Anticipation

I sit down to write, and I end up staring at the screen or the sheet of blank paper or the keys of the typewriter (yes, I still have one, a big, metal IBM Selectrix II, green, and it weighs a ton). I used to tell myself I didn't want to write because I knew I'd write crap. I could see the idea revealing itself word by word on that little screen on the inside of my head, the inside of my forehead just above my eyebrows, and I didn't like what I saw: poorly chosen words, ideas that meandered across the imaginary page, sentences begun and abandoned like old towns bypassed by the highway. I could see the disaster I was about to commit, and I thought, "What's the point?" That's what I told myself.

Yesterday, during my lunch hour, I went to Target and bought canned soup to put in my large desk drawer so I have something to eat on the days I forget to bring lunch from home. And I bought wavy potato chips, and I bought those generic Target vanilla wafers. I knew the chips and cookies weren't the kinds of things I should be buying if I'm trying to get in shape. I knew they didn't fit with the picture of myself I'm trying to create, with a man trying to move toward health and treating his body well. But a part of me was saying--a part of me I couldn't hear until I replayed the choices in my mind later--that what I ate wasn't going to matter, that I wasn't ever going to be that healthy, in shape guy. You know how this turns out, it told me. You'll try this for a while, then you'll give up.

It's easier when you know. It takes so much less energy to settle into the inevitable, into the certain. I put on the weight of anticipated and expectation like a heavy coat, and I feel my shoulders bending to it's shape, feel my back curve down, my legs bow, my head lower. Something about it feels good. It's killing me, but it feels good.

Often enough in my life, I've been sucker-punched by the fury of surprise. As a child, I could never tell how the day would go or where the next conflict would come from. Would my father's drinking or my mother's anger envelope us that day? Would furniture end up overturned? Would the belt fall on one of us kids? Or would it turn out, after all, to be an ordinary day of school and play and reading and television?

The hardest part wasn't dealing with the fights and violence; the hardest part was not knowing when they were going to come. So it became much easier to expect that every day would eventually go wrong. That way, I didn't have to wonder; I didn't have to adjust when things suddenly turned. I could always be ready.

But I've discovered, of course, that everything you really love surprises you. I didn't expect to meet the woman who would become my new wife at a friend's housewarming party a year and a quarter ago. I never expected my sons to become the people they have so far, to develop the interests they exhibit. And the words that emerge when I do manage to put them down, all the words I've put together on this screen, don't look at all like the ones that unscrolled themselves in my head like a cautionary tale before I began.

Surprise seems more and more to be the point of life, not necessarily thrills or big events or suspense, but the unanticipated discoveries that each moment makes available to us. It terrifies me because the surprises don't always feel good; they can hurt like hell: loss pregnancies, broken relationships, death, pain, rejection.

When I taught writing classes, I struggled to get my students not to come to closure too quickly on their ideas or their words. I urged them to suspend closure and come back again and again to their essays from a new angle and let themselves be surprised. All my life, I've had that same struggle with myself, trying to convince myself to see each day new, to "dwell in possibility," as my old friend Emily would day.

Most of us find it more comforting to dwell in certainty, or in what we choose to treat as certain since, no matter what we think, we never know what life will bring us. But I need to remind myself that the only certainty is death, and that the ultimate act of certainty is suicide, a refusal to continue at all. To paraphrase the line that ends the old story, "Dying is easy; not knowing what's going to happen next is hard."

But I do want to go on. I want to see what's going to happen next. I'm fighting for the part of me that chooses that response to life. And that's always been the question, hasn't it? Surprise or certainty? Love or fear?