Life is Whole

At a film screening on "Claiming Williams Day," the audience was given a short essay by Brendan Maher in lieu of programs. The topic was the necessity of respect between all colleagues - faculty, students, and staff - in the educational endeavor. It addressed the damaging effects of "divid[ing] standards of civility and respect into those that we apply to persons we define as peers versus those that we apply to persons that we do not so define." Sometimes overwritten, as you can see, the piece had a moment of spare and startling truthfulness. Its best line is my title: life is whole.

Formal education teaches us to "unpack" a phrase like that, sacrificing compact elegance for a clearer view. For a long time, I think, it's a lean endeavor - full of budding for the essayist ("to try" in French), but bearing little fruit for an observer. We tinker with our watches, and hope that when we are through, they will still tell time. But from this sudden sentiment, this life is whole, I thought, well, I can't say what. Very little was actually about staff or students - that was there already. But life is whole! In part:

Who am I to myself? Who am I to my best friend, to my brother, to my ex-boyfriend and my dad? When I save up my anger for my home, or I talk "I changed" while relegating others to always-the-same, what am I saying?

For the last: sometimes I wonder why I try to write it for myself when Marilynne Robinson is still on earth. "Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding." If I will not forgive, I say this, I willfully keep myself apart, I believe something too shaky and uneven to rest on anything but a pile of rubble. I say that I believe life and myself in it can be compartmentalized, subdivided, that I owe different allegiances and standards of being to the interesting people and the older people, the smarter people and the sadder or skinnier or weirder or even the meaner people. I can be different to people who hurt me or people who just don't impress me. This cannot be what I believe.

We cut ourselves a lot of slack by living life one day at a time. I won't chuck modernity out the window, even if I dangle it dangerously near, even if the more I read, the scareder I get. Maybe simply out of cowardice, I keep something, for there is, almost always, something to keep. But if life is whole, and we are whole, we have to live it whole. Not one day at a time, not even really in stages or steps. Let the postmodern BS fly.

In whole lifetime, whole being, life is whole means living how? Packed tightly:
Like a current, like a pattern,
like a home, and like a prayer.