sharing

During a long conversation of several hours, the kind that's really a flowing string of prolonged jokes and many long conversations interspersed with small comments, the kind that happens over the course of time that stretches from a couch in a living room to non-matching chairs on a small balcony to standing on a rooftop against a wall on either sides of an open window--during one such conversation, there were thoughts like why writing, why paintings like Hopper's Room by the Sea and Wyeth's Christina's World, and why a song like Mad World by Gary Jules. In a stream of pockets between friends, there is fast and slow talk of how one person sees this ocean as warm and comforting and the other finds it cold and foreboding, and how the grass around Christina slightly darkens, and how we seek hauntingly dark songs for a spectrum of feeling. That song is so damn beautiful.

Some of that contributed to what I wrote about last time, some of the sense that there is too much; even when it's good, when it comes in layers and builds up into dense blocks it can be incapacitating. But that conversation(s) also made me excited about writing, because I was pushed to articulate what lies at the bottom of that urge to put things in words. Which is that when things are experienced and felt strongly, you want to share them. And this phenomenon is most reliable when it's beauty. The beautiful quality of beautiful things inspires the sharing of them. There are probably a million reasons underlying this and more reasons existing in its periphery, but this is the feeling undiluted by explanation and psychology.

Since that time, I've fought hard against the turbulence of last week that made me sluggish, and in that have naturally fallen into a flexible routine. Within that space there's been an immersion in small beautiful things.

Mornings are spent in the architecture library. I like entering the place with the neat columned wooden bookshelves and artwork above, like a picture to be taken (but I don't, because I go there every day). The deep orange carpet and long smooth tables are calming, and there's a vertical window from floor to almost ceiling across the way, to see people come and go in their own proportion. There are very few people there these days, and I stay there for a few hours before I go home for lunch.

This morning, in those hours, during a pause when I let myself savor a song and stare out the window, I thought about how you always want to share music that moves you. I was listening to The Antlers' Hospice. It's an album my oldest friend introduced me to, when I was studying for Step 1 of the boards--over a year ago. It touched me then, but over the year I've grown to really love it. I like listening to albums in their entirety, for the full stories, even songs to which I'm not partial (writing that sentence grammatically correctly is kind of lame). Sometimes songs just aren't good, but sometimes you get an album like Hospice, where some songs are difficult to get into, but over time you really listen and then one day every song makes whatever it is in us that feels, explode. And it does it not with easy tricks, but with real, honest sentiments that are sometimes so much harder to communicate. I like how often the words are incongruous with the melodies, in a way that isn't about conflict, but about many things existing at once. Seeing passersby as this washed over, I wanted every one of them to have it happen to them too.

I walk back home for lunch, and cook something easy that I can have for both meals of the day. It's amazing how different, concretely and otherwise, it feels to have fresh food in your fridge, and to eat your own food. I'm going to make my own food for the rest of my life for as long as I can, because in the midst of everything else, it's so satisfying to care for your basic needs, and to know that the taking care of them can be basic too.

After passing time to digest by studying a bit more at home, I go running. I've found that one thing I really love about this is that it coincides with my love of long stretches of time. Running for an hour gives time to listen to an entire album and then some, or to a smattering of songs when I feel like it, and to be immersed in movement. The gym is also pretty empty these days, especially in the mid-afternoon, and this is a welcome break in the day.

It's also nice to shower in the middle of the day. It's almost like starting again, and makes the studies feel not so prolonged. But the studies, for the most part, have been good. Going through a different area of medicine each day, I remember the actual experience of the rotation in the past year, which is something I haven't been able to draw upon in the past. It's not that I remember anything scientific or clinical better because of those experiences; it's that spaces are filled in and studying becomes three-dimensional. Studying ob-gyn, I remembered what it was like to first consider the physical experience of miscarriage, to witness how abortions were performed, to squeeze into the corner of a crash C-section, and all the life that happens. Studying rheumatology, I remembered what it was like to think about living with constant pain in your muscles and joints, to speak to the people who have molded their skins to accommodate their illnesses, to appreciate the care and tenderness with which my attending physician touched their hands and bones. Studying renal, I remembered when I first thought about how simple and creative dialysis as a concept is and how awful and foreign it can be for the person being dialyzed, and how I felt a visual miracle to see the kidney go from gray to pink during a transplant surgery. And throughout all of that, there's the science and body alone, how dynamic we are and how a lot of the way our body functions are weird phenomenons. That's a post for another time.

I get distracted easily, of course. Yesterday I looked at photographs of my brother's trip to Wyoming, and that led to an hour of daydreams of road trips and open spaces under big clouds. I immediately shared them, and our nature loving friend said, these pictures make me want to stab myself in the heart and explode. My favorite pictures are ones where the muted browns/grays of the rocky backdrop contrast with other vibrancy in the scene; natural things that exist as they should, vivid trees and bright sturdy houses, and a rainbow after rain. It's as though their color, and presence, don't quite belong, but they're there, a quiet surprise that just about made me want to die.

In the late afternoon and evenings, I take a pick of coffeeshops. In the evening I spend time with someone whose presence I enjoy; this can be anything from eating with wife or studying at The Study, a posh hotel lobby and restaurant, with a classmate who's also wearing shorts and also not buying anything. Or it can be an activity like climbing or dinner with friends, something to look forward to and something to remind that there's not only things worthy of sharing, but people worth sharing them with.

Some nights I sneak in a few pages of Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland & the End of the World, a book that steadily flowed along and has spun into a heartaching last quarter. Murakami is something else I've consistently wanted to share, so much due to how much I feel he sees and shares. The part of the book in which I'm currently residing, shouts that conflict and imperfection and all this mix-up I feel is, if nothing else, honest and therefore, worth it.

Before sleep I feel things I try to hang onto upon waking, and these days it's been the sense that all these things add up to a minuscule percent of a percent of all that can be experienced. It's how heavy that feels, in our hands, and then how light it is buried at the bottom of what's been and what can be; this is why.