We love this new form of superstition
It's spring, and I'm buzzing with objectionable energy
My brain, a slow-motion landslide
To wit
Is there anything more perfect than a cherry tree on a blustery spring morning? Spring is so beautiful this year that I feel almost paralyzed by it.
Hemmed in on every side by anxieties and tariffs and the threats of a child out of school for mystery illness, it behooves us to go out and smell the soil, to coat our hands in it, to note it under our fingernails. There is so much growing that falls outside our notice; there is ample new life.
Buy your husband some black pants, noting that he somehow does not own any, and revel again in his beauty. Ponder how strange it is that men, even men you know quite well, can grow more lovely over time.
It does not serve women to constantly play the victim. Pigeons, don’t you know how powerful you are? You can make LIFE! Have some self-respect!
But what if the only thing missing in my life is a Betty Draper-inspired white nightgown? What if that’s IT?
To be middle-aged is to come in and out of focus with yourself, with others. To be young is to stay vibrantly fixed on yourself, to have no perspective. Both are appropriate.
If there is nothing else in your life that feels stable and sane, cleaning your floors, on your hands and knees, will restore you to some order. I have done this while in labor with two of my babies, and I think it helped everything and nothing.
I too prickle with feeling.
Life is too short and too precious to be cynical. It is slipping through our fingers. Why willfully choose such a sour outlook? Brightness and hope are within our grasp.
Another form of name-calling
As Freud’s dreams leaked into American culture, we found ourselves unable to resist his Weltanschauung. It was lurid and fascinating and possibly the key to everything. What’s not to love about psychologizing everyone? Well, plenty, I think.
For one, there’s the deadening effect, which Jacques Barzun expands upon in his book From Dawn to Decadence:
“So much exposure to the puzzling, the shocking, the bizarre (called surrealist), the repellent, the intrusively (sexually) intimate, the disturbing and the disturbed was bound to cause a perpetual inquisitiveness about human motives. The upshot was the pastime of psychologizing. It became common after the dissemination of Freudian ideas, when a new form of superstition—popular psychology—using and misusing technical terms, began to fill the conversation, the routine novel, and the press. By accounting for conduct or point of view, psychologizing ended discussion—no need to think of an argument to meet whatever was advanced; the imputed motive explained it away. It was another form of name-calling; the person was classified and labeled with finality.”
I have been routinely derided for my suspicion of therapy culture, but I think this is part of what I was trying to say, however awkwardly.
The pop-psych love of labeling (and thus writing off) people creates terrible dead-ends for relationships and true intimacy. Great therapists will avoid this, of course, but our American love of turning Freudian insight into generalized stereotyping is stultifying.
We (I) continually fail to deepen friendships and relationships because we default to pop-psych shortcuts. It’s not meant to, but so often psychologizing ends discussion. We won’t be tempted to go any further—or to admit any sign of deviation or paradox—because we’ve classified a person as repressive or a 4w5 or emotionally unintelligent or left-brain dominant or an INTJ. Even as I am lured by it (I love speaking enneagram as much as the next Christian mom), I recognize the stifling nature of such classifications.
Sometimes, as Barzun alludes, we care more for identifying human motives than knowing human beings, in all of our radiant complexity and hypocrisy.
I turned 37 and feel old for the first time. Every year until this one, I felt like I was on the side of the young. No more! I have crossed over. I look ahead to many things but now feel death’s hot breath at the nape of my neck.
It’s springtime, babies
The children are growing so quickly, like the plants. Lucinda is days away from walking. Felix grows in insight and confidence, but his deep empathy is unchanged. Moses reads and talks with the baffling acuity of a much older child.
Re: Felix’s odd gift of noticing other people. Moses had a significant nose bleed at 4 a.m. while we were staying with my parents. We went in to find what looked like a fresh murder scene, the blood pooling into his ears and running down his neck. I was kneeling and holding a rag to Moses’s nose, and the commotion woke Felix in the next twin bed over. I heard Felix mumbling something into his blankets and went over to see what he was saying. “What did you say, Felix?” I asked. Eyes still half-closed, he repeated, annoyed with me,“You look very pretty, Mama! I was saying you look pretty!”
“The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your soul in drought, and strengthen your bones; you shall be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.”
— Isaiah 58:11
Currently reading
Dancing in Odessa, Ilya Kaminsky
Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
Outlive, Peter Attia
The Details, Ia Genberg