would you save my life?
I don’t know that it is so much that I don’t know how to not sit with deep questions, how not to ask them, to myself and others, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it causes something within to feel shaky and unsteady. I don’t know that it is so much that I don’t know how to distance myself from this discomfort and more that I feel compelled to choose to reckon with the shaky, uncomfortable and unsteady. There is something in me that chooses to sit in the deep end of contemplation where query can seem overwhelming and emotions unbearable. There is something in me that fights to bear it. There have been years spent trying to let loose the weight of this bearance, because I thought it would be easier or better to ignore it, silence it, stuff it down and swallow it, but it always came back up.
Of the many questions I sit with, choice is interwoven within all of them. I believe that to be free is to have the ability to choose, not always our circumstance, or what happens to us, but to have the ability to choose how we respond to what happens, what we make of it, what it makes of us, and how it can transform us.
This question comes from a quote from Song of Solomon, the third novel from Toni Morrison,
“Perhaps that's what all human relationships boil down to: Would you save my life? Or would you take it?”
Song of Solomon was published 49 years ago, in 1977. The novel details the journey of a Black man from Michigan, Macon "Milkman" Dead III, as he unravels his heritage, familial and cultural history, and notions on love and living.
Years ago, during two very tense conversations, one with a friend, and another with a family member, I was asked if I would be willing to give my life to save another. The friend, previously incarcerated and “raised by the streets” asked, and answered, his own question with the statement, “If I gotta die or you gotta die, you gotta die”. The family member, while discussing the genocides in both the Congo and Palestine, asked, “Would you die to save their life?”. To both the statement made by the friend, and the question from the family member, I replied, “Why are either of us dying?”.
If the country and system that is the United States of America was to answer the question, “Would you save my life? Or would you take it?”, the system’s answer would be, “Take it”. This answer isn’t my own hypothesis, it’s a truth evident by the number of lives taken, for any measure of reasons, since its inception. But we are not the system, though many of us were birthed in it. We are the people.
I recognized a long time ago that artists, creatives, writers, and “intellectuals”, possess a dangerous gift, the gift of being able to shape perception which can often be used to manipulate and convince. As someone who writes publicly as a way of sharing thoughts, I decided years ago that I would, to the best of my ability, use this gift not to shape, manipulate or convince, but to inquire, invite and, if I am able, compel us to unravel internal and external origins perception. I write publicly for those in search of language and meaning, not the meaning I give but the meaning you are sure to find if you sit in, and engage with the questions.
In 1962 James Baldwin published the essay The Creative Process. In this essay he writes,
“Now, anyone who has ever been compelled to think about it—anyone, for example, who has ever been in love—knows that the one face that one can never see is one’s own face. One’s lover—or one’s brother, or one’s enemy—sees the face you wear, and this face can elicit the most extraordinary reactions. We do the things we do and feel what we feel essentially because we must—we are responsible for our actions, but we rarely understand them. It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less. But the barrier between oneself and one’s knowledge of oneself is high indeed.”
I am deeply concerned with the human condition, what unifies us, divides us, drives us, our thoughts, actions, perceptions, choices, and decisions. I believe that our individual and collective condition informs the way we live, the way we relate, to each other, and ourselves, what we give attention, what we ignore, the way we love, what and who we hate. The sharing of these thoughts is not about forcing an answer. Instead, it’s an invitation to curiosity, an invitation to examine ourselves, what our freedom means and our responsibility, as humans, as family, as friends, as lovers; it’s an invitation to investigate our values, actions, and intentions.
In my adolescence, my curiosity was deeply and intentionally engaged and fostered by my mother who to do this day maintains a child like curiosity I’ve come to cherish and admire. So often when I would come to her with a question, in hopes of getting a quick answer, she’d withhold, point to the living room with its floor to ceiling bookshelves and say, “Go, and look it up.” My mother and her fostering of her own curiosity as well as mine, is likely one of the primary reasons I am as staunch of an advocate as I am for the practice of developing one’s self through reflection and contemplation. Curiosity is a practice necessary for developing a better understanding of our humane-ness, not just humanness, but humane-ness, and why, and how we betray it.
Like Baldwin, I do believe knowing oneself is a high endeavor. An endeavor we repeatedly attempt if we desire to be well and whole in our being.
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As always, thank you for gifting me your time and attention. Thank you for reading.
– ei