A Wave and the Low Whistle of the Train

On learning to love the world

I'm on a train into the city on this very foggy and drizzly Sunday morning, feeling the familiar creep of despair after reading the news, and homesickness from saying goodbye to Ben and Gertrude for a few days. I will return to the apartment where we have crammed all of our belongings from our bedrooms and bathroom into the foyer and living room to allow our contractor to fix the walls and paint. We’ve lived here for 18 years and it shows. I am grateful for this facelift, but a little overwhelmed. And tired. I slept on our couch all week surrounded by bedding, a botanical garden of houseplants and boxes of books. The work will continue for at least another two weeks. I’m grateful to have the house and the awe of nature for a respite, but back to my work as a forewoman I go.

This week, again, I was unmoored by the bounty of my good fortune and privilege alongside awareness of lack and uncertainty. I complain about the packed apartment, but am grateful I can pay for help to repair and paint it in the colors we’ve chosen. I was distraught while driving in a taxi as I watched a mother and her children sit on the median of the Westside Highway as they waited for someone to give them a dollar or a bite of food. Many of their belongings sat on the road beside them — stroller, stuffed backpacks, a supermarket tote holds a pillow, an umbrella shielding the sun. My mind rattled off: Who am I to complain about my couch in my comfortable home of nearly two decades? Perhaps the complaints are my own clumsy way of acknowledging this imbalance.

Here on the train, I’m surrounded by beauty. The Hudson is misty; our drive here was foggy. The heather green of the new leaves on the trees ground the heavy gray sky. I would have liked to have stayed in bed all day, yet there are pools of people decked in windbreakers and hooded raincoats reeling in fish along the craggy bank of the river. A man my age holds hands with a young boy. An older man with a gray beard the color of the sky is waving them over and pointing to his tackle box. Generations huddled at the loamy soil. The conductor blows the train’s low whistle and they turn to wave in unison. I am trying to remember their faces, but the train is moving too fast. I want to study them, hold onto their smiles, touch their outstretched hand with mine and say thank you. This is what is good.

And then we’re off and my mind drifts back to the news and my to do list and all of the distractions that serve to entrap.

The tyrannical soundtrack: why is everything in life so hard, everything would be so much better if I just planned better, made more money, was smarter and more clever, weighed twenty pounds less, had thought to declutter sooner, was a better painter who could have just done all of this work during the pandemic, could just go on a long vacation and come back to this reality finally over and a new, fresher and cleaner version in its place.

And then comes the guilt, the ouroboros eating its own head. How dare you berate yourself with this crap when all of that — waves hands at the state of the world — is happening over there?

This old voice, the bully, is the opposite of the equanimity I've been seeking (There are horrors and there are joys, and it is our job to seek equanimity in that) and this endless litany of not-enough is NEVER enough, but naming it is the first step to freedom.

A ship named WISDOM is docked in the middle of the waterway, centered between east and west of the Hudson. I try to photograph it, capture it — that’s the PERFECT photo for this newsletter! — but the trees are in the way. Metaphor? Wisdom is not static, an ideal to be attained; it peeks through in the quiet, rumbling of life, gathered over time, fleeting. Enjoyed as is, a wisdom itself.

Catherine Andrews

wrote in

The Sunday Soother

:

“The existential despair of potential perfection might feel particularly acute right now. Those of us who can see how good it could be—who dream of better—are living with the relentless ache of the gap between the vision and the reality.

And thus, we are tasked with the near-impossible: to still love the world even when it is not yet the one we long for.”

Our task: Love the world even when it is not yet the one we long for.

Equanimity means neither squandering my privilege with guilt nor pushing away another's suffering with numbness. It means feeling both the grateful comfort of painting my walls in colors I chose and the ache for the mother on the median who chooses only which dollar to accept. In the space between these truths, I'm learning that loving this imperfect world doesn't require me to solve the gap alone. It’s in learning to honor the gap and the fullness every day, stretching out my hand to that family of fishermen on the banks of the Hudson, to the family on the highway, and carrying them with me long after the train goes whooshing by.

I promise, there is a ship called Wisdom through those trees.