Each day for the past few weeks has held many days within it. Like a Russian nesting doll, I wake up thinking I know how the day will unfold, and then I open it up. A smaller doll. And another. A day inside a day inside a day. Where does that story take me? What new problem is there to be solved? Who has taken some small freedom away from me, thinking maybe I wouldn’t notice? What new hell is this? Is it possible to love everyone? I definitely hate some people… What is for dinner? Thank you for dinner.
Regrettably, I have to talk about insurance. The context, my husband and I are opening a restaurant, as you may know. In between signing forms and dead-end conversations and wire transfers I read passages in books that make me feel something. I was not made for this type of bureaucracy. I’m not sure that anybody was. No use in resenting it, though I still do. The stuff of adulthood. Easier to deal than to resist. Which was the posture I had towards it for most of my life. My therapist awhile back, when discussing my aversion to bureaucracy in a different arena of my life attempted to help me reframe. Could I, she wondered, see these bureaucratic necessities as benefitting me in some way? Rather than perceive them in opposition to myself and my freedom, what if they were enabling me to better meet my needs? Ok, maybe… Mostly, I’ve started to understand that the relentless forms and bills are not going away, so better to just get on with it than give it more time and energy by being in a constant state of combat.
We purchase insurance. We need so many different kinds. Which makes me wonder – what even is insurance? Insurance - a sort of guarantee. You pay a premium for a sense of security you’re never actually going to have.
Making anything is a risk. The uncertainty of the outcome can feel like you are consistently making mistakes. I remind myself that what we’re making will be joyful and beautiful and will exist in the physical realm. It will leave this computer screen, where I compare sconces and insurance rates. It will exist in the world, as a thing, incarnate. I remind myself that being certain of it all is not the point. That would be impossible. I think the point may be harnessing the capacity to sit with uncertainty.
I read this paragraph in a book I impulse purchased last weekend. Safekeeping, by Abigail Thomas.
“It was at a party in what was to become SoHo, lots of drinking, lots of smoke, and somebody said something I didn’t catch, and another man replied, one hand on the back of his own head, the other holding a cigarette, both men wearing togas as I recall, ‘Oh honey, any sense of security is a false sense of security.’ Everybody laughed, but I didn’t get it. I just didn’t get it. What was so funny? What did it mean? Now I get it.”1
I think we are all starting to get it.
We sign more papers. I look up the word “estoppal”, which basically means to stop – “estop”. Like a sort of embellished way of saying stop. Please, estop what you are doing! I ask my law educated friend why is the language so silly and hard to decipher and she reflects what I know to be true. That partially, it is an attempt at gatekeeping. And it feels that way, and it is frustrating. But really, I am learning. So much. It can be hard. I have to remind myself that I wanted this. A life lived in deeper alignment and autonomy, which requires risks. Risk, I guess, requires insurance. No one is punishing me. In fact, I’m quite lucky. Behind my computer screen is my cat’s palm, opening towards me. An invitation to rest. To be a cat, can you imagine? What a delicious, languorous life.
The day we sign the lease, we get a drink to celebrate. No insurance yet means no keys in hand, so just a drink will do. We watch the dynamics of the restaurant unfold around us as happy hour comes and goes. A silly young chef holds sage to his nose, breathes deep, and exclaims; “I fucking love sage.” This moves me with equal parts embarrassment and sweetness. I have a sprig of thyme tattooed on my arm.
I think about grief. About dying to parts of myself every day. I notice all that is dying off around us. I think about creating a business that could be a healing. That could be restorative rather than depleting. I think that just creating a working business might be enough. I think that it’s possible if we are able to free ourselves from many myths. I think about how scared I used to be of things that really weren’t scary. I think about how many things there are to be scared of now. I pull down a marigold colored journal from right after I graduated college, from the shelf above my desk. A time when I was scared of things that weren’t scary at all. I copied this down, from David Whyte.
“The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.”2
What does that mean - to be a generous citizen of loss? I know that I need to grow my capacity. To better hold this moment in my life, and the American life, without hiding or going numb.
Shirt reads: #wehealtogether.
We take ourselves to dinner at Café Kestrel, a perfect little place. We toast with chilled Pouilly-Fumé and Kronenbourg. We’ve got the insurance. We are on the eve of the next part of our lives on the same day that the big bill is passed, and I am grieving and I am celebrating simultaneously. We eat butter basted skate with English peas, beef carpaccio with basil and burst tomatoes, grown up mac and cheese. There are people on dates. We are on a date. There are lives being lived. There are lamps with crooked lamp shades. A silver banana on the bar. A man in the pink linen shirt asks for a maraschino cherry from the bartender’s mise en place on his way out. “Reminds me of being a kid.”
Our dessert arrives. Two layers of sweet pound cake, with loose strawberry compote in between, a heaping pile of whipped cream, roasted strawberries. The woman beside us at the bar is fawning over it so Henry offers her a bite. “We have a clean spoon” he says. She laughs in shock, a reaction to a generous faux pas. They are taking food from kids and we are trying to share strawberry cake with strangers at a bar. It is July 4th. I am celebrating and I am grieving.
Abigail Thomas, Safekeeping (New York: Knopf, 2000) 45.
This is a gift, love. You are a gift.
bureaucracy--just one of those material entanglements we have to play with on this little spirit romp. the cherry! ❤️