Get Over Yourself

Correction: In yesterday’s Trying! I wrote that Anthony Bourdain died in a Paris hotel room—it was actually in Alsace. Also, after publishing, I noticed that the Bizarre Foods Facebook page has the same issues as the No Reservations one. Crazy, huh?

A couple of summers ago, my wife, Jean, and I went for a hike at the Minnewaska State Park Preserve, a two-hour drive north of New York City. The hike was a long one, close to 11 miles, that ascended steadily through the Shawangunks and looped around Lake Awosting. But the day was lovely, warm and clear, and the trail was lined with blueberry bushes whose slightly dried fruit had an intense sweetness. We swam in the lake. We ate a picnic lunch: good bread, cheese, sausage. And then we started back.

At first, the rain was intermittent. We hid in a shelter next to the lake’s main beach for a bit, then resumed our trek when the rain relented. We made some distance, scrambling up and over a rocky promontory, but then, with maybe three miles left to go, the rain came down hard. Within minutes we were soaked through and miserable. And yet, what could we do? There was no ride to hitch, no quick exit to take. As much as we hated it, we had to walk, and so walk we did, towels draped over our heads not to keep us dry (impossible!) so much as to protect us from the pounding flow. Of course, as soon as we finished, and found ourselves at the trailhead parking lot, the sun came out and the sky cleared right up. What can you do?

In recent weeks, I’ve written about all the ways we can and should limit our efforts. We can aim lower and be satisfied with fairly good results. We can quit entirely, in a million different ways, and feel relief flood our bodies and souls.

But there are also times when neither of those is possible, and you just have to do what is necessary. You have to put all your personal shit aside—your hopes, your preferences, your stupid and intrusive emotions—and simply act. You have to, as the subject line of this very email pithily states, get over yourself¹.

This isn’t often easy. We are all, I’m assuming, fraught balls of desperate need, pricked by desires and fears whose origins we can only vaguely remember, probably because we’ve blocked out the trauma for sanity’s sake. Or, more charitably, we all have an idea of how the world ought to be, and we invest a lot of energy in realizing that idea, and when circumstances conspire to shred our elaborate mental constructs, we can’t just suddenly abandon them and adjust to new realities. We stay so attached to what we want that we wind up paralyzed.

My kids, like I think many kids, have a tough time with this. They’re 12 and 16, and so are required to do more, for themselves and for our family, than they did just a few years ago. And still, they refuse to get over themselves and do what needs doing. They don’t seek out teachers after school, because they’re shy or ashamed. They hem and haw and delay homework and projects. They find infinite excuses not to do the simplest things, like taking their lunch boxes out of their backpacks and putting them next to the sink. In general, they refuse to acknowledge that if only they did the things everyone is asking them to do, they would be done with them, and they could goof off as they like. They’re kids—this is normal. (It certainly was for me!) One day they’ll realize this, and their lives will change. Until then…

Perhaps it’s parenthood, though, that makes us understand necessity in a visceral way. Once you bring home that first baby, you are confronted with raw need in all its screaming, crying, peeing, pooping, crawling, falling, clinging forms. When you have a baby, you must feed it, clean it, love it, nurture it on its schedule, not when it’s convenient for you and your mood. I remember well those early days trudging home with a baby strapped to my chest and heavy grocery bags in either hand; there was no shortcut, and it didn’t matter how I felt. There was only one way to get through this.

As much as that experience changed me, it did not make me perfect. I hunt for easy ways out, and my ideas about how the world should work often delay getting things done. For one thing, I’m always searching for an “elegant” solution: What’s the one answer, the one transformation, that will solve a problem in one fell swoop? Those solutions, I know from experience, can come to me in a flash—eureka moments that I can implement in an hour or two. And so I’ll wait for them—and wait and wait—when I could be fixing things more manually, if less gracefully. It makes me want to vomit to write this, but: There’s this 6,500-line spreadsheet that I need to examine for work, and I really don’t want to. I am at this very moment waiting for lightning to strike, so I can automate the inspection… but it has not yet struck. And so the goddamn spreadsheet lingers, unexamined. I should really just start brute-forcing it line by line. Maybe tomorrow? Certainly by Friday.

Getting over oneself isn’t just about setting aside our emotions, though. It’s about admitting defeat: As humans, we want to believe that we can make our conceptions of the world our reality—it’s what we’ve done on this planet for the last 10,000 years. But there are limits. Reality doesn’t much care what you think of it, and reality tends to win every showdown.

Me, I try to think of this not as defeat but as submission, a bowing to the higher calling of necessity. Whenever Jean goes away, for example, on a business trip or to visit her family in Taiwan, I tend to relish the single-parent experience. With only myself to rely on, I just do it all, no questions asked—getting up early to make the kids lunch and get them out the door, taking them where they need to go, cooking and cleaning, and whatever else comes our way. I don’t have to think about it, and that in itself is freeing. This sounds so postmodern, so bougie American, but whatever: lack of choice is a luxury. Not that I want it to go on forever—I’m overjoyed when Jean returns—but while I’m enmeshed in it, I can, weirdly, relax. And I can more genuinely appreciate its end, the lifting of the yoke.

The Sisyphean parallel is pretty obvious, but I’ll elaborate on it, if only to note that Albert Camus doesn’t see freedom in necessity. For him, Sisyphus’ labor is torture: “that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.” Sisyphus’ triumph, according to Camus, comes during his descent to retrieve his boulder: “That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness.” The gods have punished him with this endless task—a torture both physical and, in its explicit pointlessness, mental—but it is Sisyphus’ human consciousness that allows him to escape his situation. “The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory.” Camus may not have considered it, but I imagine a mythological figure like that, the cleverest of men after all, could also set aside his own schtick and learn to embrace the thoughtless necessity of his labors. Maybe, he might even decide after centuries, this fate isn’t really so bad. Wait, does it rain in Hades? 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: International Intrigue

I know you’re disappointed that Trying! comes only once a day, leaving you with untold hours where you have nothing at all to read. So might I suggest the International Intrigue newsletter, a daily round-up of everything that is going on in the vast swathes of the world that, apparently, are not the United States of America. Yesterday’s email had a smart timeline of the South Korean declaration and undeclaration of martial law, plus reminders that Namibia had a presidential election, jobs ads from Belgium to Egypt to New Zealand, and the requisite blurb on “brain rot.” Check it out:

Notes

1. Necessity is important here! For things we want, the Don’t Try framework I wrote about a couple of weeks ago comes into play. Here, though, I’m talking not about what we want but about what needs must.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt