiritual sickness, but I’ve almost never kept a calendar, or a journal, or any time capsule reaching more than a couple of weeks into the future. The aversion to recordkeeping is deep-rooted. I don’t travel with an itinerary, I dislike making reservations at restaurants, and I think writing from an outline is a total buzzkill.
Life, for me, is like riding an air mattress down a river of managed chaos. You do the best you can, and at some point, you go down. I am immune to the charms of list-making.
Why do I do this to myself?
The answer, I confess, has grown beyond my field of vision. Nurture a phobia long enough, and it will eventually lose its form. I’m no longer able to see the full shape of the thing.
Here is a banal proposition: We develop fear in order to protect something we desire. What we perceive to be a person’s core attributes are, in all likelihood, projections of his or her most intense fears.
So—what do you want? It’s the question of a lifetime here in America, and we ask it of ourselves long before we can be trusted to answer. I don’t doubt there’s something romantic about following the dreams of my five-year-old self to the ends of the earth. I’m just not sure my kindergarten brain knew the difference between fulfillment and martyrdom.
The truth is, I had no idea what I wanted. For a very long time. When I went to college, I knew (at least intuitively) that I still didn’t know. I could feel the stuckness of a thing inside of me. In the absence of an obvious path, my unconscious mind took charge. It was time to expand the data set, to try a little bit of everything and see how everything felt. Let everything be the goal.
And so I optimized for exposure rather than endpoint. I never consciously thought about it that way, but that was the general mindset, the vibe of the voice I spoke to myself with. I don’t think it is that uncommon.
What we can’t understand, when we are young and our field of vision is vast, is how powerful that inner voice can be—how mindset resolves into lifestyle, lifestyle into memory, and memory into character, which the ancient Greeks thought to be synonymous with destiny.
For better and for worse, this years-long untethering has been at the foreground of my adult life. In many ways, it is the best approximation of who I am, and a reflection of the core fear I still carry today: that I’ll fall into something I can’t get out of.
Somewhere along the way, people—my parents—started to worry. They wanted to protect me, as all parents do, from a wayward spirit. After all, by then my mom and dad had lived long lives and developed their own conceptions of right and wrong and naturally they were afraid of losing one of their two children to some far-flung boneyard of the American experiment.
What they maybe didn’t realize is that you can’t tell people anything. It takes immense, novelistic effort to simply imagine something we haven’t directly experienced. The speculative side of our brain cannot converse with the memories of others.
What I didn’t realize is that my wandering would eventually bring me far closer to them. Maybe we understand each other a bit better; we communicate more directly now. Maybe in order to appreciate anything for what it is, we have to get some distance—to separate the facts from our local perception. Maybe there is indeed some joy in witnessing, even from afar, the person your child is becoming.
But if I could travel back in time and, say, head off my younger self at the docks, if I could do that, I wouldn’t give him a thing. A kick in the butt, maybe, and a few choice words. Something for him to hold up next to the sights he sees along the way…
That free-wheeling has its blessings. With nowhere to go and no one to answer to, you will learn to indulge your own imagination. You will develop a fluid sense of self. You will learn to discover things on your own time, and to think outside of conventional opinion structures.
That the process of finding your path is not a happy one. Fulfillment is something you acquire through labor. It exists on a plane orthogonal to happiness, which is a state of mind.
That in spite of your best efforts you will unearth rare and pure forms of happiness, anyway. You will learn to surprise yourself, and to laugh as you pass through life’s empty rooms.
That uncertainty, risk, randomness, etc. are all just different forms of oxygen. That is to say, they are prolific in the air, and indispensable not only to existence itself but to the knowledge and sensation of being alive. You can only hold your breath for so long.
That there are times, when you could be anyone, that you won’t like who you become.
That you will end up doing nothing for long stretches of time. You will pick things up and put them down, often. You will wonder why nothing around you seems to last, and this thought will unveil the road to dependency.
That each of us can name that solitary player in his life for whom the night may never end. Some nights that person will be you, and you will suffer the same illusion just long enough for it to appear uncompromised, infinite. There are no breaks in the insomniac’s dream.
That the search comes with restless legs. Every once in a while, you will wake up on uninhabitable shores. You will watch as the world streams along without you, oblivious to your inability to hold onto whatever floated past you when the tide went out.
That your brain is the perfect enemy. No matter what path you choose or change you make, there is a part of your mind devoted to contrary imagery. Naysaying, fomo, visions of doom, the like. As much as you might believe it, this voice is not your own.
That time is not precious, and life is not a gift. Life is the impotent container.
That you are given the cup to collect the infinite substance. Which is ???
That you will, in fact, fall into something you can’t get out of. That there is a reason no one rises into love. That, at a time and date you’ll never see coming, you will give yourself up.
That you will develop a sense of urgency when you recognize the imminence of this fact. You will not notice it but your inner voice is changing again. You are manifesting something new now.
You are starting to plan.
