The Center Will Hold (You)

A Roundabout Way to Answering the Question, "How Are You?"

My wife and I started watching a documentary about Joan Didion until she—my wife, not Joan—reminded me that we’d already seen it. I must have fallen asleep, which is not uncommon for me. “The Center Will Not Hold” is, in part, about the writer weathering the storm of her husband’s and daughter’s deaths, which both happened in one cosmically tragic year. 

Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash

The film presents a quandary, which is: When do you tell your story? Do you write it all down while it’s happening, ensuring you will inflate the importance of certain incidents and downplay others that you’ll later decide were far more important? Or do you wait until you’ve got a more nuanced and objective perspective? When a client tells me, “I am living my book right now!” I tell them no, you’re not—you are living your life now and maybe in a few years you can write about it. But probably not yet. 

Writing about your life is something best done after the fact. It takes time to let the detritus of certain events settle and to sort the gold from the dross. Only time allows you to do this, to understand what something really “means,” usually long after you’ve forgotten what happened. Sometimes, there is a point when you have to tell your story—when you don’t just need to document events but write about them as they’re happening. Such was the case for Didion who wrote about her griefs as they unfolded and then published them later. 

In my case, no great grief besets me, but I continue to marvel at both the difficulty and beauty of life. I know I’m not alone. We all struggle with what to make of our respective realities. These are confusing times, and we all need catharsis, which is what good writing does: offering a reason for our suffering. 

As I type this, I overhear a couple of middle-aged men complaining at the coffee shop about how expensive and hard things have been since the pandemic, how the whole ship of the American empire is going down. I get it, but I can’t allow myself to go there yet.

Still, I am far from cheerful.

One of the vocational hazards of being a writer is that I often feel compelled, despite the rules of common pleasantry, to tell people how I’m doing. So when the checkout clerk at the grocery store asks, “How’s it going?” or the guy at the record store greets me with the same, I tell them. I know the inquiry is far from sincere, but I can’t help but indulge in a little sincerity. When people wonder how I’ve been or what’s new in my life these days, it’s hard to limit my response to a mere “fine” or “I’m good.” There’s just so much more to say.

Didion wrote an entire book—actually, two—on the devastating experiences of losing her two closest loved ones, and I can’t relate to such horror. But when you ask a writer a question, you will always get a novel. I will, therefore, in an act of great restraint, limit myself to a mere essay (it’s the literal least I could do). So, since you asked, here’s how I am doing.

The best I can describe it is that there is a core to life, something towards the middle, and this place is stable and secure. Beyond this center, there is chaos: barbarians at the gate, money troubles and environmental stressors, clients to contend with, neighbors to borrow tools from, kid drop-offs and pickups, taxes to pay, bills to keep track of, and little pieces of mail demanding to be opened.

Then there are the friends and family who wonder how we’re really doing and what it’s like to manage all this. 

But in the midst of it all, in the eye of this storm, there is a calm, cool center, and that is where my wife and I, and our four children, get to live most of the time.

Most mornings, we wake with the sun. The birds are singing at this hour, a neighbor’s sprinkler system kicks into gear, and we peel ourselves out of bed. We feed and take kids to school, and this act alone requires an hour. It is something we do reflexively, like good soldiers. We return home and make our own breakfast. Today, it was scrambled eggs and fried potatoes, sautéed peppers and diced onions, scallions mingled in with flimsy bacon and extra cheese sprinkled on top—all wrapped in a tortilla. We talk, we eat, and take our second cup of coffee on the porch.

At some point, never too early, there is work to do: phone calls to make, emails to send, someone coming by the house to deal with a newly-broken appliance.

Before noon, I make a list of what must be done that day and get through the first few items.

Later, I go outside, do a quick stroll around the block, take a break and stuff some food in my mouth. 

Then there’s another call and more emails; the urgent replaces the important. I make a new list of what will have to be done tomorrow—and another of things that can’t wait until then. This is the ebb and flow of any day, every day. But there is always tomorrow, always more to come. Despite the headlines and fears of an election year, there is still something to hope for and hope towards. Even the most urgent matters can wait a day or two.

Knowing this, I have grown accustomed to telling people I don’t answer emails on weekends. It feels like an admission, especially after years of overwork and a general disregard for my health and wellbeing. I don’t own a smartphone and rarely check voice messages, I apologetically confess to friends I’ve lost touch with. “It’s just too hard to text on this dumb phone,” I say, this phone that I barely lose and often misplace. “It’s best to just send me an email,” I tell them. And some do. Most say they will and don’t. But this much I can control. I can turn off the laptop after a long day of work, shut it down when the kids are playing around me, leave it in the bag at bedtime. It’s harder to transport and pull out of my pocket at a four-way stop. This self-imposed Luddism is no great act of personal discipline, just a small measure of sanity. I hope. 

I also remind clients and colleagues that my wife and I take off Fridays, and this time has become sacred to us, a little respite in the middle of an otherwise busy week. It’s a nice refresher to grab a coffee or breakfast, even sometimes an overnight trip away, and we do these things as often as we can, as a matter of schedule. It feels so self-indulgent to write but, also, necessary. We decided some time ago that we set the pace of our lives, and this is what it looks like. 

---

Most afternoons are met with a foreign invasion of neighborhood children, occasional tutors, sojourners from out of town, the occasional roof salesmen, and much, much more. We welcome these guests and try to feed them. Sometimes, they relent, often they do not. 

The rest of the day, starting around four, is spent on making dinner. This is a feat performed by my wife or me, sometimes both, and it takes two hours. Our home fills with smells of cooked garlic and onion, the sweetness of rosemary mingled with broiled chicken flesh. There is the sound of potatoes sliced on a wooden cutting board, a pot of bubbling water, jazz music playing on the hifi. 

As these smells waft through our home, a teenager or tween will sleepily stumble into the kitchen, moaning, “Whenzzz dinner?” We sip our cocktails and chuckle, winking at one another. “When it’s ready,” we say, then return to the cooking and the music and whatever conversation we were just having. The child sighs and returns to the voice whence they came, only to be spotted twenty minutes later, asking the very same question.

When we don’t cook, we heat up the dregs of a previous night’s dinner: something sitting in one of the dutch ovens for a few days, congealing in the fridge and reforming to make something even better. When warmed, this dish gets placed on a trivet in the middle of the dining room table, along with a large serving spoon. We plop bowls down beside it and declare dinner to be served. If we don’t want to set the big table, we seat the kids in the breakfast nook, and we adults stand, taking our meal at the counter—it is our lazy version of dinner. On occasion, we even let the kids fend for themselves or cook for us, and those are special times, indeed. 

As evening fades into night and the dawn of a new record fills the house, we share what we can remember from the day. Rarely do we have anywhere to be after dinner or anything to rush off to, so we linger. The talk lasts half an hour, sometimes longer. There are, of course, things calling to us—cul-de-sac kids who want to play after dark and emails that need our attention, pieces of paperwork sitting on the filing cabinet—but these are just blips, muted colors in the background that are easy to ignore.

The dinner concludes, and our children have chores. They need to clear the table, do dishes, sweep the kitchen, and mop. The trash and recycling have to go out, homework needs to be done, and teeth require brushing. Their bedtime routines await. This is the hour when we have our most sacred activity, the one practice that comes before anything and happens after everything. It is our only prayer, the most powerful meditation we have known—a strange and wonderful yoga: No matter where we are in the world, no matter what we’ve done, we always end the day with a walk. 

It is a thing done religiously, this exiting of our home, so we are sure to not start too quickly. You never know what last minute emergency might pull you back into the gravitational pull of family. But once the escape pod has been jettisoned and we have safely descended our front stoop, we are in the clear. We are now liberated, entering a new continent, one beyond time, a land far from cell reception. It is just us and the pavement now and the movement that binds us. 

We walk for an hour. It’s not exercise, per se, not something we try to do. It happens as unforced movement, something graceful and practice, a weather-like act that occurs when and how it wants. It is a thing we have always done, how we fell and fall in love, an effort akin to breathing. 

To suggest doing it would be as unthinkable as not suggesting it. It is a thing that is assumed. When my wife and I struggle to connect, when we are just somehow missing each other, we go for a walk. When confused about the state of the world and overwhelmed by the never-ending demands on our time, we walk. And when we lose touch with what’s right, when we are happy or sad or in a new place or the same old place, we take a stroll together.

First, there is silence—just the presence of a body beside yours, one that knows your heart and respects it enough to not fill in the gaps with idle noise. Eventually, though, there is sound, the first word ever spoken. We move across sidewalks and streets interchangeably, ambling through the neighborhood as if it were the Garden of Eden, eying each other and everything for the first time. 

We walk and name things, laugh out loud, noticing the Halloween decorations in September and the Christmas wreaths in July. We wonder why everyone is rushing when what’s current is far from over, and then we recognize this tendency in ourselves and repent. We vow to do better next time but will forget by tomorrow.

We head down this street, turn right, left, go around the cul-de-sac, taking a less direct route and enjoying it. My wife doesn’t know the way, tells me she would never do this alone, not any of it, admits she likes not knowing what’s coming. I don’t have the heart to tell her I don’t know, either. All I have is this vague sense of how many rights we’ve taken, a number that needs to be corrected with an equal amount of lefts, eventually. When we’re about to round a corner, I point out our next steps so we don’t bump into each other. No walk is complete without one of us doing this, anyway, but it helps mitigate too many run-ins.

As we walk, we talk about the day and our life, how we’re going to get through this latest challenge, whatever it is (and there’s always something), going from concrete to pavement back to concrete. We turn down this way, explore a street we’ve never seen before, then keep going, getting lost in the endless, beautiful monotony of suburbia. And yet no matter how far off course we veer, no matter how lost we seem to get, going round and round, we somehow always end up home just in time to say goodnight to the kids. 

---

So, you ask, how am I doing? I am well and stressed, happy and aware of hard things. I am building a life I can be proud of, one I hope some future me will look back on and describe as “the good old days.” I am having a hard time but a good one, in love with my wife and dedicated to her wellbeing, committed to loving and leading our children as best I can, to being a good man. 

I am unsure but confident, scared but willing to try. I want to take it one step at a time but get ahead of myself, dreaming of places we might visit. I think of that small mountain town in Montana we drove through when we moved her down here. I remember that sleepy village in Portugal my friends and I visited in college and wonder if it’s still there. There’s that hotel in Kenya where they let you feed the giraffes, and I want to make my way there, too. And the stinky tofu that wafts through the streets of Taipei still fills me with regret for never trying it, for not attempting so many things. There are just so many possibilities.

I am hopeful, paranoid, here but distracted, feeling like so many people at once. How does one person fit all these experiences into a single human life? There is a lack of certainty in me now, of my place in the world, and a curiosity: Does anyone else ever feel this way? I live and work and try to write down what I remember, partly for myself and also hoping it helps someone else. And I try to take as many deep breaths as possible. 

When things get inevitably crunchy, when it all just seems like too much and life feels smaller than it should, we walk. We cook. We sit on the porch and breathe together, read together, go find a new, used record to spin for dinner tomorrow night. This is the center we try to hold, this set of rituals practiced daily, steeling us against the onslaughts of an indifferent world. And as we do, fighting for whatever margin we can find, we discover this thing we’ve been holding onto was, in fact, holding us. 

So, how are you doing?

---

P.S. I’ll be at the Sonoma County Writers Conference this Saturday, keynoting the event. If you’re in the area or can make it out, I’d love to see you. I’ll also be teaching a workshop on book marketing. All the registration details can be found here.