I’ve been quiet lately. I’m sick, and life has been quite busy, and I’ve been reading a lot. Currently soaking up Marilynne Robinson’s When I Was a Child I Read Books. Read it if you care about this world and/or this life and/or anything really. It’s bold, true, wise, cutting, and filled with a deep and honest love.
As is everything she’s ever written, I think. She has got to be the wisest person in the world. I like to talk a lot about people I’d like to sit down with and share coffee with. I usually say Tracy Chapman, which is still true, but I think I’ve been neglectful in not including Marilynne Robinson on that coffee date. And Mary Oliver. Michelle Obama too, for good measure. I’d just like to listen to them talk about things, because I think they understand the world in such a beautiful and raw and true way. An honest way. I respect that. I want that.
The older I get (which is not that old yet I realize; I’m not delusional), the more I appreciate honesty. I lied a lot when I was a kid. I lied even more when I was a teenager. I was good at it, knew I could get away with it, and didn’t understand the reasons not to. Telling the truth just wasn’t appealing. I don’t know what changed, and maybe if I gave it more thought I could figure it out, but I’ll be honest and say that that just sounds exhausting to me right now…regardless, things changed. I stopped lying – and things were fine. I remember one morning when I was probably nineteen years old…I had been out the night before at a party at a friend’s house. I was supposed to have returned to my parent’s house that night. I had been drinking, had become somewhat inebriated, and lost my keys. It was 4am and pouring rain and a friend had driven me to my parent’s house and I couldn’t find my keys. They were gone. So we went back to the party house where I slept in this kid’s sister’s bed for like an hour until I felt really sick and wandered the house drinking coffee until dawn. Arriving back at my parent’s home in the morning, my mom was surprised to see me come in the front door. She thought I had come home the night before. She asked me point-blank if I’d been drinking. I said yes. I didn’t get in trouble. It was so easy! It felt so normal!
Teenage recklessness aside, honesty became something I looked for in new friends at college, in the preaching from the chaplains at my Christian school, in the way I articulated what made me me. Life got difficult in college. Death and loss and trying to figure out who the fuck I thought I was and what I really believed…And it just seemed stupid to fake it, you know? What’s the point?
I got in a huge fight with my best friend during the summer before our junior year of college. She is a friend from high school, and we went to college across the country from each other. I don’t even remember how the fight originated, but it was brutal. And, drunk off my newfound love of honesty, I sent her a Facebook message (I don’t recommend ever using Facebook in fights or anything serious, just FYI) saying something like, “I’m just being honest, here,” and it opened up a whole bag of worms. We were messaging back and forth just spilling our ‘honest’ guts about all the shit the other person had done in the past. “Remember when you said you would come to this, but you didn’t, and I said I was sad, but really I was so so glad! Just being HONEST!” It was horrendous. I cried and cried and cried. It was honesty, but it wasn’t genuine. It was vengeful honesty, dredged up from the depths to serve an agenda. I don’t dig that. And it didn’t reflect who we were as people. It reflected a tiny dark part of who we are, sure, but it totally missed the wholeness of the people who are angry and loving and forgiving and hurt. And wholeness is huge, guys; wholeness is huge.
A lot of what Marilynne Robinson writes about is how silly it is to think we’ve got this world in the realm of our understanding. People are too complex and this life is too complex and this universe is too complex to be making all these claims all the time about “this is right” and “this is wrong” and “this is the only way” and “this is, clearly, how this came to be.” Maybe those things are true, but do we really think they are the whole truth? Wouldn’t letting ourselves just be amazed at this world be a whole lot more real and true and honest and genuine? Wouldn’t that maybe be the wiser choice? Wouldn’t doing that, just maybe, open us up to more of the endless discoveries this crazy place seems to offer?
In conclusion: Tracy Chapman, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Oliver, and Michelle Obama – please take me to coffee and teach me your ways.
