On Being a Container

and Wanting to Be a Smaller One

It is nearly midnight. I have just finished journaling, I had every intention of being asleep by ten, and I have failed at this with the same quiet consistency I bring to most of my bedtime ambitions. And yet here I am, awake and faintly pleased about it, trying to set down something I have been feeling for a while — which is, I admit, a rather unreasonable fantasy.

In this daydream, I simply stop explaining myself. Nobody hears that I make art and congratulates me on having found a nice hobby, nobody listens to me wrestle with how I want to spend the remainder of my days only to offer a list of efficient ways back into the very life I am trying to examine, and no one takes a question that has occupied my heart for months and answers it with admirable speed and complete irrelevance. In this version of things, people ask the second question.

What makes the wish particularly unreasonable is that I spend a great deal of my own life doing precisely the opposite. I am the one who asks second questions, who looks for the thing beneath the thing, who listens for what people are trying to say rather than what they happen to have said. Somewhere along the way I developed a reputation for being understanding, which sounds lovely until you realise that understanding is a little like volunteering to carry everyone’s luggage: it feels noble for the first mile and considerably less so by the tenth.

To be fair, understanding has a great deal to recommend it, because it softens judgement, makes room for complexity, and allows you to remain curious in situations where certainty would be easier and far less useful. The trouble is that it can quietly harden into a habit of mind.

Someone disappoints you, and before the disappointment has properly arrived you already understand why; someone dismisses something precious to you, and almost immediately you can see the assumptions that led them there; someone offers advice that misses the point entirely, and rather than feeling offended you find yourself appreciating the generosity behind it. The irritation barely has time to unpack its bags before compassion escorts it out of the building. By most measures this is a fortunate problem to have, though it is also, on occasion, quietly exhausting.

I suspect this question surfaced because of treatment, or perhaps treatment merely removed my ability to keep ignoring it. These days, I find myself asking larger questions than usual, not the kind one encounters in self-help books, but the kind that arrive uninvited when one’s relationship with time has changed. I spent weeks working on an Odyssey Plan, exploring different futures and different ways of living, and the exercise turned out to be less about career planning than about orientation, because what I was really trying to understand was what still felt alive. The curious thing was that most of the advice I have received, however thoughtful, rarely addressed the question I was actually asking. I was not trying to work out how best to fit back into the box; I was trying to understand whether the box still belonged on the map at all.

Something similar happens with art. Every so often someone refers to it as a hobby, and I find myself smiling politely while resisting the temptation to ask whether they have mistaken a heartbeat for a pastime. The issue is not really the label, but the speed with which we categorise what we have not yet taken the time to encounter — though I will admit that categorising is probably one of humanity’s favourite hobbies, and that without it we would spend our days wandering around in a kind of existential bewilderment. If I am honest, I am beginning to suspect that this form of bewilderment has been unfairly maligned, since some of my most interesting discoveries have emerged from precisely that state.

The older I get, the less interested I am in certainty and the more interested I am in attention, which feels increasingly rare in a world where certainty is so abundant. Everyone seems to know what everything means, what success looks like, and how one ought to spend one’s time, and everyone has a theory ready to hand. Attention asks something more difficult of us, because it requires that we pause long enough for reality to reveal itself before we rush to explain it. Perhaps this is what I have been longing for all along: not agreement, not admiration, not even understanding, but simply attention — the kind that lingers a moment longer than necessary, that asks another question, that remains curious.

There are days when I fantasise about a small reversal of roles, nothing dramatic, since I have no wish to become selfish or unreasonable or incapable of seeing others clearly. The wish is far more modest than that. I would simply like a day in which the world meets me halfway, a day in which I do not have to translate my choices into a language that feels acceptable, in which uncertainty is not treated as a problem requiring immediate resolution, in which art is encountered before it is categorised, and in which someone hears the question beneath the question. I realise this is an absurd request, because the world is under no obligation to organise itself around my preferred mode of participation, and every person I meet is carrying their own concerns and hopes and disappointments, finding their way through a landscape that rarely offers clear directions.

Perhaps this is why I keep returning to stories like The Little Prince, or to films about people wandering through adulthood without a clear script, since I recognise something of that wandering in myself. The desire to remain unfinished, and the suspicion that life is simply larger than the categories available to describe it.

A few weeks ago I did something genuinely unhinged, at least by my standards, which are admittedly the standards of a person who likes to have fun but spends most of it quietly checking that no one nearby is inconvenienced by it. I danced in an open field. There was no one I needed to be careful of, only a small herd of cows on the other side of a fence, and what surprised me was that they did not ignore me at all. They were thoroughly fascinated. A human moving in a way they were not used to seeing was apparently worth investigating, and one by one they drifted toward the fence to watch, until I had a full audience of witnesses.

Naturally, I tried to teach them to dance. We had no language in common, which did not seem to matter, and there was one cow in particular who shifted and swayed a little — enough that I have decided, with no evidence whatsoever, that he was dancing alongside me. It was ridiculous and it was funny, and it was also, somehow, the thing I had been longing for: they met me exactly where I was. I have come to think that animals, even without language, participate with us the moment we manage to establish a connection.

This fella wanted to dance

Nothing had been solved, my future remained gloriously uncertain, and the questions that occupied me in the morning remained unanswered by the afternoon, yet life felt astonishingly present. The world, I noticed, does not pause because we happen to be having an existential breakthrough — birds go on migrating, grass goes on growing, cows go on being cows — and life carries on with a confidence that borders on arrogance, which, oddly enough, I find rather comforting.

Lately I have begun to wonder whether I have spent too much of my life trying to become a larger container. Growth, as I understood it, always meant increasing capacity: becoming more patient, more understanding, more able to hold complexity and contradiction and ambiguity. Now I suspect that maturity may have less to do with volume than with shape, because a river is not improved by becoming an ocean, and a teacup is not failing simply because it cannot hold a lake. Every container has its form, and every form implies a boundary, which makes me think the task was never to become infinitely accommodating but to discover a shape that is genuinely in conversation with one’s actual life, a shape that leaves room for curiosity, for art, for wandering, for delight, and occasionally for setting down everyone else’s luggage long enough to notice the view. I realise I might be slow witted in understanding these finer nuances of life :D

I sometimes imagine my own eulogy and find myself hoping it contains more than a catalogue of emotional labour. She was understanding, it might say; she was accommodating; she held space beautifully — all admirable things, and yet I hope someone also remembers that she paid attention, that she remained curious, that she danced badly in fields, that she went on asking inconvenient questions, and that she was genuinely interested in being alive.

The older I get, the less I want to become the largest container in the room, and the more I find myself drawn to something closer to alignment: a life in which work and art and love and solitude and wonder all arise from the same center, in which the inner and outer worlds are not perpetually negotiating with one another, and which is lived, as best one can manage, at one’s own wavelength.

It is now well past midnight, which means I have once again lost my negotiation with sleep, and tomorrow I will no doubt be understanding about that too. But I find myself hoping that tomorrow might also be the day I get to test this small, whimsical dream — that I might, for once, be the person who is understood rather than the one doing the understanding, or perhaps simply not my highest self for an afternoon, and see what happens. And if, somewhere in the middle of it all, the world happens to ask the second question, I shall consider it a delightful bonus.

I think the poem befitting for this post is The Donkey

By G. K. Chesterton :)

A reflection for you my dear friend :

When did you last do something gloriously unhinged, and who (or what) was your audience?

PS: I was so amused by my dancing experience that I drew and created an animation. I know I will be re-reading this when I wake up tomorrow wondering if this essay was meant to be published. For now, let me share freely :D By the way, I am back to writing in my journals and I wish my handwriting was legible enough to share a fun page from it. Maybe someday, I will share. Meanwhile, keep dancing to life.