Choose the Spoon: Reflections on Imperfection after Two Years Dreaming

Two years ago today, I had my first and only panic attack. Jennifer and I and our almost-two-year-old, Tyler, had flown red-eye from Boston to London, then taken an hour-and-a-half taxi ride from Heathrow Airport to the Kings Crossing train Station that cost us about half our savings. Then, the train ride into York cost us the other half of our savings.

We had chased down a dream of ours, and we arrived (finally) into York amidst cascading waterfalls from the skies (some people call this "rain"), a massively overtired toddler, basically no money, and a whole heck of a lot of hope. We were changing roles, changing countries, changing cultures, and we were (to be honest) pretty naive about the whole thing. My mantra was, It'll work out.

When the panic attack arrived that night at three in the morning two years ago, a question had arisen in my mind responding to the mantra--simply, this: What if it doesn't work out?

And, as it turns out, a question like this at three in the morning doesn't exactly bring peace. Or hope. or trust. Or really anything good. Finally, Jen helped soothe the attack, and I fell asleep. But the following weeks were filled with that nagging question, What if it doesn't work out?

Fast-forward two years. Jen and I are standing in the kitchen our our little rented home, and fireworks are going off. I'm not talking figurative fireworks; I'm talking a real-live firework show occurring a stone's throw from our kitchen window. Reds, yellows, blues--all sparkling and blasting and booming. And Jen and I can't think of any occasion.

So we decide something: it's our two-year anniversary of chasing down a dream--even though it may have seemed half-baked at the time. Because it had to be half-baked. If we had fully baked that dream two years ago, we would have pulled it out of the Oven of Reality Checks, stuck a fork in it, and remarked, Whew! That baby is toasted! No good!

Two years later, life still hasn't afforded us much more certainty--except, maybe, a line that Atticus Finch constantly told his children: It's not time to worry yet. The more practice we have trusting, waiting, hoping, and believing that things will be alright, the more we learn to, well, trust, wait, hope, and believe that things will turn out alright.

Tyler: Looking UP!

In her stunning novel, Middlemarch, George Eliot shares this quip: "Even Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin." Maybe the greatest English poet of all time can't withstand the force of certain reflections, and would have to deal squarely with his own imperfection. I guess this is true of all of us: in one way or another, we're all bumpkins. And we either accept that fact about our experiences, our dreams, our views, saying, It's not time to worry yet, or we don't.

After two years of this adventure abroad, I choose the spoon. Because when all is said and done, I think the spoon prevents a panic attack much better than a crystal clear mirror. Sometimes, we don;t need to see and understand everything perfectly; rather, we need just enough to get by, just enough to keep taking one step of faith after another. And maybe, we bumpkins can laugh a little while we walk.

The Long View

It had been over a month since I'd been to the Fulford Bowls Club--a collection of men over 65 who play indoor lawn bowling. (And one 30-year old American.) Life has been pretty hectic lately, with Tyler fighting cold after cold, sleeping through the night a thing of legend and lore, and allergy attacks gathering around me like I'm a never-ending supply of sticky notes for a highly organized person.

So attending the Thursday night bowling just didn't make the list of Must Do in Order to Survive.

But this past Thursday, I attended again.

Ten years ago, I ran the London Marathon with my oldest brother, Christopher. By mile 20, the two of us were Jell-O men, stumbling forward under the weight of gravity and lunacy, in equal parts. Walking into Bowls last Thursday, my legs felt similarly. I wanted to keel over a few times--or at least just bowl from a chair.

But as I looked around, I felt heartened. So many older men welcomed me back. Told me they missed me. We shook hands. Talked about the weather. Talked about the wars they had fought in fifty, sixty years ago. Talked about bowls.

Always about bowls.

Ah, good wood there, mate!

Just ease up to the Jack. Bring it straight round there.

Oh, ay! That's a Yorkshireman's delight right there.

Every time down the green fake-lawn mat, these older men smiled with joy at the smallest attempt, the closest call, the possible point.

The thrill. Even of indoor lawn bowling.

And I was struck by something my soul was in desperate need of: the long view.

I talked with Ken, one of the men who landed on the beaches at Normandy when he was only 18 years old as a conscript of the British Army. He was paid twelve pence a day. By contrast, American soldiers during World War II were paid the equivalent of four pounds a week. Ken was making 84 pence a week. And he served at the invasion, then for two years in Palestine during terrible battles there. In both places, he was wounded.

Now, Ken smiles with ease. He jokes. He laughs.

Ken has survived. He has taken the long view of life, realizing that we pass through immeasurable difficulty and confusion and fear and sometimes horror, but somehow, we survive. And when we do, we keep on walking the path that falls before our feet.

I talked with Tony, who described how his four-year old daughter (now 39) would wake up screaming night after night after night. For six months. He and his wife had just had another baby, and between the four-year old screaming, the newborn with terrible colic, Tony and his wife had zero sleep. Literally. I watched Tony's face as he recalled the time.

"How did you make it through?" I ask, wanting to glean some kind of wisdom for our own sleep trouble with Tyler of late.

Tony shook his head, looked at me, and smiled. "The thing is, our daughters are beautiful human beings. You just have to love them through the hard stages and remember that you might always know what the hard stages are about, but they pass." Then, Tony smiled and patted me on the back.

The long view.

During the eight o' clock tea break, I talked with Henry, who lives and breathes bowls now, as a seventy-year old man. His face rose and fell like an ocean of glee as he described the five Bowling Clubs of which he is a part. The different match-ups, the visiting teams, what bowls means to him and how it gives him a place to belong.

And I couldn't help but think, here's a seventy-year old man, and he has passion and joy. He looks forward to waking up each day, playing bowls almost every night. He;s not mourning his past, regretting the past 69 years. He's living his 70th.

The long view.

Walking back from St. Oswald's Church Hall at nine o' clock with the wind whipping cold across my ears, hands, all I could think, over and over, was the long view.

I am often so accustomed to contemplating the short view. What is happening now? What if this or that circumstance doesn't work out? What if this hard stage lasts forever?

Such are questions that the vocabulary of the Long View doesn't know or acknowledge.

In bowls, you might have an incredible turn: your ball might land square next to the Jack, lean against it like there's nothing in the world that will take that point away from you. But then another player gets up and knocks your ball completely off the mat. Your point is gone. Lost.

Alternately, you may bowl a ball that is as far away from the Jack as ice from fire. But then another player takes a turn and inadvertently slices your ball, knocks it square next to the Jack. One point.

You never know. The game changes moment by moment. Like life. And you can't play by giving so much power to each turn that you lose the thread of the game.

You can't live by lending so much significance to every circumstance that you lose the narrative of your own arc.

It's what the men at Bowls are teaching me. It's what I am slowly learning to do--slowly learning how to see. The Long View doesn't throw away the moments, nor does it anxiously plan and prepare for the future. Instead, it simply approaches the present with open hands, receives it, but does not allow any present moment to crush or signify the worth of existence. The worth of a life is much more valuable than any one thing, much more authentic than any sound bit, no matter how treacherous or beautiful.

Because what is most miraculous about our lives of it all is this: the story. It's not the sentence that decides our fate, nor the chapter. These are but a part of the narrative. The story as a whole is what matters. The mistakes I have made before, the patterns of fear I may have allowed to beat in unison with my heart--these do not signify the substance of the novel of my life. Nor yours.

The Long View tells us to wait and see. Keep living. Keep going. Keep bowling. The next time down the lawn mat, we may just end up with an incredible bowl, one that we would have missed had we been caught lamenting our last turn.

Don't Think; Begin!

If you're anything like me, beginnings can be tough.

I am unashamed (okay, I am a little bit ashamed) of my bashfulness when I first knew that I wanted to date Jennifer (and eventually, marry her!). I had been visiting her, and at every turn, I planned romantic moments where I could tell her how deeply I cared for her. I took her to a beautiful lunch where we clinked glasses full of Chardonnay.

Even though the sun streamed through large windows across her face, urging me Come on, buddy, I'm doing my part...Tell her already, won't you? I had trouble getting the words out.

Then, as we walked beside a pond, skipping stones and watching light reflect on the shimmering water, my old pal the sun spoke again, Alright, man, I am really working hard here to give you some major opportunities...Tell her buddy! Yet I still had trouble getting the words out.

Finally, I was able to blurt out a (fairly) non romantic and harried "I like you" -- probably making Jen wonder if I was still in middle school rather than a 22 year-old high school teacher myself.

But I recognize something that I couldn't see before: beginnings are tough. It's hard to really put ourselves out there, say what we feel, what we believe, what we hope for.

I sometimes fall into that pattern where I start thinking a whole heap about ways to begin something, without beginning it. This is a dangerous zone, because thinking is, in fact, a good thing.

It's a great thing. We would save ourselves a whole lot of foot-in-mouth moments if we thought a little before we spoke or acted. But there's a lot in life that doesn't follow the notion of thinking for long, long (way too long!) periods of time before we begin.

Writing is like this. When we sit at our computers, staring at that white screen with it's tiny cursor flashing repeatedly before our very eyes, then we need do only one thing: begin.

We've got to write something--\anything--to get us going. Because writing is like running. You can't stand on the side of the road thinking about how exactly you're going to move your legs, what strides you'll make where, and when exactly you'll turn a corner. (Well, I guess you actually can do this, but you might look fairly odd dressed in your running clothes, standing outside for an hour, then going back inside without sweating.)

No. We've got to sweat, and with writing, that sometimes means sweating over some fairly awful prose.

I recently began a new novel, and the vision of this book in my head was remarkable. I smiled whenever I thought of the book's premise, givign myself imaginary pats on the back for thinking up such a cool idea.

Then I started writing it.

Part of me almost didn't want to write the thing, because keeping company with Premise was such fun! After all, Premise was a pretty non-demanding buddy. Premise even suggested I grab a bag of chips (or crisps, as I'm learning they're called here in England) and put on a great film clip whjile Tyler naps. Premise often told me, Hey, Man, aren't I enough for you as I am? Why you got to go and try and make me, like, 40,000 words long or something? The relationship we've got now is pretty sweet, right?

Sadly, I had to tell Premise to beat it. It was fun hanging out with him for a while. But I knew I needed to begin.

And so I threw up words and sentences onto my screen and winced as I wrote them. I felt like some very mean-spiritied doctor was continually poking me with a Hepatitis A vaccination, then hiding the needle quickly when I took a sidelong glance.

But I kept writing.

I wrote through my halthing, confused Chapter 1.

Ouch.

Then I started another halting, albeit-less-confused Chapter 2.

Ouch. (But less ouch.)

Finally, I made it to the end of Chapter 2, where I found one line I had written, and I leaned back in my chair and I said out loud, "Thank you, God. Thank you for this line. This one line."

Because, see, that was the line.

The line.

I had written many pages, but most will probably be chucked when all is said and done. But I will keep that line. That one line.

Living, too, is a lot like this. I wonder how often we stop ourselves from doing anything because we're so afraid we're going to get it wrong. We're so afraid that we don't have it just quite right, so we counsel ourselves that it's okay--better, even--to wait it out. Think some more.

The sad part about making little choices like that every day is that it leads to one rather big choice: we never do the thing that makes our hearts beat fast. We have a vision--a dream, a hope, a cool idea--but we don't allow ourselves to just begin it and make mistakes along the way.

Yesterday, as I was doing my morning devotion on the porcelin potty (well, I think ours may actually be a very, very hard plastic-type material that only looks like porcelin...in fact, is anybody's porcelin? If you're still with me, and you know for a facvt that you have a porcelin potty, send me an e-mail at LWReynolds@gmail.com as I'd love to hear about your porcelin potty. If you don't have a porcelin potty, but you have factual knowledge of your potty's substance, e-mail me and let me know what it is), I came across the book of Jonah in the Old Testament.

I said to myself, Hhhmm, I've heard a lot about this Jonah character, but I don't know that I've ever actually read the book in the Bible.

So I read it then and there.

And I was blown away by it. I was blown away by a lot within it--but two things really hit me like something heavy and big (but something that doesn't leave any pain or aftereffects).

Two verses, really, which said, essentially: "God changed his mind."

Whoa! So God had planned on one course for the Ninevites, but their repentence provoked his mercy, and he changed his mind!

Jonah was pretty bummed about this whole God-changing-His-mind-and-having-mercy-thing.

But hey, the point is that if God can even change His mind, then why do we pretend we can't?

Why do we so often walk through our lives telling ourselves that we must get it exactly right on the first try, every time and all the time? That's a pretty high and impossible standard that, essentially, accomplishes one thing only: it prevents us from beginning something that could be really good, really beautiful, really important.

So, since my son Tyler is waking up from his nap, and our local library is calling both our names, I'll end with this question today: What dreams are bouncing around in your heart right now? Have you dreamed of starting a non-profit to help reform schools? Have you dreamed of doing the Peace Corps? Have you dreamed of writing a novel, running a mile in six minutes, or visiting all 50 states? Have you dreamed of living abroad, telling people that you love them, learning to play the gutiar, or writing your own song?

Whatever the dream, begin it.

And don't think too much about it; just start.

You'll find that when you begin, the pace is plodding, and the voices that seek to nag you back into inertia are loud. But keep going. After a while, I promise your heart will start to beat a little faster, and the excitement that leaps around inside that central organ of yours will slowly but surely crowd out the fear, criticism, and worry.

Begin. Now.