Make of Yourself A Light

The day is eerily warm and still. The sky is blushing with the residue of dawn and the sea looks layered: horizontally striped in hues of blue from inky dark to nearly silver. While much of the country is enduring bitter cold, here the windows are all open, as though it were a summer morning, and the oranges are suddenly heavy and sweet, and I have the gift of an unexpected day off.

Yes, just when I was beginning to get into the new routine of work, this blank space in the middle of the week has left me feeling like a boat freed from its moorings, and I am drifting through the day off-course. I love it, but bad news has come to people I know and I’m heavy-hearted. I’m moving through the narrows, I guess, pitfalls all around, but aren’t we all?

Since my bicycle is currently in a state of disrepair, I decide to head to the beach and run to the sea wall. But the tide is high and the sand is soft and as I run I remember what my daughter told me last time I started out on a run with her: “Mom, can I be honest? Maybe you should just say you’re going for a walk.”

So I decide to be honest, and I slow to a stroll.As I stroll I realize that I am anxious already about completing all the plans that have been squeezed into little boxes on the chart thoughtfully put together for me by the teacher for whom I am subbing, and I am anxious about posting grades using the computerized system, and I am anxious about whether the students will like me and whether I will teach them well and even whether I will get more connected to them than I want to in this very temporary gig.

(I never thought of this before, but I have a lot less anxiety when I am riding my bicycle than when I am walking. I wonder why.)

So I reach the sea wall, my place of pause and ponder. It’s odd, but I realize that lately I have been watching my dreams constrict. I know that sounds depressing, but please don't hear in it the voice of someone bitter and disappointed. It’s simply that my aspirations are becoming more congruent with the reality of who I am and the time frame of a life. Does that mean I am lowering my standards? Admitting to failure? It felt like that for a while.

Now, though, it is beginning to resemble peaceful acceptance. I see that I am simply not that special, and I am not good enough at anything to garner much acclaim. My muse and I are not even on speaking terms lately, and my brain is conspicuously more sluggish than it used to be, and frankly I have no vision or drive. So what? I am just an ordinary person and I’m tired of being disappointed in myself, because maybe that’s okay after all.

Perhaps this sober self-assessment and recalibration is just part of getting older. It could even be evidence of appropriate maturity. And it isn’t as though I have no dreams; it’s just that the big glitzy ones have receded in importance.

Talk about big dreams -- last night I watched a documentary called Man on Wire, about Philippe Petit, the French street performer and tightrope walker who danced on a wire 1350 feet in the air between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. It had been Petit’s burning obsession for many years: an elaborately complicated, dangerous, and essentially impossible dream. Can you imagine being there that day and looking up to see the lone figure of a man walking on the clouds, inconceivably high in the air? Poetry. Death defying poetry.

Afterwards, when people asked Petit why he did it, he said why is the most incongruous question of all, so practical, so peculiarly American...this is not a why thing, is what he basically said.

It reminded me of Archibald MacLeish on poetry: a poem should be, not mean. Petit’s high wire walk was a form of art and beauty and affirmation. It was fearlessness and passion made manifest. It was a miracle, really. And the act was its own reason for being.

I found the film unusually touching. Certainly the images of Petit’s breathtaking performance at the World Trade Center are rendered more poignant by the knowledge of horrific events to come. But it affected me on a personal level as well, even as my own ambitions shrink, to watch an epic vision unfold. I felt inspired.

I was especially prone to inspiration, however, because of a poem by Mary Oliver I had recently read called The Buddha's Last Instruction. I cannot get the first line out of my head: "Make of yourself a light."

Not that you have to do something outrageous and dangerous and exhibitionist, but I like the idea of shining, in one's own way, even if it is a quiet, more private way, and of turning your life into its own small work of art. I am beginning to relieve myself of the artificial pressure of having to have some kind of splashy conspicuous success with writing (or whatever) and that feels good. I am going to try being instead of wanting.

When I was in high school in the 1960s, I went with my class to see Man of La Mancha on Broadway. Oh, I was so inspired by Don Quixote’s impossible dream! My mind was brimming with vague thoughts of heavenly causes and glorious quests, and I resolved to follow that star, no matter how helpless, no matter how far, and off I went into a twisty future and suddenly I was 57 years old and sitting at the sea wall trying to come to terms with things.

And seriously, it’s all I want now, to make of myself a light.