“Out There: On Not Finishing”, by Devin Kelly

Wonderful read as CO awaits a snow-pocolypse.

”Out There: On Not Finishing”, by Devin Kelly via longreads.org.

What happens if what you once used to make sense of things no longer helps you make sense of things? What happens if the patterns and habits and metaphors we lean on do not serve us in the moments we need them? What happens if the stories we tell ourselves about our lives leave us lonely, wrestling with meaning? What then?

I grappled with these questions for hours on that farm in Georgia. Under the stars and all alone, I did not know what I was doing. Each lap, I shuffled past the bonfire, past my friends singing karaoke, past the laughter of strangers, and each lap I shuffled away from them, until they became the soft patchwork of voices traversing a distance, the kind of sound that hollows you to your core and fills you with a deep sense of missingness, a longing to be there and not wherever you are. At that point, the race had ceased to be a race for so many people, but it hadn’t for me.

Two weeks after Farmdaze, I sat in my therapist’s office wondering why I hadn’t been able to stop when all my friends had. We talked about how I have a desire to tell a specific story: a story of perseverance, a story I have been telling myself for so long as a way to make sense of my own life, as a way to prove, to myself, that I could love myself, and deserve the love of others. For a long time I have believed that love and joy come after. They come after accomplishment. They come after pursuit. They don’t live in the present. They have to be earned. But there is a kind of grace that comes at a place like Farmdaze, a place that calls itself a race but is really everything that a race isn’t, an event that lets men give up if they want, that doesn’t shame them for it, that lets them become present in the story that is, simply, all of us trying to love all of us, the story that Galway Kinnell calls, simply, “tenderness toward existence.”

Each time I made it through another lap and then shuffled into the next one, the voices of my friends got a little quieter, until one lap, when I came around, they had gone to sleep. I felt suddenly selfish, and sad, that I had abandoned spending time with people I loved so that I could search for meaning by myself. One lap, I was alone under a field of stars, soaking wet, skin steaming. I tried to see the stars, to see all of them, but my headlamp’s glare made it impossible. So I turned off my head lamp and offered myself to the dark. It was freezing, my lips trembled. What is the point of all of this, I asked myself, what is the fucking point.

Indeed. It’s important to celebrate the small things - eat some nachos off the fine China, as I have been known to say - but some things are just for the sake of. This writer, Devin Kelly, attends this race with some college buds, which is so special. Some stuff is just what you do, not necessarily who you are. Plus, enjoy the process! I have lost sight of that myself sometimes.

More, then you should read the whole thang:

So often, the plot of our lives seems like a clarion call for the extraordinary. It is, nearly always, how the world is marketed to us as consumers, and speaking specifically, how the world is marketed to me as a man. Think of how young you were when you first thought you had to be the hero of your own story. I must have been barely older than a baby. My father called me maverick. It made me feel like a rebel. I wanted to be a star. I had to win at all costs. And yet: when was the last time anyone ever told a man to be ordinary? Think of the difference that would make, to begin to dismantle our need to be heroes, to finish things, to consider ourselves defined by accomplishment, particularly in a world where women make less money on the dollar and yet are defined, in settings both casual or professional, by what they have done or failed to do. Living, as Mueller writes, is so often, and so deeply, an ordinary thing. And yet the extraordinary sits there like a burning sun on the horizon.

The thing about horizons is that, upon reaching one, you always encounter another. It’s the in-between where life lives.

🌞