Invincible Summer

It's surprising what people will tell you when you stop to listen.”

The other day, I read a short essay penned by the daughter of a friend of an old friend from their high school days, a remarkable writer who I’m only beginning to know long-distance. She describes her early adult life as working hard and playing it safe. She graduated from college, followed by law school, landing at a respected East Coast law firm. But, in the end, she recognized it was less than satisfying for her.

What would she do to earn a living if she could do anything that brought her closer to her authentic self? What makes her feel like she’s offering her best to the world?

Today it’s baking wonderful pies, writing from her kitchen table, and working to get her pie business off the ground. In her essay,  she describes the adrenaline rush of skydiving, despite never having done it herself. I think the point for her was to examine what made her feel uncomfortable enough to be willing to take a risk, to do something very daring — even impractical, despite the deeper fears we all share.

Her words were convincing enough to bring back powerful memories for me. There was no “jumping” out of the plane in my experience. I listened, followed instructions, and fell forward out of the open side door of the airplane with a guy nearly twice my size strapped to my back, wearing a parachute for our tandem dive over Shelton. No prior experience required. Buy the ticket, take the ride. 

There is no going back once you’re out the door. Gravity does the work, but living in the moment opens doors into another world — a feeling I will never forget. Our parachute opened to slow our free-fall. The waves of adrenaline I felt inside continued into the following day. I don’t think of myself as a thrill seeker, but there I was: a human being with an entirely fresh perspective.

Whitewater rafting on a new river is similar. You don’t know what you don’t know until you’re through it. If you’re lucky, you’ll go home with a series of mental snapshots and the sound of rushing water in your mind to remember it by before experience turns into a blur.  Keep a journal, write it down; your future self will thank you kindly later. 

My great fortune is to communicate with many different people from all walks of life. It’s surprising what people will tell you when you stop to listen. Hearing contrary opinions doesn’t harm me but helps me better understand where people are coming from. 

Change is constant, but it’s not always comfortable. Core principles within our constitutional form of governance that many of us took for granted are evolving, some would say disappearing, before our eyes. The changes in our national discourse and international relations come with consequences that go far beyond my lived experience.

So, I listen. I read. I watch. Most of all, I consciously guard against rendering judgment too quickly. Politicians, consultants, and algorithms have groomed us not to consider, but to react in an endless game of "us" versus "them."  Who benefits from all the blind hate? Is it our country? Is it our community? Our schools, our families?

In the last few months, I’ve noticed more people in grocery stores keeping their heads down, going about their shopping while actively avoiding engagement. Candidly, I find myself doing the same thing more often, too. There are times I know I don’t have the energy to be patient, and more often stay home instead of going out. Believe me, I, too, grow tired of thinking what I think and trying to turn it into a neat little package, easy to digest but entirely forgettable.

A recent study from Washington University in St. Louis shows that about 40% of people are keeping their mouths shut, afraid of social disapproval that may result from controversial conversations. “In an age when social media ensures everyone has a voice, fear causes people to stay mum, creating a silent near majority.”

Then another old friend told me something remarkable. He is a notorious misanthrope who takes pride in avoiding attachments, for the most part. But he has faced a severe health crisis lately, and is walking around alone and feeling it. Now strangers smile at him. They strike up conversations in the grocery store. They want to chat at the library. It’s not him, he says, it’s like the rest of the world has changed. But something in him is sending out a signal that people respond to with kindness. Now he smiles back and even talks with them.

It reminded me of an old book I first read as a teenager, before I could make sense of it, “Summer” by Albert Camus, which includes a return to his homeland after World War II.

“In the worst years of our madness, the memory of that sky had never left me,” he wrote. “I realized, through it all, that in the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger, something better, pushing right back.”

Perhaps the coming summer will warm us all.