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November 18, 2004
You know, from MY perspective...
So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the process of growing up, making the transition from a “young adult” into an adult-adult. Maybe it’s the getting married thing, or the realizing I’ll be 30 before we have a new president thing, but I’ve been looking at a lot of things in my life lately through the lens of how much older I feel now than I did four, eight, ten years ago – all times of my life when, at the time, I felt very grown up.
I’m actually finding it a pleasant surprise that I actually do feel like I’m gaining not just experience as I get older, but perspective. Perspective seems to be the constant theme in my realizations: How big of a deal various events are to me, how quickly a day or a week passes, how long a year or a decade or a century seems – these are what’s changing. I've been able to understand historical events in a much more full and interconnected way than I could even in college, as a History major. I see patterns and themes there that never occurred to me five years ago.
But this gaining perspective thing, while I’m enjoying it, is also a trade-off, which is what Patrick and I were talking about the other night: When you’re a little kid, the reason it feels like the month before Christmas takes eons to pass is because every day is full of new experiences that seem to fill your whole life, your whole mind.
The playdough handprint you painted as a gift for your mom in kindergarten that day. The Star Wars lunchbox your neighbor Corey just got that you can’t wait to get home and admire. The new technique you and your brother have discovered for sliding down the carpeted stairs on your belly while emitting a Tarzan-like chorus ah-ee-ah-ee-ah-ee-ah. As a kid, you focus so hard on the moment at hand that it seems to expand both temporally and in its importance. It’s generally said that children have shorter attention spans than adults, but I think that’s actually kind of a misleading way of describing the difference, at least from how I remember my own childhood.
As a kid, I could absorb myself completely in the world of my Playmobile figures or Breyer horses, and go for half an hour or more without my mind wandering out of the imaginary world I’d created for them. True, perhaps after half an hour I’d get up to go to the bathroom or get a snack and decide that I wanted to read a book or play on the swingset or bug my brother instead of returning to my game.
But now – it’s hard for me to remember the last time I focused for even 15 minutes on something without those thought interruptions – Oh, I’ve got to remember to buy some canned goods for the food drive at work – Did I pay the phone bill? – I should really try to stop eating so much ice cream, I’ve probably gained five pounds – Housing prices keep going up, man, I should really get on that whole pre-approval thing – I haven’t emailed my cousin in a while – Yeah. That. So while I may look like I’m focusing on a given task for hours at a time, it’s a surface-level focusing. There are very few things I can still get as absorbed in as I could as a child. My perspective has shifted.
Though now, when I do still find those things that completely absorb me, it feels like a revelation. I realized it this summer while picking raspberries on Powderhorn Island in Maine – a tiny little treeless island in the Sheepscot Bay near West Boothbay Harbor, where I have been picking wild raspberries with my family every summer since I was old enough to toddle up to the prickly bushes and pluck berries from them. This summer, we went twice during my week-long vacation in Maine.
Sarah on Powderhorn, August 2004
And something about the weather patterns or the pollination or something must have been working in these berries’ favor this year, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen them so luscious and plentiful. One day, we picked so many that (and you don’t know how it pains me to admit this) some of them actually rotted in the fridge before we could finish eating them. And there were many of us. And we love us some wild raspberries. It’s just that we had picked, like, seriously, close to a gallon of them.
Anyway, what I realized, out there on Powderhorn, with the sun on my hair and the smell of bayberry and salt air and sunscreen in my nose and my ankles scratched up by brambles and my eyes and fingers darting from cluster to cluster of dark pink and juicy blood-purple berries was: If no one called me back to the beach to go home, I would just stay here picking berries for hours.
Someone always does call me back. “Sarah! Tide’s going out. We’ve gotta get home!”
“Okay,” I yell, but my hand is deep in a thicket finding more berries, and I begin moving slowly back in the direction of the beach, dawdling here to pick just that perfect one, or there – oh, how could I let that one go? – until, “Sarah! You coming or what?” And I get back to the beach to find everyone already on the boat, ready to shove away from shore.
There are very few things in my life that I have to be cajoled and dragged away from anymore. Sometimes reading a good book will do it. Once in a great while, when I get in some sort of zone, writing can be hard to break with. Maybe sometimes painting, though I think that’s partly logistical – if I have a palette full of paints, I don’t want to go to the trouble of cleaning them up or covering them with plastic wrap or whatever unless I seriously have to.
But it’s rare these days for me to be so mentally consumed by any activity that dislodging my attention from that thing and moving it to something else is actually difficult for me. And that’s an experience I remember having daily, sometimes hourly as a child. The phrase, “Five more minutes? Please?” was one I made heavy use of.
And I guess that’s what I mean about perspective changing. On one hand, it’s nice to be able to transition between the various commitments and activities of my day without much trouble. To multitask, as it were. But it’s also really great to find those things that can still suck me in, focus me, pull me down so deep into concentration that clawing myself back out again takes a little time.
I’ve often thought and spoken about my sense that art, and fiction writing in particular, comes from a sort of dreamstate – a different level of consciousness than that on which we live our day-to-day, must-remember-to-buy-dish-soap lives. And I feel like what I’m describing here is part of that.
The nice thing about getting to be an adult, I suppose, if you can figure out how to pull it off, is that you can get to have both. You can read theory and history, and think about trends and context and broad patterns, and you can understand the world around you much better for it. But hopefully you can also find ways of getting into that place where you can focus on a story or a painting or a song or a dance and it can open up into a universe, the same way a two-minute dream can contain an epic. That’s the balance beam I’m trying to walk, at least.
Posted by sarah at November 18, 2004 02:07 PM
Comments
hmm. this is kind of like that article you once told me about (on salon or somesuch) about how everybody wants to know nerds now. or geeks or dweebs or - i forget the technical term they used. but there's something so very enticing about people who can ocassionally summon up a stubborn, unpragmatic focus on a particular subject. they're so much more defined.
Posted by: jen at December 6, 2004 11:01 AM
It might have been an essay from Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot... I know what you mean. I think I tend to wish I had more of that nerdlike (childlike?) capacity to focus on specific, unpragmatic things without distraction. A big point of this site, actually, is me trying to cultivate my inner nerd, to have a place to geek-out about old magazines, finds, and so forth. Sadly, it's sporadic at best... I hate to think that maybe in 6th grade, when I was desperately trying to strip away all the vestiges of uncoolness from my former dorky self, I somehow lost the ability to just let go of self-consciousness and throw myself into whatever creative pursuit my imagination latched onto.
Posted by: Sarah at December 6, 2004 05:28 PM
I keep coming back to the idea that this is a form/content issue for me; that i want nerd-energy for my ideas, but pragmatic-functionality for making them affective. or effective. (i'm actually not sure here if i mean both, or if i've just forgotten the actual distinction. eh, english majors).
does that make sense? i don't think there's anything worth creating that doesn't come, in some part, from un-self-conscious self-throwing-into; but i don't think creations count if they aren't communicated, and that requires translation skills that are deliberately, and unapologetically, pragmatic. that separate the wheat from the chaff.
Posted by: jen at December 10, 2004 12:50 PM
