basking in the grace of others

on agency

Swan #7, Hilma af Klint

A single sentence can modify reality. A few weeks ago M emphasized that you’d be surprised how much of life is malleable and negotiable, which sounds like a truism until you actually negotiate for something you want and get it. I realized long ago that what determines your success in the game of life is really simply how persistent and efficacious you are at asking for things you want.

In her excellent essay on agency,

Cate Hall

describes the principle of courting rejection: “ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what’s reasonable are accurate.” One of her accompanying points is how embracing low status can be a moat:

Making changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time where you are actually bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.

What I’d add is that these hidden paths toward agency can often be inaccessible alone. But they can emerge with the right type of milieu. People amplify agency in you through example, instruction, and care! When your ideas are fragile, when you go through said rejection or low status cycle, your milieu can nurture or undermine your dreams. In the best case, they can help you travel beyond your own linearity.

I have spent my whole life basking in the grace of others. Small measures of kindness and affordances given to me have rippled out from a moment in time and gone on to alter the trajectory of my life.

Getting into college through really odd and circuitous means is a good example. As a teen, I enrolled myself into poetry programs to work on my fledgling portfolio. I was really not very good, and had an incredible amount to learn. At the time I was really obsessed with Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Dante Alighieri. The final semester before senior year, without me asking, the head of one poetry program put my portfolio and an accompanying note on the Penn admissions desk. That moment inflected my path. Importantly, through the benevolence of another human being who didn’t have a lot to gain from helping me. It was pure kindness. It was a loving push.

While this is a very direct example with clear inputs and outputs, there are so many illegible gifts we receive from others. We alter one another’s internal cosmology, how we view ourselves within the world, all the time.

I keep returning to the way Patti Smith describes the transformation her friend Sam Shepherd has on her world model in her memoir Just Kids:

There was a part in the play where Sam wanted us to have a battle of language. So he said this is where Slim, his character, he improvises his language and then Cavale, my character, improvises back. And I said, how do we do that? What will I say? And he said, I’ll say stuff and you just say stuff back at me.

And I said, what if I make a mistake?

And he said, Patti Lee, it’s improvising—you can’t make a mistake. If you miss a beat, then you invent another beat. And that made perfect sense to me. And [with] that little instruction, I learned how to improvise, which has served me my whole life in everything I do. It’s one of the greatest lessons I got from Sam.

A turn of phrase can evolve into a technology of sorts, inspire a different interaction pattern with the world. The improvisation that Patti Smith writes about can be as granular as a momentary change in acting, or more broadly, can be philosophy of moving dynamically with novel stimuli.

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Recent online discourse makes the world feel increasingly individualistic, isolated in its expression. Conscientiousness is declining; We’re disenchanted by our machines; it’s a deeply lonely world. You are wholly responsible for your rise to success and your worst mistakes.

All this is true! Self engineered agency is realer than I can even hope to articulate. But we can’t discount the infrastructure of loving grace from both strangers and friends on the very small human scale. Much less is written about the opportunities others extend to us as markers of good faith and good will. The agency others sharpen and polish within us that imbue courage and hope. If I could, thought I can’t, simplify one of the most important qualities of love, it’s that: we make each other more brave.

Albert Camus in a letter to his friend René Char on 17 September 1957, translated from French:

The more I age the more I find that we can live only with beings who liberate us, who love us with an affection as light to carry as strong to experience. Life today is too hard, too bitter, too weakening, for us to suffer more new servitudes coming from those we love […]. It’s as this that I am your friend, I love your happiness, your freedom.

I feel this all the time. My friends liberate me, most often from my own self imposed limitations and fears. With the right interlocuters, every conversation is emergent: you start somewhere completely different on the map and arrive somewhere new.

To unblock someone on the route to their own potential is the single most valuable thing you can do for others. There are more portals than the eye can see, but to step into them we require guides with different senses.

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