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I was not the least bit depressed, or even especially thoughtful. I had hardly a thought in my head at all.
I was, even so, feeling a good deal—feeling, actually, pretty pleased with myself, and feeling especially pleased with that radiant morning on the shore, accompanied by a deliriously happy dog. My best guess is that, after some years of high anxiety, I was finally relaxed enough to suspect the trouble I was in.
We had moved to Virginia Beach about a year earlier, having arrived there with a palpable sense of reprieve from a stint of—as I have come to speak of it—having done time in Texas. I had left a difficult and pretty much thankless teaching-and-program-directing job in north Texas in favor of a similar but far more satisfying gig at Old Dominion University in Norfolk. We'd extricated our little family—by which I mean me, Marcia, our ten-year-old Liz, and our five-year-old Ben—from our rundown cottage in a run-down corner of a small (and, at the time, relatively run-down) north Texas town; we'd swapped those derelict digs for a bright, airy bungalow by the beach.
The contrast was stunning. Our first evening there, in fact, sitting at an oceanfront café, we were treated to the spectacle of a dozen or more dolphins frolicking northward as they proceeded to the mouth of the Chesapeake half a mile up.
Life looked good. It looked very good. It even tasted good.
I felt as if I had found my body again after having misplaced it for four intermittently numbing years in exile. I had even started running again, running on the Chesapeake beach or along the state park bike path most mornings before heading off to my job in Norfolk.
In the midst of such bounty and such promise, and provoked by nothing I could name, I suddenly thought what might seem like a strange thought under the circumstances. At the age of forty, I had accomplished only this: I saw how far I had gotten off track.
It was as if those difficult years in Texas had somehow distracted me from seeing that the real work—the interior work—was being neglected. And, to be honest, my difficulty with a handful of colleagues there and a regrettable lack of humility on my part had led me to speak and act in ways I knew, even at the time, to be wrong, ways that ate at me still.
Shame is a curious phenomenon. It can provoke further, entrenched, and shameful responses—compounding the shame, compounding the poor response, ad infinitum—or like a sharp and stinging wind it can startle even the dullest of us into repentance. Now that my job was once again rewarding, now that my family was safe and happy, I relaxed enough to glimpse a subtle reality: I saw how far I stood from where I'd meant to be by now.
Rather, I saw how far I stood from where I'd meant to be by then.
I have recently turned fifty. And though it is possible that some progress has been made in the intervening ten years of meantime, that progress has been very slow, negligible, and remarkably unsteady, with virtually every advance being followed, hard on its heels, by an eclipsing retreat—with hard words, harsh thoughts continuing to undermine any accomplishment in the realms of charity and compassion.
In his Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, the beloved Mr. Auden puts it in a way that never fails to resonate with me, to slap me awake when I recite the poem (which I do as a matter of course every Christmas Eve): "To those who have seen / The Child, however dimly, however incredulously, / The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all."
I get that, too.
Wise men and women of various traditions have troubled the terms being and becoming for centuries without arriving at anything like a conclusion. Every so often, though, I glimpse that some of the trouble may derive from our merely being, when—as I learned to say in Texas—we might could be becoming.
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