About a month ago, while lying in a tent in Montana, listening to wind through cottonwood and maple, a train rumbling in the distance, a particular thought wandered into my head and sat down.
It said: “What are the things that you have refused to let yourself desire?”
And in that quiet moment, I didn’t laugh at the playful fortune-cookie language, or give the thought a joke-answer involving porn, or comment that it’s a good question at heart and I should think about it seriously. Instead, I let it stay. Then I answered it:
“To practice architecture.”
The simplicity and crystal clarity of the thought was a gut punch. Of course I do. And have for a long time.
I love furniture. I love teaching. I love writing. I’ll never fully leave them. But now I will pursue the study, then the practice, of architecture. (For the necessary credentials, I’ve been accepted to an M Arch program and can start next month, provided I can secure the funding to pay for it. If not, I will take my resume and hunt for a job in the profession, aim for a guerilla education, and leave the M Arch for later.)
In fairness, I had not answered the question properly. Nothing had been denied. Architecture has been an amateur interest all my life, and I’ve worked at its periphery. I have simply chosen other professional interests before it.
What I had denied was the possibility of doing anything else with my life. What you do is good, so keep doing it. If you enjoy it, why change? You’re 53 years old. It’s time to slow down and think about fishing in those lovely Montana mountain streams….
Yes, but...
One advantage to reading is that some singularly beautiful, seeking minds have captured complex insights into human nature, and set them down with simplicity and clarity. These thoughts are not available anywhere else, so not to read them risks the possibility of not knowing them, unless we come up with them ourselves. Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is one such insight into the restless spirit that drives us. It ends:
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
It’s the last four verbs that strike me to the core. Four intertwined actions. This is the spirit of all life, not just old age raging against the dying of the light. Their renewal at every age is key to just that: living. (And architecture is all about living. Or should be. But more of that anon.)
Our fate is certainly guided, but not determined, by what we have done and who we have been. My furniture work is not alien to architecture, and a rather good foundation. Each step can be away from the past, or to confirm it. It really is our choice, though a choice embedded in kairos, not kronos. I could not have made this transition earlier. I don’t want to wait to do it later.
Eventually, I should sit down and consider my original question, if there is anything I’ve denied myself to desire, and if so, why, etc. But asking the question, I found, was quite helpful. Again, it is always the questions that have value, and rarely the answers.
When you listen to the wind (available to us all, I hope, who live above ground), what questions find their way in? Which ones do you let sit down and stay a while? Which ones inspire new and better questions? I let an unknown architect wander into my head and sit down. Who will you let in?
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This is a time of the most powerful public debates that I can recall in my lifetime -- whether we want to continue tolerating a society that divides and prefers on the basis of race, or imagine and develop an intentional community of all humans in America, whether we want to smash the rule of law and government by the people for the people in favor of membership on, tenuous, populist political teams, whether we want to discount the benefits of rational science in favor of emotional needs, and what we truly owe our neighbors. An old friend has a saying of all crisis: that our situation is critical, but not serious. Gloria Gaynor might also be helpful: we will survive. Let's keep building the future.
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