Letter to My Brother-in-Law

To Rob, who can prove conclusively with facts and figures and charts that civilization as we know it is about to end, brutally and soon, because the world is running out of oil:

You probably don't want to hear anything from me right now, but in your message to your brothers (which David shared with me) I thought I detected a yearning to escape the awful sense of the future which has enveloped you in the past few years.

 

The only certainty about the future is that there is no certainty. Zip. But this holds true in a positive way as well as in a negative way.

 

I read some of the websites you mentioned. They are all extremely logical and coherent and compelling. But when I back away from them, I ask myself: is this a scientific argument, or a belief system? Is there any way that any of these theories can be convincingly disproved, other than by civilization NOT ending?--a non-event which, obviously, will take more than our lifetime to not happen? I don't think so. When a theory is so all-enveloping that it can take any new fact--anything at all--and neatly incorporate it as furthur proof of its fundamental thesis, then we have left the realm of science. Scientific theories are fragile, and full of inconvenient inconsistencies which need to be ironed out or which otherwise may be fatal. Scientific theories can be disproved in lots of little ways, not by just one great big way.

 

It also seems to me that for people who truly subscribe to what is here, there are only two options. You have chosen one, which is admirable in its way, because the other is numb despair--simply waiting for the end.

 

I propose a third way, which is this: living your life with purpose and joy. 

 

As I said in my last e-mail, I refuse--REFUSE--to let fear infect my life, or the life of my family. It simply will not happen. I feel as strongly about this as I have ever felt about anything in my life, and this is why I have reacted so strongly to you--because what you have fallen prey to is a form of fear, and I will not let you infect us with it. (David is of the same mind here, for different reasons; you can talk to him about it since he speaks for himself.) Fear, for me, has been the biggest enemy I've had to face in my whole life. I was not raised with any confidence in myself or in the future; on the contrary, I was raised in exactly the kind of mindset you now inhabit, which is that the world as we knew it could end at any moment. What confidence I have today in my skills has been painfully learned, and is sometimes a fragile thing. It took me decades to un-learn my own reflexive fear of the future, and at some level I never will (hence my extremely strong reaction to you). But over time, with a lot of thought, I have gotten to a point in life where I have really grown to understand something fundamental: it's the fear of what may happen, not the thing itself, that kills you.

 

 A person in a long-ago group therapy group called me the "Cowardly Lion," after the Wizard of Oz character. That person saw something with clarity that I didn't know at the time, which was that I had a lot of strength I wasn't using. I learned how to use it the hard way, which is the only way it is possible to learn such things. When it became obvious that using my talents to their fullest involved moving away from momma 'n daddy and home and all the things I was explicitly taught I should NEVER turn my back on--well, I turned my back on them. When it became brutally obvious that I was mentally ill and needed to be in a hospital, I went. When it was obvious, as it was for way too many years, that I was not healthy enough to be in a committed relationship, I lived with bone-deep loneliness, all day every day, and I did it for 12 long years. When my illness returned in force a few years ago, I went for electroshock treatment, even though submitting to that--that moment when the anesthesia creeps over your brain and they are already scrubbing your forehead for the electrodes and that thing is in your mouth--was like death. Actually, it was like death on a twice-a-week schedule. (I still can't so much as drive through Baltimore today without getting an elevated heartbeat.) I did that because I wanted to get better, and eventually it paid off: I did. For me, facing fear is the lesson that's presented itself over and over and over. I feel like saying to the cosmos, "Okay, already, I GET it"--but every time I think I've mastered fear, something else comes along to remind me that I haven't. In my view, real life presents quite enough challenges with fear--more than ample, really. Ramping up to a level of near-panic about a future nobody can see is not, and never will be, on my agenda. I suggest it should not be on yours, either.

 

I am writing to you on the day after I got the news that a book proposal for a book I've been wanting to write all my life--which I think in some way I've been researching most of my life--was rejected by my last publisher. I spent some time yesterday sobbing on the sofa. It's not over; my agent has great hope that it will sell somewhere else, and this may turn out to be a good thing, in that the editor of my last book did not show any intuitive feel for the subject, and so would not have been the person to help me see this project through. It may also be that this is a project which won't happen--because we can't afford any longer for me to sit here and type all day without earning some money. I may be working at Kohl's or Macy's this year, just to gin up a little cash, and after the first of the year I may be seriously on a job hunt--or dramatically revising the nature of what I do here at home. I'm already looking at classified ads. I think I could do a pretty good job as an office administrative assistant, and in some ways it would be really nice to get out of the house every day. Writing makes a person stir crazy.

 

In any event, I am contending with my old enemy at this very moment. What if this is really the end of my cherished career? What if I've already written my best thing, as puny as that is, and I'm done? Was that really it? How are we going to get by financially if I don't earn some money soon? All this stuff leads me on the road to panic, and it's not nearly the apocalyptic vision of the future that you have in YOUR head. If it's this bad for me at the moment, you must be in agony.

 

So my solution for today is to abandon the office and go outside and do some fall planting. That way, at least, I'll be putting some oxygen in the air, and it will make me feel better. This may strike you as really idiotic. Maybe my time would be better spent looking  at our Smith Barney statement and strategizing about what to do next. Maybe I should be studying those websites and books you keep talking about and figuring out how much land we'll need to till and whether we have enough dried food in the basement and where I can find some decent but cheap sleeping bags to ward off hypothermia when Western civilization goes dark. But in the end, none of those things seem to me to be things that would ultimately affect the universe one way or another; while I'm frantically preparing for that future, another one--one that I cannot see and I cannot specifically prepare for--is gaining on me. Moreover, doing those things wouldn't do me, personally, a bit of good. In fact, they'd be toxic. They would simply feed the thing that keeps trying to gnaw at my soul. And when the future does arrive, I will be weaker for having spent so much time being afraid of it.

 

So what I'm going to do the minute I hit "send" here in a minute is to go outside, grab a shovel and get my hands dirty. While I'm doing that, I plan to be thinking about what I want to cook for Thanksgiving dinner this year, and I also plan to make a mental list of the many, many things I have to be incredibly grateful for. And while I'm doing all this, my old enemy, Fear, is going to be sitting on the doorstep, so to speak, glowering at me, waiting for me to notice him, because he is so INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT, as any THINKING PERSON can see. To him, as I walk by, I'm gonna say, Fuck you, buddy, and I"m going to keep right on walking.

 

Rob: find work you can do with joy. Quit pissing on other peoples' joy (and I'm another utter fool celebrating Barack Obama's election, by the way). The fact that in my lifetime I can go from seeing doors marked "white" and "colored" to a time when a black man is president is--well, it's a future nobody could have ever foreseen. I rest my case.--tracy