Don’t complain; don’t explain. The world doesn’t owe you anything except to be what it is. And you don’t owe anyone an explanation for your choices, beyond the fact that you do what you do because that’s what you want to do.
I am writing this from a Eurostar, traveling from London to Rotterdam. How good it feels to travel by train, avoiding being thrust 10,000 meters into the air in a metal can, to wake up 45 minutes before departure, and to take as much luggage as you want. Planes suck. Trains rock.
We’ve now passed the Brussels station, and the carriage is nearly empty. A woman, who sounds American, sits somewhere in the far back, talking to her friend in that grating way some Americans do — nasal and with minimal facial movement — going on about a true crime podcast she’s “literally, and I mean literally, hooked on.” She seems oblivious to the fact that not everyone in carriage 3 of the Tuesday morning Eurostar from London St. Pancras is interested in her listening habits. I put on my headphones and type away.
I’m reminded of something I read last week, an interview in The Paris Review with the writer Tobias Wolff. He spoke about his personal life, becoming a young writer in the ‘60s, and his fascination with Hemingway, Joyce, Fitzgerald, and Remarque — writers who sought out experiences (like wars) and then wrote about them. He mentioned following in their footsteps by volunteering for the army to fight in Vietnam. “Though I failed to see that these writers were warning me against these experiences,” he adds.
This resonated with me. Not the wars, though. Despite being young, ambitious, and sometimes foolishly romantic about the idea of going to Ukraine to report from the action like a young Winston Churchill, my wife knows better.
No, it’s about something else.
These are my favorite writers. And like them, I am drawn to the idea of accumulating experiences and world-weariness to write about. In my most ambitious dreams, I imagine traveling the globe with one backpack, hitchhiking across the US, biking around Asia, meeting interesting people, and getting into various stories to write about. However, in calmer moments, I soberly recognize that I am not that adventurous; I am what my neighbors call a “cautious traveler,” preferring well-trodden paths and hotels with at least four stars. But the belief that one should seek out experience in one’s youth, especially when aspiring to write, still lingers. Isn’t our twenties meant to be THE BEST TIME OF OUR LIVES, filled with fun and without holding back?
Wolff goes on to say that over time, he learned that what is good for him as a man and a writer is “to be in ordinary life.” He values the gravity of daily obligations and habits, the connections to friends, work, family, place, and even the necessary compromises to navigate life.
What a revelation.
Indeed, while seeking new experiences might be a good thing, some writers, like Flannery O’Connor, have written brilliantly about the culture they observed without leaving their hometowns. They wrote about what they knew, which is the first piece of advice given to writers. Experience, on the other hand, doesn’t have to be about putting yourself in risky situations and being someone other than you are — sometimes, it’s about seeing what’s around you, being attentive, seeing how things work, and most importantly: what it all adds up to.
You can write what you know, but you can also write what you want to know. Writers are able to write about characters smarter than them. You don’t have to go to prison to write about prison. And Stephen King definitely didn’t get into all kinds of trouble he writes about. Most writers tend to write about what they know either way, even if the external façade and the settings are different from book to book. As one writer said, “I didn’t write 9 novels — I wrote one novel 9 times.” Writers have their (often pre-defined) Territory.
But so does everyone else.
The bigger idea here is that most of life is, in fact, found in the ordinary, in the mundane, in the stuff that doesn’t go well on Instagram — and that’s okay. Sure, the modern myth tries to convince us that Just Living is not enough, that we somehow have to break our backs achieving Success. We tell ourselves it will happen by the time we hit 25, then we sigh and tell ourselves stories that many of the people we admired didn’t achieve success until their 30s and 40s. The 30s and 40s go by and something strange happens: we let go. We forget we wanted to be a Big Success at all and we move on with our lives. Is that giving up on one’s dreams? No, it’s maturity.
Our generation has been brought up to think that compromises are for suckers, that one should always strive for the stars, have insane ambition, “get it all or die trying,” but what happens when our ambitions are larger than we are? It happens more often than we’d like to admit.
Grind and hustle aren’t everything. Luck and talent still count.
I’ve recently been thinking a lot about the idea of limitation — and how understanding your limits as a human, character, person, employee, artist, athlete, what have you — is a healthy way of looking at life. For as long as I can remember, I had a deep inner belief that I shouldn’t have limitations and that those I have should be overcome. My therapist and I often worked through something she called: accepting that I am a human, not a robot. It seems almost childish and hilarious to look at these things now. Though I still struggle with this sometimes. Still, I try to remember that knowing where you begin and where you end is good. Knowing your boundaries, limits, and edges are keys to self-identification, self-esteem, and generally being a good (not to say sane) person. How many people went insane because of overinflated egos? I have too many of those in the blood.
Another way of thinking about your limitations is through compromises. When you are young and arrogant, you live by the motto “GET IT BY ANY MEANS.” Whatever it is you are trying to get. When you grow up, you start making compromises. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, if you look at people who have never compromised in their lives — the so-called geniuses and bold ones — they are, well, quite often, narcissistic jerks.
Tobias Wolff says, “The compromises don’t diminish us, they humanize us. It’s the people who won’t, or who think they don’t, who end up monsters in this world. I’m not talking about dishonesty, I’m talking about having some give, sometimes letting go of things that you aren’t inclined to let go of, that you may even have attached the name of principle to, to justify your fear of bending.”
Meanwhile, my train is arriving in Rotterdam.
Ah, how great it is to live in Europe. It’s only 10 AM and I have already visited four countries.
~
If you want to, you can buy me coffee here. No pressure though.