So What?
If Nothing Matters, Everything Matters
If everything matters, nothing matters.
We took a catamaran out into Biscayne Bay — four of us — past Stiltsville, those old houses standing on their pilings out in the flats, and on out toward the lighthouse. Good wind. The boat was responsive and steady.
At some point I went forward and laid out on the netting, the trampoline stretched between the hulls, and put my face down close to the water rushing under me. And I saw it the way you sometimes see a thing you already know. From down there, at that angle, the water has no beginning and no end. It doesn’t start anywhere. It doesn’t stop. It’s just the one body, moving, edgeless, and I was lying on a few square feet of mesh strung over the whole of it. I stayed with that a while. It was the entire thing, right there under me, free for the looking.
I had a meeting the next morning.
When the meeting came I did not think about the netting once. Not a flicker. There were metrics, there were people across a table, there was the particular weight of the room, and the ocean with no beginning and no end did not exist, because the meeting was now the only thing that existed. It had taken the whole field — not fighting the water that was there before, just replacing it, completely, as if it had always been the only water.
Later that day I flew out of Fort Lauderdale, and by the time I was in the security line the meeting was gone too. No metrics, no room, no weight. Just the process of getting home — shoes off, the gate, the seat. On the plane I reflected a little. On nothing in particular. The reflecting was its own small thing and then it was gone.
The cab to the airport I’d already lost by then, but it had been total while it lasted: a Honduran driver arguing with someone on the phone the entire ride, very fast, very expressive Spanish, his free hand carving the air, completely consumed, and me completely consumed watching him, and that was the only thing in the world for ten minutes. Then the curb. Then it never happened.
Someone met me in Pensacola and we went to Dharma Blue for dinner. Over the table I mentioned the sailing — but nothing of the water with no edge. I mentioned the meeting — but nothing of the metrics. I mentioned the flight — but nothing of the cab, nothing of the driver and his beautiful furious Spanish.
Each thing came back as a headline with the essence of it dropped out. And by the time the food came, none of it was anything at all. There was just the table, and the people at it, and whatever was being said, rising up huge and total and being, for that moment, the only thing that had ever happened.
That’s the day. One thing rises up, looks enormous, fills everything, and then the next thing rises up and the first is simply gone — stored, sometimes, but in most cases, gone, and so on, and so on, and so on. No beginning. No end. The same edgeless water I saw from the netting, except I wasn’t watching it from a few feet up. I was in it. I’d been in it the whole time.
That said, I have a brother and a sister who died before I was born. They sit down there, below the surface. I think about them sometimes — not often, not as grief anymore. But they surface, they go back under, they come up slower each year. My mother carried them at full weight, probably to the day she died. Her mother lost children too; I know nothing about them, they never reached me at all. Same loss. Three depths. It was bedrock in her, it’s a waning tide in me, and in my own kids that lost uncle and aunt are barely a fact, already going to silt.
Some things cut deeper than others. Many of us have a flashpoint — something so deep and personal we’ll live with it as long as we breathe. I do. But it doesn’t exist outside the flow of awareness.
So what.
I know. I’ve been waiting for you to ask it. You’ve read this far and somewhere in there is the reasonable voice that says: fine. Pretty enough. Why do I care.
Here’s the only thing I’ve got, and it’s small, and small is why I trust it.
You’re going to do this anyway. Today was your day too — a different boat, a different meeting, a different driver, a different weight that the rest of us will never feel — but the same chain, each link lighting up like it’s the whole of your life and then going dark for the next one. It runs with or without your permission.
You can’t push the river. You might dam it briefly. But you can’t keep even the best of it. Nothing survives the next thing intact.
Just be aware that’s what’s happening. Stop being amazed every time the huge thing turns out to be the next thing in line. Quit mistaking where you are for the place the chain is taking you. It isn’t taking you anywhere.
This piece is already going. You can feel it going. Something’s rising up behind it right now — a text, a hunger, a thought about dinner — getting ready to take the whole field and make this never have happened.
Let it. That’s the answer. That was always the answer.
So what.
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