The Process of Growth

Notes During a Pandemic

Years ago, from my college days until way into my thirties, I was obsessed with a writer named Paul Goodman.  He had been a panelist at a symposium when I was a freshman and I found his presence electrifying.  All through the sixties he was a famous and extremely successful author, primarily because of a groundbreaking book called Growing Up Absurd, but he died of a heart attack in 1972, at the age of 61, and seems to have been completely forgotten.  He had one decade of fame; he’d been utterly obscure until his groundbreaking book.  But he had written all his life, starting way back in his twenties.

One of my favorite of his books was a collection of his journals, Five Years: Thoughts During a Useless Time.  The useless time was 1955-60 (a fairly useless time in general).  He’d had an underground reputation as a writer since back in the thirties, had published various books with small presses, even published his major fiction project, The Empire City, but nothing sold and he’d more or less given up.  For five years he didn’t begin any new projects, just sat around recording his thoughts in small notebooks.  Many of his most important thoughts were in those notebooks; the words that would astound people in the Sixties were sitting in those notebooks in the late fifties.  But nobody saw them.

I read those notebook entries multiple times; one has stuck in my mind particularly.[1]  Goodman talked about a sequence of events around his daughter’s coming down with a case of polio.  When he first took her to the doctor, or maybe to the hospital (that’s the way I remember it), they made the diagnosis and he was furious with rage.  (It was a parent’s worst nightmare in the fifties to be told his child had polio.)  He wanted to scream at the doctors for being stupid, physically attack them for saying such a thing.  Really he was expressing grief.  But over time he came to realize that the diagnosis was correct, that this fact was a new reality of his life, and that he had to figure out how to handle it, what he could do for his daughter, how they should proceed.  The fact of his daughter’s illness—after his initial denial—had become a part of his life, and by recognizing it, and taking it in, he had become a larger person.  That was an example of human growth.  He had become larger by accepting a new fact.[2]  He had also put himself in touch with reality.

Dealing with the coronavirus has been one moment like that after another.  At first it seemed to be something that was happening in China, interesting primarily because of what it said about that country.  Then it began slowly to spread elsewhere.  Even as of early March (I’m writing this on April 2^nd), my wife and I came to Asheville for a week but then drove back to Durham.  It was only once we got to Durham that we began to think we might immediately come back, because my wife’s brother is autistic and would need help.  She talked about moving to Asheville for a while to orient him.  We were stocking up on food in Durham.  But as the situation worsened, I knew we shouldn’t be apart, and wanted to come with her.  We packed our supplies in the car.  At some point we realized we weren’t going to be here for a matter of weeks, but maybe a matter of months.  Things kept changing exponentially.  We’re here for the duration, but have no idea what the duration is.

Just to show how ridiculous my trivial attachments are, there was a moment toward the beginning when I thought that if I couldn’t go swimming and see my friends at the Y, I couldn’t survive.  That notion seems infantile at this point.  There was one sleepless night when I wondered what would happen if all three of us got sick—me, my wife, and her brother, all of us over 65—then got dreadfully sick, and couldn’t take care of each other, and all died.  I pictured various moments of this scenario (like somebody discovering our putrid stinking corpses months from now).  That is catastrophic thinking, but it is literally possible, and doesn’t seem all that far-fetched.  Worst of all was the night, two nights later, when I heard that actually, 40% of the people hospitalized in New York were between the ages of 20 and 50, something like that, and I thought of what might happen to my son, who lives in Brooklyn and is 46, and his wife and two children.  That news literally had me on my knees in fear.  I was pleading, to whoever was listening, and I meant every word, please take me if it’s necessary.  Take me and I’ll be glad to go.  But please don’t take my son or anyone in his family.

That bargain isn’t mine to make.

Growth in this situation is realizing that we don’t have any choice about what ultimately happens, that things are literally, completely, out of our control.[3]  That’s always been true, but in 21^st century America we’ve been able to forget it, in a way that people in the past were not.[4]  The famous words at the end of the Diamond Sutra, about how fragile life is, have always seemed poetically beautiful, and terribly sad, but now we discover that they’re true.  They’re factually true.  They’re the reality of life.

As stars, a fault of vision, as a lamp,
A mock show, dew drops, or a bubble,
A dream, a lightning flash, or cloud,
So should one view what is conditioned.

What we want doesn’t matter.  It’s not in the equation.

[1] If I had the book here I’d quote the man directly, but that book is at my house in Durham.

[2] Goodman was among other things a Gestalt Therapist, and wrote a famous book on the subject.

I realize that the process he went through was delineated more particularly by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, but her work was in the future.

[3] We can of course take small measures, like washing our hands and practicing social distancing, but we can’t be sure they will be enough.

[4] All I had to do was read John Ehle’s wonderful novel The Land Breakers.  A man’s young wife took sick with some respiratory illness, got weaker and weaker, and died.  That was life in this same spot, some 240 years ago.