Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

Nothing comes into the universe and nothing leaves it.

But my mother, in her bed, infinitely still, was wild inside.

In college, I’d read Walden because a boy I found beautiful found the book beautiful.

Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

Homo sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom,

“The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That’s science, but that’s also everything else, isn’t it?

but memories of people you hardly know are often permitted a kind of pleasantness in their absence. It’s those who stay who are judged the harshest, simply by virtue of being around to be judged.

Yes, she’s insufferable, but she’s ours and so we must suffer her.

that I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.

If I’ve thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remind myself what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound.

What is the point of all this talk? What problems do we solve by identifying problems, circling them?

“Religion is the opiate of the masses,”

she chided us for becoming too American, by which she meant we didn’t believe in anything.

We read the Bible how we want to read it. It doesn’t change, but we do.

she just never figured out how to translate who she really was into this new language.

Nana and I would spend a lifetime of silent minutes, strangers on the phone.

so lonely that I craved further loneliness.

We were engaged in spiritual warfare.

I, too, have spent years creating my little moat of good deeds in an attempt to protect the castle of myself.

And so I recognized, for perhaps the first time, that my mother wasn’t mine.

“There is no living thing on God’s Earth that doesn’t come to know pain sometime.”

Of course, my mother is her own person. Of course, she contains multitudes.

Some people make it out of their stories unscathed, thriving. Some people don’t.

But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.

I want everything and I want to want less.