Stay Hungry, Part 4

(Note: This is the 4th part of a 4-part series.)

After bidding Greece a sleepy 4-in-the-morning goodbye and flying to Frankfurt, then to Riga, we boarded a moldy 1970’s bus that crawled slowly home, over the ice and snow, to Klaipeda. When we finally arrived after dark, we were famished and exhausted, so Scott and I dropped Rory off at a pizza joint to rest and proceeded home to deliver the luggage. Slipping along the unsalted crusts of ice that somehow pass for sidewalks, we passed the bus stop where we wait each morning, now that it is winter, behind the shuddering plexiglass. We passed the square where you can still see the base of a statue that used to be Stalin. We crossed the bridge over the lagoon where now, in the morning, sack-shaped lumps of hunched backs dip their fishing poles through the ice. And we passed into Old Town, with its tall, close buildings in earthy pastels, its cobblestone streets smothered in a half meter of snow, its graceful lampposts, its antiquated signs. All of these things were so expected that, despite the ice and snow and the bitter cold, we felt a jolt of joy and comfort. After the adventurous uncertainties of balmy Greece, we were again in a place where we knew how to ask for directions, where to buy food, and how and where and when to catch the bus. We were in a place where we had a cozy apartment with a refrigerator, stove, and washing machine. A shower for life-sized people. A familiar bed. We were coming back to two meaningful jobs and a close community of friends. Somehow, at some point, this had become our home. Later, over thin, flaccid slices of Lithuanian pizza that hung from our hands like wet laundry, I said a quiet prayer of thanks: thanks that we were home, and that home was a good, albeit slightly foreign, place to be.

The semester is now in full swing, and, as such, my all-out pleasure seeking has taken a back seat. My pleasure now, for these next four months, must be primarily taken in duty, in the purpose of my work. I am teaching two heavy sections of Research Writing, both of which meet every afternoon, and a class called “Special Topics: Current Events” where my students and I are using English to explore difficult issues like racism, gender roles, homelessness, and the effects of war on children.

This class is a difficult one for me to teach. At certain points in my planning, as I have been researching my topic, I have even broken down crying. News has never been an easy thing for me to digest. It is something I approach with a sense of duty and depart from with a sense of despair. I wholeheartedly agree with Charles Baudelaire, who was “unable to understand how a person of honor could take a newspaper in his or her hands without a shudder of disgust.” And so in the course of this class I have been asking myself the following question: Is it really our duty as human beings to examine these things unflinchingly? Are we, in addition to the labor of our chosen work, also supposed to know, even perhaps to dwell on, the hideous events of this world? And how, if we do this, could we ever possibly live a joyful life? In his “Eight Weeks to Optimal Health,” Dr. Andrew Weil goes so far as to prescribe what he calls “news fasts,” or entire days, even weeks, without listening to or reading the news, the implication being that it boosts mental health tremendously. I agree that sitting on depressing facts and statistics like Eeyore will get you nowhere. However, I think that Dr. Weil also implies that we can do nothing, and so we should not burden ourselves with all of that disturbing information.

The real temptation here is to do what I have often done: to embrace a false sense of powerlessness. I have wanted to be exempt from obligation and discomfort. Of course there is nothing that I can do; I already have enough on my plate. In order to experience any pleasure, in order to possess any happiness, I must turn a blind eye.

Yes, to some degree, I am powerless. I cannot feed everyone, nor can I single-handedly bring peace to Afghanistan. I cannot prevent children from being sold into the sex-trade or ensure that every woman is allowed the same level of education as a man. I, Michelle Webster-Hein, cannot heal the world. But I can pick up food at the grocery store to give to the woman who sits in the snow across the street. I can feed a child in Haiti for a month with the same money that it costs to buy a nice dinner out. I can volunteer with a literacy organization and teach someone to read. I can make donations in people’s names instead of buying them more shit that they don’t want or need. And I can examine my own thoughts and assumptions; I can confront my own ignorance and my own misattributed blame.

That’s why the harrowing experience of facing these things is important. That’s why the pain we feel in the face of all that pain is important. It is important because it provokes in us a deeply human response. We cannot simply stand by and let injustice be without doing something, something, however small. But unless we face it, we simply do not know. And, not knowing, we are incapable of being moved to our own small yet significant actions.

A week ago, my current events class watched a video on child soldiers in Uganda. One boy in the video, in order to save his own life, was forced by a paramilitary group to kill his own mother. At first, of course, he refused. But then he was told that his captors were going to kill them both if he didn’t comply. So he did. He beat his mother to death with a stick. As a result, he was given a place to sleep and a gun. A community in which he was protected. Food. Water.

How can we react in the face of that? Well, first we can give it our time and our thoughts. We can talk about it, react to it. We can give it the meditations of our hearts, which are also, I believe, prayers.

So we had a discussion. The students first expressed their reactions: sadness, horror, disbelief, anger. Then the discussion naturally turned to solutions, to grasping at something that could be done. So we talked about how this could be stopped. Some students talked about punishing the people who forced the boy to commit this act, insisting that they should be killed, hanged maybe, or tortured, or shot. But then another student in the back also mentioned how those very men who forced the child to kill his own mother were probably themselves, long before, forced to do similar things. And so, as a class, we were reminded together of the everlasting and often overlooked tragedy: If we had known those who commit cruelties before they committed those acts, when they were on the receiving end of those cruelties, those very people would be objects of our compassion rather than victims of our wrath. Realizations like this, I believe, change us at our core. They make us uneasy with simplistic solutions. They change our crude black vs. white to a spectrum of gray. These realizations teach us that ignorance is not exactly bliss but that cowardly ignorance is instead a shallow and temporal pleasure. All of this calls to mind a Franciscan benediction:

“May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart. May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace. May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy. And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.”

I do not know how this discussion will affect my students. I do not know if their capacity for compassion has greatly grown or if their behavior will change at all as a result. But that is not my responsibility. As a teacher, it is often more important to raise questions rather than provide answers. I must then trust the inquietude of the human soul to ramble and grapple and learn. And I myself, of course, must also continue to ramble and grapple and learn as I strive to live “deep within my heart.”

Two weekends ago, Scott and I took a break from our work and went with some friends to a sauna on the Baltic Sea. Under my thick coat, multiple sweaters, and thermal body suit, I wore my swimsuit, the neck strings sticking out ridiculously above my scarf. In the sauna, we disrobed and took our seats next to all the elderly Lithuanian men in Speedos snapped tight below their hairy, glistening bellies. The sauna was so hot that it fried the insides of our noses and frizzled our hair. We waited until we had halfway melted and our faces were splotched in angry red patches. Then we jumped up and ran out the door and across the beach. Under my feet, I could feel the sloping hills of ice and sand. Before my will weakened, I scrambled onto the ice shelf and stripped off my socks. Then I stepped into the sea and began to run. When the freezing water reached midway up my thighs, I dove headlong. In my brain there was an explosion of light. My body burst into one of those antiquated comic book pictures: a throbbing red and orange “BAM! POW!” I came up gasping. My lungs seized. My skin burned. I was certain that my feet and the bottoms of my legs were going to crack and shatter into a million pieces. I sprinted back to the sauna, certain that I would instantly become deathly ill. Once I got inside, though, I realized that I was still alive, very alive, even. So I did it again. And again.

This is how life finds us, how joy finds us, not in the muted middle ground of sustained comfort, but at the edge of the precipice. We cannot truly know warmth without the cold, joy without the sorrow, light without the dark.