Writ in Water

Waves beat on the side of our ship. As evening comes, and then night, we
know them by white froth and rocking pulses, beating, beating. Stand at the
shore, watch the waves break, and let your fingers twirl to their stirrings. One.
Two. One. Count, and you will understand.

This year, just about everything seemed written in these waves. A new tide
washed away bits of who I was each month, bringing in new sand. From January
to March, the pressures of BMT seemed to select for a more aggressive, more
forthcoming me. To my memory, that aggression faltered rather after April, and
the relative laxity of my naval training meant I would indulge myself instead in
some hijinks of doubtful respectability. (My roommates would remember my
jumping on other people’s beds, and more.) And, in the latter half of the year,
the sometime strictures of life on ship and reprimands looming on the horizon
cultivated a sort of hardness that flickered even with friends and at home. Even
now, of course, all this is changing: the end of the year is not so much the
closing of a chapter as an intermission in a show that goes inexorably on.

Changes were far from only internal. Friends came and left. Some
presences made themselves better felt; others disappeared. People I used to
see every day or week became quarterly events, or, in some cases, even annual
ones. And, as I introspect again: things that I thought would matter to me
revealed themselves to be mere specks, once in the rearview mirror. Everything,
actually, looks smaller in the rear view; and so much — school, projects, desires
— was thrown off my shoulders this year, into the back.

We spend much of our lives building sandcastles. Some of these are built
alone: we etch our names gently in them and affix portions of our souls on clay.
And, when we meet each other, we carve out a new mound from this here
wetted sand. As I know you, I add a keep; as you see me, you add a turret. And
so it goes. The beaches of our lives are littered with castle after castle after
castle; and the largest of these tower over us into clouddom.

Yet the tide always comes. Little waves breaking might chip only pieces off
our monuments of sand. Know ye, though, that they chip: no wave leaves our
castles unchanged. They deform and recast and, sleeping in the night one day
in spring, we wake to find a mighty rogue has rendered it all to sand. It is too
bad for our lives that we must construct with sand and build by water; a more
knowing maker might have given us tools for concrete and unbattered land. But
we have no cup to drink from than the one we have been granted, do we?

Does our work mean nothing, as we face the sunset? The book of
Ecclesiastes gives us a preacher who delivers a coal-black sermon: vanity of
vanities, he says, all is vanity. “There is no remembrance of former things;
neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those
that shall come after… All is vanity, and vexation of spirit.” The preacher speaks
very well, but I cannot see that he is right.

Children playing on the beach know this, as they build their blotchy
figures of sand: the meaning of their figures does not lie in immortality. It lies in
the fact that our child by the water can take from his figure and give to the land,
and kick it all down before the tides even do, but build it up again. It lies in what
the castle is now, and how its moistened patches glisten now against the sun.
And so it is with those things we cherish that pass.

When the tides come, there is no pretending they have not yet arrived.
Neither is it wise to hang on for too long. We can, and will, gaze longingly at
what was as it melts away — fight, though, scramble to keep everything the
same, and you will find that the tide always wins. What is left is to let go; and, if
this year has seemed like a catalogue of change as I have written it, it is best
seen, really, as a chronicle of letting go.

Going from school to life after it was letting go of that comforting bubble
that school is, where no mistake really does matter and I could spend almost all
my time studying without having to worry (indeed, spending almost all my time
studying meant not worrying). Letting go of friends as, one by one, they went to
different countries. Letting the ghosts of past relationships go. Rancour, anger,
hurt — it was better for me that these go. I had to let them. And much fades
away still: I know I will see friends I have known for a decade, or more, less and
less. Projects I dedicated so much of my soul to pass into forgetfulness, or into
new hands. Memories, perfumed so strongly before, thin out.
 There is something quite misleading about the language we use to talk
about letting go. The phrase itself — let go — makes us picture an open hand,
readily letting all that must fall, fall. It conjures in our minds an expectation of
immediacy: one moment the fist is clenched, and the next it is open. With
nothing happening in between, one is set free. Letting go, I suppose, might be
something quite like this for the man on his deathbed, passing onto the next
life, but it is nothing like that for us who must think, feel, and remember.

The finale of Mahler’s 9th, written like a farewell to the world, depicts most
faithfully, I think, what letting go truly is like. There is something gnarled about
this movement from the very outset: every note comes heavy from the heart.
This is a letting go, conscious of letting go, desirous not to; it recollects with
passion, adoration, and bitterness. Bitterness always comes at a peak. It tears
away at what must be.

And yet even from the first minutes of that movement, parts of the
symphony have already let go and sing a paean to that abandon. That reflects a
truth our language obscures: letting go is not sequential, or an all-or-nothing
affair. Parts of us may let go while others hold on, and it is those parts that can
drive us into darkness. In this Adagio they drive into a ruminative, hesitant
quietude for the questions that come, and into pain, and into grief.

All these battles must come before the end really does. In this symphony,
the end comes quietly, but not yet peacefully. In those six minutes of quiet,
near-inaudible string playing, anxiety still comes. So does longing. But these
would always return, anyway: the hard-won part is a quiet consolation, which,
like everything else, grows softer. Softer still. Then acceptance, and serenity.

Silence follows. That, perhaps, is the only way Mahler really deviates from
what letting go is like in reality. We do not have the benefit of silence, and we
must carry on. In my case, 2023 will come. The waves will lap. I will build new
castles, and you with me too. The sand that washes away from all that we make
will flow, grain by grain, into the ridges of an ocean; the current will carry it to a
new shore, with a new sun. Under beating waves, it will all start again.