Foolish Faith

What was it about the second day of this new year that terrified me so much? What was it about the blank slate ahead of me that caused such feelings?

Those shiny new days should feel like a fresh slate, but they don’t. Perhaps this is because there is much that lingers from my past year, and years for that matter; those things left undone, all those promises I didn’t keep, that despair that I so easily allow myself to give into. And in these moments of doubt, why are all my triumphs and hard-won wisdom so difficult to summon? Can there be any point in rallying to a higher cause given the failures and disappointments that lay behind me as I try to manage a way forward? I try to rally myself into thinking I will flourish with a new approach, re-calibrate my way in the world. How can I make the march forward one of delight and discovery instead of the management of the indignity of past choices and recriminating pangs of uncertainty at what the future will hold?

The answer: foolish faith. And this I re-learned the next morning. I woke up on that third day of 2013 to another fresh slate; fresh Canadian snow blanketed the landscape. If this new climate of global warming has taught me anything, it’s that if you see snow, you have to take action; in this neck of the woods, it is bound to be followed by rain or temperatures high above freezing that takes it away as quickly as it has come.

I grabbed my dog, Clarence, and my cross-country skis, and we headed out into the Don Valley at the end of my street, and off we went. I was out the door by a quarter to eight, the time I once dutifully went to work. But today it felt like freedom. It has been some time since left my secure publishing job for the life of a freelance editor and writer, and ever since, I appreciate the opportunities such freedom has brought me.

Yet even from the onset of this new phase of my life, I’ve been discovering the underlying cost of freedom and its pretty constant companion: fear. There is no safety in freelancing, and the lack of it can also be debilitating and terrifying. And that’s what I thought about as I skied beside one of Toronto’s busiest commuter routes, Clarence running and jumping playfully at my side.

As I watched him, I was reassured by his unrelenting faithfulness and strangely wondered if his faith in me, like my own when I can call upon it, has anything to do with dealing with fear.

The thought took me back to my university days when I first seriously considered the meaning of faith, and to the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s idea of how a leap of faith can lead to religious conviction, because, essentially, a leap of faith is putting one’s trust into the unknown. Although religion does not form my world view, I have adapted this concept of faith into my own spiritual convictions. Often, when facing difficult moments, embracing “blind” faith buoys me against despair.

As I skied my way through the valley, I thought of how often faith is the main theme in works of art, particularly those that point towards a life of stoicism and making do. I’ve been seeing a lot of Chekhov’s plays recently. I have always appreciated his vision and his wit, but lately it feels like I’m living it. I find so much wisdom and comfort in the assertion of Uncle Vanya that we must find solace in work to make do. I find wisdom and comfort in all of his portraits of so many characters attempting to make do in the face of unrealized hopes. The three sisters might never get to Moscow; the cherry orchard will most likely get cut down. Even though Chekhov wrote in the late 1800’s, the lessons in his plays and his stories are as relevant today as they were then.

Not only do these stories give me great solace, they give me faith and hope just in knowing that there are artists who are long dead, who once dreamed up and wrote down stories which today’s theater artists have picked up and restaged in the original or in contemporary settings that still struggle to honor the artists’ original intentions. Even when stories counsel hopelessness, like Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot does. I’m reminded of a brilliant production which I caught last spring in Los Angeles. It was particularly adept at providing a portrait of the most beautiful playfulness in the hopelessness and cruelty of those of us – everyone, really – who wait for someone who never arrives. The paradox is that the very fact of that presentation on stage – that the play has survived for decades – counteracts the play’s internal message regarding the hopelessness of life.

There is so much we can learn about life from art.

Despite the importance of these realizations, when I returned home from skiing and sat down at the blank screen of my computer to write this column, I once again was overtaken with anxiety. Would I be unable to create something meaningful? Do I have something worthy to say?

For a moment I wondered if the attention to my anxiety was too self-focused, even selfish. But then I recognized at the deepest level, it grew out of a conflict between my desire to stand up for honesty and openness and reveal my own troubles so others might follow. It grew out of my absolute fear of the consequences. We are all acquainted with anxiety and despair given how unpredictable, transitory and unsatisfying this culture we live in actually can be. Does my struggle to become comfortable accepting this as part of the balance of life not mirror the struggles of others? Perhaps my anxiety is more generous than selfish. Every life is an act of balance, and that anxiety comes from the perilousness of that balance. As I get older and wiser, I have come to embrace that balance is the only way that we can survive and truly prosper. So the blank slate that induces anxiety can also be a state that provides a way forward. The trick is to walk both sides of the line and to recognize that the impulse of creation is the only way to buoy the spirit when it sags into that darkness that looms all around us.

It came to me as I stared at the empty screen of my computer. Perhaps I was thinking too theoretically at that moment and I needed to practice what I was preaching in order to move forward. Without further thought, I took a breath and leaped into the absurdity of embracing faith. And at an instant, my fingers were scaling the computer’s keyboard.

In the days that followed there were similar moments that buoyed my belief in faith.

This morning it was very dark and cold at 6:30 when I contemplated getting out of bed. Instead I grabbed my copy of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, which lay on my bedside, and luxuriated in a few more chapters before I faced the day. This first novel by Ayana Mathis is a thing of wonder. Seek it out. It is inspiring to read such a finely wrought story. The realities that Mathis makes her story out of are overwhelmingly sad and disturbing, yet there is such beauty in her writing and such honesty in its telling that I once again found faith through art. It also occurred to me that it took a huge leap of faith to publish this brave first novel. I suddenly felt the same hopefulness that I had when I was a young editor entering its ranks.

And there was another moment in my day that also allowed my hope to buoy up. For a few brief moments during my morning ski, I was Sally Bowles – that feckless and ridiculous character in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories – making the best of her pre-war Berlin. Well, more honestly, I was Liza Minnelli portraying Sally Bowles:

… As I skied along the Don Valley again this morning, I came to the Bloor Viaduct, which a few hundred feet above me conveyed not only the traffic of cars, but if you time it right, it also conveys the subway taking those commuting Torontonians to their places of employment. I flung my arms back and screamed as loudly as I could into the void of the noise. My yell was muffled and incorporated in the rumble of the train passing above me, and I thanked the heavens for where I happened to be at that particular moment, feeling a little euphoric and sheepish at the same time.

I skied on to the blank slate, with my faithful – though a little perplexed by all the fuss – dog at my side, and I counted myself lucky.