A Very Evident Fact of Life
During World War II, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry—who’d later write the beloved classic, The Little Prince—captained a French Air Force reconnaissance crew. Each crew had three members: a pilot, a gunner, and an observer. Saint-Exupéry was a pilot, and one day at the air base, he and his observer were summoned to the major’s office. Afterward, the observer noted that the major seemed a little off—not his typical confident, assured self. Must have gotten some bad news from the front, the observer guessed. Probably not, Saint-Exupéry thought to himself. “I didn’t say so aloud, for I wasn’t thinking of [the major]. I was thinking of man in general.” He was thinking of “a very evident fact which most seem not to see—that the life of the spirit, the veritable life, is intermittent.” The spirit, as distinct from the mind and the body, is that part of you that, for no particular reason, just feels a little off from time to time. “The spirit,” Saint-Exupéry continues, “alternates between total vision and absolute blindness. Here is a man, for example, who loves his farm—but there are moments when he sees in it only a collection of unrelated objects. Here is a man who loves his wife—but there are moments when he sees in love nothing but burdens, hindrances, constraints. Here is a man who loves music—but there are moments when it cannot reach him.”
Intermittency, the natural ups and downs of life—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Sometimes, The Tide Is Just Out
At the age of 8, the future singer-songwriter Jewel was abandoned by her mother. Her father became abusive, and so at 15, Jewel left home. She lived in a car and worked odd jobs to make ends meet. She was often stressed, anxious, pissed, and miserable. Once, uniquely, completely, and seemingly permanently depressed, she took a walk, and at a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, she sat down. “I sat there for about 8 hours,” Jewel said. “I watched the tide go out and then come back. It happened so slowly, so imperceptibly.” She considered the possibility that the ebb and flow of the ocean was somehow like her mood, Jewel said, “And I thought, ‘Sometimes, the tide is just out.’ And that thought changed my life. Because I felt so sad, like my sadness would be forever. But watching the ocean tide out and back in, I realized that change is a basic law of nature and physics. And I’m part of nature and physics, so it would be impossible, it would be outside the laws of nature and physics, for my bad mood not to change.” That realization now allows Jewel to think of her stress and anxiety as not only manageable, but as natural, a fact of the intermittent life of the spirit. “To this day,” she said, “whenever I get sad, depressed, stressed, anxious—I say to myself, ‘The tide is just out. I don’t know how long it will take, but it will come back in because it has to: nothing is permanent.’”
Each Cycle Is Valid
In Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes about her own oceanic realization, had one day while on vacation, as she sat on the beach looking out at a “breathlessly still ebb tide.” At a time when she was feeling discouraged about a relationship in a bit of an ebb, she watched the tide recede and began to consider whether relationships, too, have an “eternal ebb and flow,” an “inevitable intermittency.” Yes, she felt, the life of relationships is also intermittent. “When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment,” she wrote. “It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity.” When the only possible continuity in life is in its ebb-and-flow cycles. “Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back,” Lindbergh wrote, of the lesson she hoped to carry home into ordinary life: “that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.”
Who Am I Kidding?
Fresh out of college and trying to become a novelist, Jenny McPhee was feeling up and down about her writing abilities. Some days, she felt confident and capable. Other days, as she wrote to her father, the great John McPhee, “she said she was asking herself, ‘Who am I kidding?’” John wrote back, “I think I first started saying that to myself almost exactly forty years ago…And I still ask myself, ‘Who am I kidding?’” The life of a writer, he told his daughter, is intermittent, and it is even a lie to pretend otherwise: “To feel such doubt is a part of the picture—important and inescapable. When I hear some young writer express that sort of doubt, it serves as a checkpoint; if they don’t say something like it, they are quite possibly, well, kidding themselves.”
It’s Got Hate In There. It’s Got Pain In There.
The legendary skateboarder Rodney Mullen is in his 50s and still skateboards every day. “It’s such a gift,” he said, “to be able to [do] something and to love it for the sake of it…I have that. I’ve nurtured it in my life.” When reading about people like Rodney—people who seem to love what they do, who describe their work as play, and so on—a common mistake is to think that it’s all bliss all the time, that there is no intermittency. “There are days,” Rodney said, “where you don’t want to go out. Or it hurts. Or you’re sore. Or you just suck—you’re not making progress, and you feel defeated…But that’s the nature of love—it’s got hate in there, it’s got pain in there. And that’s what draws you in, that’s the magnetism.”
A Migratory Animal
“Man is by Nature a migratory animal,” Frederick Douglass wrote (in a passage I came across in Maria Popova’s Traversal). “It does not appear that he was intended to dwell forever in any one locality”—physically, mentally, spiritually, relationally, emotionally, creatively, energetically.