Why This?


Dear Eugene,

I don't play with my phone and last night I thought maybe I don't play with it enough: there must be something good, something better that I can do with it.

So I found myself an app to identify plants, went into my photo album to do precisely that, surprised by how it actually worked, wasted 30 mins in sort of a good way.

And I thought, Yeah, if I can do school all over again, this is the kind of thing that would interest me.  There are stuffs you put in your head because you need to use them, and there are others just for the joy and pleasure of their being revealed.  Somewhere in between exists a tenuous dance of the realistic and romantic, I suppose, if one doesn't mind the obscenity of such arbitrary sorting.

Now I used the word "sort" twice already this morning, a word I don't often use.  There are 20 stand-ins lining up to deputize but I let the stranger stay.  I determined to do something I didn't even know the reason for and somehow joy met me there.

Yesterday I was happy to hear from a friend.  He determined to climb a mountain and I was worried.  To see his email in my inbox means he has made it down.  He said, "At one point, clinging to the side, hoping the hand-holds would actually hold, and looking almost straight down for hundreds of metres, I did wonder, 'Why this craziness?'"  I replied that question wouldn't be a bad title to his autobiography.

"Why this beauty?"  I wonder if God asks while creating.  There are more than one way to see it, the learned man says; and with that he gives me all sorts of way to sort things out.

Yours, Alex

Comments

  1. UnknownAugust 30, 2018 at 6:42 AM

    Dear Eugene,

    “Something in between exists a tenuous dance of the realistic & romantic… Now I used the word ‘sort' twice already this morning, a word I don’t often use."

    In 2011, I must have soared to the pinnacle of romanticism in its most fantastical flare upon receiving the invitation of a lifetime: I was personally invited to an on-site interview by the hospital director of one of the most nationally prestigious research programs in the East Coast. If I could dream about dancing among comets & constellations, I would grace the cosmic floors until they burn in love.

    Years prior, I fantasized about abandoning all - the stability of work-life balance, the alluring reliance on monthly wages & the soul-bellowing call from home - to embark on a year-long sabbatical in clinical hospital research. Even motherhood could not have barricaded me in the misery of forgetting about this romantic visionary replay in my mind & heart. I was simply not certain about the timing of this delicate dance between reality & romanticism.

    I knew the director whom I was destined to see again at the interview. I loved him as my professional superhero, one invested in his highly specialized work without the fear that adulterates conviction. I would trudge through snow & bleed from thorns to be privileged with a year’s pleasure of learning under his supervision in a dance among expert clinicians & researchers in their fields. And through this prolonged thrill of a year, I imagined my minted transformed self, pregnant with the sort of acquired skills unleashed for the first time, growing in experiential knowledge & laboring in the language of love.

    The day before my interview, my flight across the US from West to East felt as fleeting as a kiss. From my windows in the plane, I saw the lines demarcating ocean & sky, reality & romanticism, a woman & her dreams. Why this? Why should I have surrendered my youth, my cash to pursue this dance of dreams? There is often no logic to life’s most impassionaied inquiries.

    The 8-hour interview grounded me in the reality of expectations & competitiveness. Towards the end, in an elevator on our descent, the director turned to me squarely & expressed his final words. He congratulated me on being the select few among many for this magical day. He must have known me well because he reassured me that I had achieved much already. In the moment, I dreamed of all sorts of possibilities that could not have been pristinely sorted or mapped out for my prospect.

    A month had passed before I received the result of the interview. I was rejected. I cried. I sent an obligatory email to thank him & the interviewing team. I cried again. Dance not. Nothing to sort or romanticize.

    Within a month’s span of the same year, my world upended in an unexpected second dance of the realistic & romantic: another program in Southern California had accepted my application for a year-long specialty training. It would be one of the most glamorous, agonizing dance of my life.

    “ ‘Why this beauty?’ I wonder if God asks while creating.. he gives me all sorts of way to sort things out.”

    Yours, Kate



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