walking through the fire

inevitable hard things

Monet, En promenade près d’ Argenteuil, 1875

I think about one line in Ted Chiang’s short story Exhalation a lot: that experience is incompressible. He was talking more generally about the experience of children growing up — you can think back to an awkward phase where you were largely intolerable to others, malicious, careless. When you acted out of bad faith or impulse. Though you wish you could’ve skipped those chapters, they were essential moments of learning and maturation despite the embarrassment or pain that accompanied them.

What he means is you can’t bypass steps in the plot, or take an easy, sweet, pill to make experiences shorter or less painful. It’s true we all have guides: people who kindly simplify our routes and make the external journey less arduous, but the journey will still be arduous within the internal landscape nonetheless.

Historically I’ve wrestled with this duality coming in contact with difficult problems. First, the level-headed, begrudging acceptance that yes, this is meant to be hard. In the same vein, I’m like god, why is this so hard? Sooner or later, I get over myself. It’s not that my problems are uniquely hard, they just generally take energy to solve and think through. Or they’re meaty and complex, but I shouldn’t shy away from complexity. Beneath all that complexity is a layer of simplicity, and simplicity belies beauty.

There are a myriad of moments I wished I could have handled better or more effectively. If you regularly put a lot of pressure on yourself, you might relate to my frustration. In hindsight, it’s obvious the approaches, methods, attitudes I could’ve taken in certain situation that would’ve led to more accurate and strictly better outcomes on the pareto frontier.

But it was through those mishaps I learned worthwhile lessons relatively cheaply: fail early, fail often, stand up for what you need and want, and if you communicate from a place of honesty and trust, hard truths will continue to be hard, but loving. Every misery, every victory is owned by you, and that responsibility is your greatest burden and volition.

There’s not much else I want to say in today’s reflection other than that I’m certain there are really hard moments ahead, and also really precious and effervescent, ecstatic moments too. The essential thing is working toward having a mind that embraces both realities, and that can hold the tension between vital opposites that exist across experiences: light, dark, dissonance, resonance, fear, hope. If I can recognize that even difficulty has its own sort of poetry, I can be kinder to myself when I feel stuck in a holding pattern or wallow in a trough for a long time.

Sometimes I can’t pre-empt what to do before things get hard. It’s only when things get hard that I learn what to do through the process. I’ll make a few costly mistakes, and continue to live intensely in the balance. But I’ve made peace with the overarching need for endurance and patience with myself regarding tackling hard things: I’m crawling before I’m walking. I’m walking before I’m sprinting.

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This was an unedited post - just thinking and writing in a stream of consciousness in the early hours of the morning. Happy thursday :)

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