THE COLORFUL CHANGE OF REASONS Written by Melanie Jane Parker
You have always been more at home in the kingdom of the past than in the intergalactic hinterlands of the future, but if you look back over the last few years, you’ll find evidence of a burgeoning curiosity about what will—or what could—be. For months before the pandemic began you dreamt of a sky- high black tidal wave cresting over New York City. By the fourth month of the pandemic you were listening to astrology podcasts, by the seventeenth month you were reading the I Ching every morning, by the twenty-fourth month you are sub- scribed to so many newsletters you created a folder in which to archive them and you named it Magical Mystery. In the weeks after you found out you were pregnant, you dreamt of fields of amaranth and marigold, scrubby coastal cliffs wreathed with gorse, austere snow-capped mountain peaks. Near the final weeks of gestation, your lists consist mostly of tasks that entail spending money or spending time wading through bogs of bureaucracy. Election Day is here. Everything, once again, is at stake. No one, once again, can afford to not do their civic duty. You’ve never felt more reluctant to enter into the discourse, to have the little tornado of your own life wrapped into the big tornado of life in a failing democracy. “I can’t be the only one who needs a little calm before the storm of news and pundits and anger and charts and percentag- es and celebrations and reflections that this entirely unpredictable week seems likely to bring,” writes Heather Cox Richardson in her newsletter. You leave the apartment you’ve lived in for eleven years, bewil- dered mostly by the fact that you are now old enough to have in- habited one space for this long that is not a childhood home.At first you sort your belongings into totes and cardboard boxes according to a refined system of categorization which eventually devolves due to time, tiredness, and dwindling patience. One afternoon you rifle through all of the notebooks you’ve ac- cumulated over the last fifteen years, you fill a box with over twenty of them, and this box ends up on the sidewalk, a box full of papers covered in disposable thoughts, ideas, memories, secrets. “Everything is different now. Releasing, shifting, undoing, be- coming directionless.What might happen from here? I am practic- ing moving in asymmetry, without direction,” writes somatic teacher Suniti Dernovsek in her newsletter. Because you are invested in narrative elegance, you tend to work backward from critical points of your life, especially when you are blindsided and struggling to regain insight. You construct sto- rytelling schemas that add contour and clarity to the amorphous and blurry. You arrange select details, create a mise en scène out of fragments. You are etiological in your meaning-making. Your lay reading of psychological theory indicates that an obsessive compulsion to explain the past is at its core an attempt to know and control the future. You find it difficult to resist the worldview, which some may describe as anxious, that there is always a storm either approaching
or receding, that we live merely between surges, that phases of tran- quility and phases of volatility are equal parts of a unified, holistic cycle. You remember learning that anxiety may in some cases be an inherited trait, an adaptive feature with evolutionary utility, an in- stinct that helped your ancestors anticipate and survive life-threat- ening events. You wonder if calm is a delusion of retrospection, that in the wake of a transformative moment anything that occurred before would seem comparatively orderly and coherent. The Tao Te Ching says, “Life is a series of natural and sponta- neous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let re- ality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” You wonder about all the storms, disasters, violent convergen- ces that have been avoided through premonition or preparation. It occurs to you that there are storms you’ve been avoiding your whole life the outcome of which could very well have been purifying and restorative. You wonder if you should have spent more of your youth antic- ipating the future rather than attempting to live under the tyranny of the present moment. You wonder what it means, in the end, to have sufficiently braced yourself. You understand now how material goods can become articles of faith: bassinet, changing pad, disposable and reusable diapers, diaper pail, a wet wipe dispenser, washcloths, audio and video mon- itors, a wardrobe of unbearably small garments, swaddles, stroller, car seat, a small thermometer, even smaller nail clippers, an heir- loom rocking chair. You assume that the impulse to buy your way into a feeling of readiness is a markedly American trait, but you can’t deny the cor- relation between crossing items off your list and a sense of spiritual organization. Everyone who’s been through it tells you what to prepare for. Prepare to lose your mind. Prepare to experience the greatest love you’ve ever known. Prepare to lose all understanding of who you are. Prepare to enjoy every moment as much as possible. Prepare to lose your grip on time. Prepare to be a prisoner to clock time. Prepare for the happiest years of your life. Prepare for a purgatory of exhaustion, self-doubt, and regret. Your prenatal yoga teacher describes birth as a storm that pass- es through the body, passes through being the operative phrase. Most storm preparation entails a battening down of the hatches, strate- gies for preventing wind and water from penetrating a structure. But some storms come from within, and the only way through is total surrender to their primal intensity. You remember hearing that birth is a near-death experience, a wormhole that brings the two polarities of existence into an excru- ciatingly intimate pas de deux. Or maybe you misheard. Maybe birth and death aren’t polari- ties at all, maybe birth and death, like happiness and loss, are more origami-like in nature, folding over into the other.
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