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the top of the alpha dominance hierarchy is still beneath the lowest level of what constitutes wisdom
This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine. – Prospero
It’s one of the awful secrets to getting older. You don’t ever get the answers. Every time I consider myself an adult, I think back five years to when I also thought of myself as an adult. And I’m aghast at how staggeringly blind I was. Maybe what I hold to be true right now will seem just as ignorant when I reflect back on it years from now.’ She arched an eyebrow. ‘If I’m around.’ She examined the flute once more. ‘Maybe that’s all growing up is. Knowing in real time that you don’t know anything.’
Maybe that’s what intimacy was, a discomfort like the burning he’d felt in his chest when Joey had told him she could take care of herself. A sense of dread at what could go wrong, a stifling of fear, a baring of the vulnerable self to the judgment of someone else. The jagged edge of one soul meeting another, tearing and rending, a connection and a diminishment both. All that imperfection, all that friction – it wore down the tread, expending rather than preserving. What if that was the point? To expend ourselves in the care of people who mattered? Without that, what was there to preserve?
‘If you have to tell people you’re important,’ Evan said, ‘then you’re not important.’
‘The hardest part of trying to become an adult is realizing that your suffering doesn’t entitle you to anything.’
That’s what people did for you, they held you to a standard you had to live up to.
‘I coulda been something, dunno … worthwhile.’ ‘You still can be,’ Evan said. ‘Best two words in the English language: “next time.”’ ‘If I figure it out. If I live that long. I been under the heel of this thing weeks now. All I feel is fear. At what it’ll be like when they catch me.’ ‘Fear needs a future,’ Evan said. ‘Let’s focus on the present.’
DON’T PICK A FIGHT WITH REALITY,
It struck him that the same law of physics applied to any injury, physical or emotional. If you babied it, it stiffened even more, spreading the pain through you. But if you yielded, if you were willing to endure the white-hot agony of making vulnerable what you sought to protect, you had a shot at releasing it.
‘Dogs are feedback loops for positive emotion,’ Evan said. ‘They’re happy to see you, which makes you happy. Then you pet them and they’re even happier, which makes you even happier.
‘You spend your whole damn life proving that you’re different from everyone else. What a great relief at the end to find out that you aren’t.’
