The Sunday Letter, Part Two
Imagine, for a moment, that you were able to chose everything—everything—that has happened or will happen to you in this life that you currently have.
Imagine you were given the opportunity to watch moments from your life splayed out on some kind of cosmic screen as a way of testing whether or not you’d like to jump into this life, into these boots.
Imagine that part of this exercise involved looking at some of the saddest moments you were going to experience and choosing them anyway because of what they were going to teach you.
When you think back on the life that you’ve led up to this point, is that how you see your griefs and sorrows? Do you look back on stretches of time where you were sad or disillusioned or upset or hungry or angry or filled with rage and think: that was a terrible time and I am glad to be rid of it. I hope it never comes again. What an awful waste of time and space and energy.
Or do you look at those dark moments, the moments we’ve all had, and try to think: I wouldn’t be here, today, in this very moment, had all of that darkness not happened. I wouldn’t know what I know now without it. I wouldn’t be who I am without it.
This is my goal for 2023.
According to this latest release from NASA, astronomers have discovered a planet in the habitable zone of a nearby star. (“Nearby” being relative, of course—it’s about one hundred light years away.) There could be water on this planet; there could be life. It’s the stuff of wildest dreams. It boggles my mind sometimes to know that there are people out there who build their whole lives around this—analyzing the shifts in light around distant stars to determine whether there might be planets out there that cradle life just like ours does. (For more on this, you should read this article about the work of Sara Seager, and then, for good measure, read her memoir, because it’s brilliant.)
It all feels impossible to me on some level. Impossible that there could exist such a very far away; impossible that there are planets and other worlds with life out there outside of ours. And yet, also impossible that ours could be the only world with life on it in all of the tremendous, very vast universe we occupy. All of it! Impossible to understand, to comprehend. It’s all just so very big.
But then our lives are all very big too, arent’t they, when you think about it. At the same time as they are also all so very small.
I meant to get this letter out last Sunday, of course. It isn’t called The Sunday Letter for nothing. But one thing after another got in the way, and then I had a surgery consult on Monday, and then the work week began in earnest, and and and. You know how it goes.
I’ve had increasing problems with my right foot over the last year and the surgery consult—which we set in motion last summer and only now got in to do—did not go the way I had hoped.
Basically, my options are: 1) do no surgery and just experience increased difficulties over the coming years; 2) do the regular surgery required in most of these instances, which involves realigning my right foot and then several months of off-my-feet recovery; or 3) opt for a more comphrensive corrective surgery procedure which will realign my foot permanently (with metal rods and pins, like a true cyborg!) but involve more recovery (6 months, at least) and also mean a loss of certain kinds of movement.
The trouble here is that because I have CP, the second surgery, which is standard and also more conservative, will likely only bring temporary benefits.
Your foot will likely go back to its current configuration within 2-3 years, the doctor said. But the third surgery, which I recommend, will also mean that you’ll walk differently and will experience increased strain on other areas of your body.
I’m not wild about that third option either. I don’t know how I feel about permanently changing my foot in this kind of way, of signing up for another however many decades of strain and difficulty all in the name of trying to prevent the strain and difficulties I’m already having. Feels a little like trading one set of problems for another.
But then that’s life, isn’t it. One set of difficulties goes out, another set of difficulties comes in.
I said goodbye to a lot of things in 2022. I said goodbye to people I loved and things I loved and expectations that I had for myself and my future. Some of it was freeing; a lot of it was hard. I let go of one relationship in particular that has been a large part of my life for the last decade, and for a while after that happened, it was tempting to feel like I’d wasted so much time.
But I didn’t want to do that. Instead, I asked myself: what did you learn about yourself during the time that this person was in your life? What things did you discover? What revelations from then and from them contributed to the revelations that you have and know today, or might know in the future?
And then I did what I asked at the beginning of this newsletter, and imagined myself into a time and place where I might have been choosing this life the way that one chooses something at the grocery store. And this has been so freeing, so quietly revolutionary, that I feel like I want to do it for everything and every time there’s been a moment in my life when things were hard. This is the energy I want to take with me, forward into 2023. Looking at my life as though it is one giant lesson, because it is. Maybe there’s actually a dimension out there where we are privy to the moments of our lives before they happen; maybe we do, somewhere and somehow, get to choose the lives that we inhabit and occupy and relish. Or maybe it’s all just an exercise in thought. Sometimes I think it’s even more magical if there is nothing after these lives that we spend on this planet.
Just think: there is only now, this moment, this life. After you die, there is nothing. An impossible number of coincidences and circumstances—from the white-hot explosion of the Big Bang up until this moment, today, when you decide to get that coffee at the local cafe and share a joke with someone standing in line—have transpired to bring you here. Aren’t you so lucky, if that is indeed the case? An entire universe filled with chance and gas and today, you get to read a letter that warms your heart, or expeirence a grief that cracks you open, or share words with someone who lifts your spirits.
If that is indeed the reality in which we find ourselves, then what a gift that is.
I don’t think, as it happens, that we live in a universe filled only with chance and gas. I think the reality of our inter-connected nature on this planet and this solar system is much vaster, much harder to comprehend, than that. I think our lives, much like the universe, are both impossibly small and imposssibly large all at once. When I think about my life—all of the relationships and experiences and things that I have, some of them brought together by chance, others brought together through dint of luck and hard work—itself a kind of gravity bringing things into orbit—and still other things that have landed in my life simply as gifts—it feels as vast as a universe. And there are billions of lives circling around mine all at the same time. Billions of other person-universes just going about the day, laughing and crying and being sad or ecstatic or watching their dreams come true while others watch their dreams whittle down into nothing. It is all happening, right now, all at the same time.
So of course there are other planets out there in the so-called habitable zone around other stars. (Though isn’t that itself something to explore? Habitable meaning the habitable that we know and understand. But surely there are lifeforms out there in the universe that require other things to survive. We just don’t know about them yet. Isn’t that exciting? Doesn’t it make you feel comfortable and cozy to know that we are all of us so small, and yet also all a part of something much bigger?)
And of course there are lessons to be learned in the choices around things at once as small and as vast as orthopaedic surgery, or letting go of relationships, or letting go in general.
Of course that immensity of the universe around us exists right here, too, in the impossible possible glories, small and large, of the lives that we’re all living.
Sending you all a spot of wonder as we move through these grey days of January. I hope the vastness of the world we inhabit gives your soul a boost.