Be Flexible Like a Palm Tree
I recently treadmill-ran my way through the S-Town podcast, am in the middle of the book Bird by Bird, and literally just read the last page of Everything Happens For A Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved.
I’ll say I already knew it, because it makes me sound more astute and self-aware, but the honest to goodness truth is that I was sorely in need of this bold refresher: Life is in the business of building flexibility in us. More: by its end, requires it. While these three conduits to brilliance I've recently studied could not be more varied in content, each resource yielded it, this reminder about flexibility.
S-Town is an investigative podcast about a place called Woodstock, Alabama, where a deeply intelligent man (John B. McLemore) suffers from the belief that both the planet and society are doomed, all while begrudging his hometown for being an ugly, corrupt, small-minded microcosm for everything else wrong in the world. Bird by Bird was written a bunch of years ago, right around when I graduated from 8th grade, and tells every last secret its author, Anne Lamott, has on her gift of writing (and living). And then Kate Bowler, who published Everything Happens for a Reason just in the last year, is a professor at Duke Divinity School who has committed her higher education to studying the American obsession with prosperity theology (think Joel Olstein). Oh, and she also is living with Stage Four Cancer, openly trying to parse out the prosperity in that.
The New York journalist responsible for the storytelling in S-Town, after months and months of research and countless trips back and forth to and from Alabama, about this one thing he thought he was chronicling through the eyes of John B, winds up pulling anchor, sailing for a bit, and then re-anchoring for the unfolding of a whole new story. And it works. Not because it was a premeditated plot twist. Nonfiction has no such luxury. The listeners stay on, unfazed by the pivot, equally as drawn in as we were when we thought we knew what we were signing up for because that’s exactly the way it works in real life: pivots abound, anchors are always getting yanked.
And I promise I wasn’t at all giving fiction a bad rap earlier when I said it underscored reality. I mean, yes, it underscores reality - second place to what is right in front of us. But what I learned in reading Bird by Bird is that in order to make fiction work, in order to have it mimic the truth that is right in front of us in a way that is, as Simon Cowell would say, Believable!, is to allow the characters you create to tell the story (NOT you). She says, “Characters should not serve as pawns for some plot you’ve dreamed up. Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don’t worry about plot. Worry about characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, ‘Now what happens?’ The development of relationship creates plot.” She explains that if this practice is committed to deeply, often fiction writers end up swerving this way and that, perhaps landing quite far and by unexpected routes from how their novels were set up from the start. Turns out, you have to master flexibility even while you are the boss of your own book, even while you hold all the cards… can pull all the strings… are the lone puppeteer. Because the truth is what Anne says: the development of relationship creates plot. And relationship (with people, with ideas, with our world) – in the real world and in the believable imitation of it – is nothing if not unpredictable.
Lastly, this Kate Bowler gal. I mean. She’s a bad luck magnet and somehow finds a way to pull off a memoir solely about herself in a hilariously not-self-centered way. She takes the reader down into the terrain of her life: a frustrating physical disability in her 20s that leaves her nearly without the function of her arms while the deadline of her dissertation bares down, then the hard reality of fertility struggles in her 30s, then a miracle baby boy, followed all-to-closely by a cancer diagnosis wrapped in a hopeless package of “30% chance of survival.” I would be friends with Kate, because in all of her accounts, she never once sounds pitiful. She cusses and gets pissy at God and even burns one of her favorite dresses the day she finds out she has cancer, because it seems way too “before cancer” to ever be worn again… and yet none of it sounds the type of pitiful that makes my heart yuck. Instead, it sounds the type of real that makes my heart cheer this remarkable woman on. The book's thesis, in the aftermath of a diagnosis, a rigorous chemo treatment, a year of getting two-month intervals of permission to keep living, I'd say is this: “No matter how hard I try, I can’t save myself.” I can think of no other thing than death staring you down that will serve as a greater teacher of flexibility. Our good health, if we have it, is a puffy little package that allows us the luxury of believing we will see through what we plan to see through. Until, like Kate, we’re robbed of that certainty -- until we recognize that we can’t save our own lives, much less our own plans, our “plots,” our scheming and dreaming – we will blindly prefer what is rigid, sure.
I'm reminded of my most recent visit to Florida. I've vacationed there since the time I was a small child and can remember playing the road trip game with my brother on our long venture south: Who Can Spot The First Palm Tree? But it wasn’t until this year's Florida trip, with my 40th year of life nearly complete, that I gave those palm trees a hard look for what they really are. Those suckers can bend, baby. In a strong wind storm, I stood out on the balcony and marveled as their long trunks endured the whipping, swaying this way and that with the fierce gusts. It made me realize something: There is a strong that is galvanized, steely, permanent. And then there is a different type of strong: pliable.
Life is in the business of building flexibility in us. Every last one of us. To our very last day.
I don’t know about you, but my overachieving nature – knowing this – wants to be ahead of schedule. I’d like to yield to this exercise, like a palm tree, sooner than I absolutely need to. Won’t you join me?
