Hello and welcome to Kind Regards. I’d like to apologise for the 3 month hiatus. I plan to resume writing 6 days a week to bring you an article every Sunday. I hope you enjoy the work. I’m glad to be back at the desk. Feels good.
W.
“The clouds above us join and separate,
The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns.
Life is like that, so why not relax?
Who can stop us from celebrating?”
Lu Yu
‘When people commit suicide, no one ever understands. You know what I mean? People commit suicide, and people go, "I don't understand why," and I go, "You don't?"
‘What, do you live in a cotton-candy house or something? What the fuck? You don't know about life? How it only disappoints and gets worse and worse until it ends in a catastrophe?
‘The fuck?’
Norm Macdonald
The Shape of Stories
In a lecture titled The Shape of Stories, Kurt Vonnegut describes story archetypes on a graph. Across the course of the story, from beginning to end, the protagonist progresses and experiences varying degrees of good fortune or ill fortune. In Boy Meets Girl (think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Jane Eyre) the protagonist finds something wonderful, loses it, and then gets it back forever. Up, down, and then back up even further than before. In Man in Hole a protagonist gets into trouble, gets back out of trouble, and is better off for it (think The Hobbit or Finding Nemo).
There are also tragedies that behave differently again. In a tragedy, the hero doesn't overcome their anxieties or reunite with their lover. The protagonist suffers, and the suffering is not relieved by magical pumpkins or seven dwarves. The slope of the story dives perilously from good to bad to worse... without reprieve.
Rather than the Hero's Journey or Rags To Riches, it is the shape of tragedy that interests me most. I believe that within the sobriety of tragedy lays something precious—an exotic jewel. I believe that once we prize it out and dust it off, the agony and torment of tragedy dissolve and are replaced by a kind of bright, hot, and life-affirming light. First though, a word on some different kinds of tragedy and how they relate to our lives on earth.
Horace and Pete
During a bout of mild illness, I fired up a favourite of mine on the laptop while my partner boiled the kettle. With tea in hand and tissue boxes on our laps, we lay beneath the covers and began to watch a ten-episode series called Horace and Pete.
Horace and Pete is a tragicomedy series, though I don't wish to mislead you. It is more tragi- than comedy. Don't think Peep Show or Worst Week of My Life, where the characters get into embarrassing escapades like pissing themselves at a wedding or accidentally saying something racist in front of their in-laws. In Horace and Pete, there are laughs, but they're sandwiched in between irreparable wounds on the characters' psyches and relationships. Horace and Pete doesn't just make a wedding go wrong. It dishes out heavy and life-altering events seemingly at random.
I'm bringing up Horace and Pete because it was one of my first love affairs with tragedy, and it sparked the realisation at the heart of this article. Watching the show, the catastrophic, relentless, and unresolvable turns in the plot struck me as both palpable and horrifying. I watched with disbelief as dreadful episodes came to a close with no possibility of reprieve. Surely, they aren't going to leave me with that.
Narratives hadn't done this to me before. I was much more used to Hollywood's relentless optimism. At the same time, I knew that in real life there aren't always happy endings. Not everyone battles valiantly and overcomes the diagnosis. Not all mental illness behaves like A Beautiful Mind or Silver Linings Playbook. Some of us don't learn to live with it. Some of us don't get better. Where were all those stories?
A Cautionary Tale
Some are found in plays like Macbeth. Macbeth doesn't get redemption or a consolation triumph at the end. His wife commits suicide, and then he is murdered. Not very encouraging stuff. In Macbeth, however, the tragedy is purposeful. It is there to remind us of something. Macbeth is killed because of his ambition. Without setting in motion the plot to kill the previous king and his heirs in a preventative bloodbath, Macbeth wouldn't have attracted the vengeance of Macduff and Malcolm. Really, the tragedy that befalls Macbeth is a kind of justice.
There are many cautionary tales like this, that are supposedly helpful and reassuring. They tell us: Don't begin experimenting with illicit drugs and you won't end up imprisoned or destitute (Requiem for a Dream), or don't buy into the midcentury economic and political systems and you won't end up disappointed by them like Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman). Bad things, they say, happen to bad people—or at least people who aren't as well informed as you are. Now that you've learnt your lesson, time to be on your way.
In The Post
These stories are true enough, in a sense. Do the crime, do the time. What goes around comes around. Bad things happen to bad people.
Only, that isn't always true, and we all know it. Good things also happen to bad people. And good people often flail and falter until they suffer and die. In fact, no matter how well behaved we are, some seriously bad things are coming for every one of us.
Please permit me to reiterate, because this is a fact that I find easy to shrug off. I can easily nod my head and say yes while only recognising the intellectual truth and not the emotional and more visceral truth behind the words. Bad stuff—really, the worst stuff—is on its way. Loss is in the post, and tragedy is silently stalking us all. The details can sometimes change, but the bare facts stay the same.
If you have a great job, you will either be fired or learn that it is not a great job after all, and so you'll quit. If you have a nice rental on a quiet street, you'll either be evicted or get a new neighbour who is a sadistic hoon, drives a Supra and loves hosting reggae parties. But don't worry, it gets much worse.
Everything Must Go
Oliver Burkeman has a delightfully pessimistic talk called "It’s Worse Than You Think," where he reminds us that often, when battling with a to-do list, we forget that the problem is much larger than, say, an inability to get everything done today. Really, Burkeman proposes, the problem we face is that 'getting on top' of things is an impossibility. There is no place of refuge from the piles of work and responsibilities that are generously heaped onto our plate each day. It isn't just today's to-do list that will remain incomplete; the problem is much worse. Our life's to-do list is never-ending and self-renewing. You'll never, ever be complete.
Applied to our loss example, it isn't simply that your underpriced rental isn't going to last as long as you'd like it to or that your job is eventually going to get boring and you'll quit. Really, the problem is much larger and our situation much worse than that. Everything you know and love will be taken from you without exception. It isn't just a shame that you don't get to redo the job interview. You can't redo anything—ever. Our teeth, houseplants, prized possessions, aunties, social status, and brain function are all out the door. The discount tile advertisement was more right than we thought when it said: everything must go.
The Buddha gave his followers recantations to prepare them, daily, for the world's impermanence. According to the Buddha, we should reflect often: (1) ‘I am subject to old age; I am not exempt from old age.’ (2) ‘I am subject to illness; I am not exempt from illness.’ (3) ‘I am subject to death; I am not exempt from death.’ (4) ‘I must be parted and separated from everyone and everything dear and agreeable to me.’
In other words, everything is impermanent.
If you're wondering why you've read 900 words basically rewording Nelly Furtado's 2006 classic All Good Things (Come to an End), please bear with me. Burkeman, the Buddha, and Horace and Pete aren't all doom and gloom—there's a beautiful flip side to contemplation of tragedy and we've almost arrived. First though...
My Friend's Play
Earlier in the month, I spoke with a friend of mine as I cooked in the kitchen. When I asked how he was doing, he replied that he was doing exceptionally well. A few months earlier, he'd be wondering whether to return to acting. He knew how much attention and time an amateur production takes and was concerned that his work as a musician would suffer under the strain.
He ended up taking on a role and was now standing across the bench from me, reporting that he couldn't be more pleased. The process of acting and rehearsing was super fun, and the production was creatively energising. After each rehearsal, the eight actors and director would sit in a circle on stage and discuss their labour. My friend told me that the creative thrill of unpacking his performance with actors he admires and getting and giving genuine praise on the intentional directions each one had taken on stage had been deeply rewarding.
Then, in the circle with his fellow performers, he would receive a sense, a stark awareness that these—these moments that are presently flying by—these are the good times.
Initially, I found this sad. Knowing that this is it, that these are the moments you'll undoubtably look back on as the happy days of your youth, felt depressing and deflating to me.
My friend didn't find it sad at all. He said it was beautiful, and I could tell he meant it. Why?
Awareness and Finitude
“But if you knew you might not be able to see it again tomorrow, everything would suddenly become special and precious, wouldn't it?”
Haruki Murakami, “Kafka on the Shore”
My friend knew. He wasn't looking back on days long gone, wishing for a miraculous revival of a long-gone relationship. He knew that his moments were precious while they were happening, which only increased his awareness and deepened his appreciation for them.
“Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.”1 We are all going to spend most of our time on this earth as dead people, shrouded in that endless blackness. We are all dead people who haven't died yet, and each experience is a memory that is not yet written. Seeing things this way—your apartment as a place you used to live that you're still living in—is a way of contextualising the impermanence of things in the moment that we experience them. What better memory to concentrate on than the one that is still unfolding?
Burkeman can console us here too. It is only once we face our situation as it really is that we can begin to choose how to spend our time and attention. If we labour under the illusion that everything will still be here tomorrow—something that isn't guaranteed—we can't possibly prioritise according to what matters most to us. Similarly, if we don't recognise the singularity and impermanence of our present experience, we'll write it off as something to be endured or partially ignored while we think about the past or the future.
The Buddha wants us to embrace presence too by shedding our preoccupation with the past and the future and our ignorance regarding the permanence of things. We will become old, get sick, die, and be separated from all that we find agreeable. If that's the case, sad as it is, knowing it frees us from delusion. It reunites us with the importance of this moment and how lucky we are to be here.
All of us are lucky. We're lucky to have anything nice at all, from crispy potatoes to plain brown rice, from a cool breeze to an overcast day, from a play to perform in with friends or a mind with which we can contemplate our loneliness. We are all so lucky. Sure, things could be better, different, less boring, or painful, but really, when faced with the fact that everything must go and that bad will eventually transform into worse, we must realise that what we do have is worth our love, attention, and appreciation.
Conclusion
Personally, I'm working too much in a schedule that doesn't suit my writing. I am supposedly a writer and yet I haven't published anything in months. Instead of moving forward by writing every day and practicing a craft, I feel as if I'm stuck on a hamster wheel of cooking, eating, receiving payslips, and occasionally going for a run. Another week rolls around.
What I need to remember is that my job isn't forever. I don't know how many shifts I've got left, and this afternoon is one of them. This afternoon and my job are singular and unique and able to be cherished if only I recognise them as truely impermanent.
And right now, I'm writing. It isn't going to win any awards. I'd say it will probably be my worst article in a long time. And yet knowing how it feels to not write for so long gives me the perspective to appreciate these moments, this frustration and resistance and triumph and flow, instead of squandering it with perfectionism.
This right here, this week, this sentence, this breath—this is your life. We don't get a rehearsal. There are no second chances. This moment, this is the show, and we can only enjoy it and whatever it holds once. No one else can do it for us. This corner of the universe, this combination of sensations, can only be enjoyed by you right now. Compared with the loss that is coming for us all, with the endings, with sickness and old age and heartbreak and the black curtain's eternal embrace, what you are going through now, whatever you are going through now, these are the good times. Who can stop you from celebrating?
W.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/851545-life-is-just-one-small-piece-of-light-between-two