Not Knowing What You’re Getting Into
I’m often quite naive about things, getting into situations without knowing what I’m doing. I bought my first place as a single woman, a cedar house in the mountains, on six acres of mature, second-growth forest. Before that, my only experience living rurally was in a MIL cabin on someone’s property for two years during college, and I didn’t have the skills, nor the physical strength, for mountain living.
During my first winter there, a windstorm took out power in the area for a whole week. No power, no heat. The old generator made a ton of noise but was not helpful. I tried to sleep in down jackets and under a pile of blankets, but had nightmares about dying from exposure. I got through with warming up in neighbors’ houses, and the memory of that week still makes me shudder. Even without unforeseen events like that, snow could be on the ground for weeks, tree limbs can fall over the driveway. One needs to be able to operate a chain saw, along with many other skills not typically in the experience of a petite immigrant woman.
Yet, I learned so much about myself in those first couple of years living there —that I’m odder than I previously realized, that I’m extraordinarily contented puttering in the garden away from civilization, that I’m moved by the subtle changes in the forest and the seasons. I had more quiet to be able to hear the small voices inside, and I came closer to the things that I have always known.
Perhaps the biggest things in life are always like that—that we’re really naive, not knowing what we’re getting into. Relationships, vocation, parenting—we get in over our heads, flail around, time passes. Eventually we recognize patterns, layers of them, as well see how much of a range there is in any situation, and we ask better and better questions. Our capabilities grow—we see the particulars of each stage of the journey, and can enjoy the intrinsic creativity of the process.
It’s good to have the assumption of resilience, permission to flail and to fail. Love will lead us to get in over our heads, and we’ll be okay. Krishnamurti said beautifully: “You must begin without knowing anything about it, and move from innocence to innocence.” Natalie Goldberg talks about it’s a poverty mentality to go to teachers and classes constantly to learn to write. If you want to write, write, she says. Yes, if you want to do something, don’t talk about it, don’t think about it, just do it. After you’ve made some tries, you’ll discover teachers and benefit more from them. The arc of acquiring these capabilities to any depth can’t be traveled by will and ambition alone; only the love of it will get one through the hard parts of the journey.
When we’re out of our depth, we will also start to ask for help, as I did of my neighbors in the mountain. This realizes that connection between us all. Do not be in so much control that we do not need others in our most significant endeavors.
Kahlil Gibran writes about children, “The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and he bends you with his might, that his arrows may go swift and far.” So we’re with ourselves—driven to be on the edge of our capabilities, in a lively, and often frustrating, tension. I’m aware of the gap between vision and capability, which not only helps to motivate and guide my learning, but also gives me a sense of trust that this is bigger than I am, that something is coming not from me, but through me. I dive in and do the best I can, asking what am I getting into—what is needed in this situation.
