Timothy Schuler’s Weekly Challenge #3: A-Z

LOOKING OUT, LOOKING IN: AN ESSAY IN 26 SENTENCES

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Accentuating the inexplicable, inescapable ugliness of our lives is meant to be reassuring.

But I wonder.

Constant exploration into our brokenness through emotional trauma-dramas like Margot at the Wedding and Rachael Getting Married (how rich our familial rottenness when viewed through the lens of The Wedding!) can sometimes come across as celebration. Despite our feelings about the quality of such films, the trend to accept and publicly discuss our ugliness is becoming full of that from which all trends suffer. Excess.

Film may be the most obvious venue for it, but in religious circles, too (among others: academia, for one) it now is popular to advocate messiness over perfection. Grace over piety. Holiness no longer as strict adherence to a law (or even a sacrificial attempt at adherence), but as process—a messy, muddy process.

I comes before the e’s of everyone else—not in ideology (though it does in its spelling), but out of necessity (off again here), as nihilism (only i’s) becomes a tenet of faith: the result of cultural studies and a whole lot of guilt and uncertainty. Journey is the popular metaphor. Kickstands on which we prop our beliefs while we take some time off to explore or disengage, knowing we can resume at any point; we’ll never arrive, so why push the pace?

Lamenting these dangers—and I believe they are valid ones—it is true, however, that acknowledgment of our messiness can be valuable—what I have to say is not all shit and cynicism. Many of the implications of messy spirituality and Wabi-sabi culture are (just as proponents assert) truly beautiful, helpful, and as I mentioned before, reassuring. Negativity is part of life—it comes in the form of failure, guilt, fear, self-loathing, difficulty, brokenness, and error. Only a fool would deny the existence of these things, and therefore I am a fool if I ignore them and invent for myself an incomplete, Utopian philosophy. Pretense doesn’t get me very far; so despite the dangers, the excess of the trend, I accept those unpleasant, distracting, difficult elements of life, which actually makes me needier than ever.

Quiet introspection becomes incalculably valuable, a balm for the wounds I inevitably reopen.

Resting within myself; dreaming my thoughts and organs; metastasizing my daily visions, fears, and ideas; organizing these and then loosing them upon the world—this is a picture of health. Simply listening to life—mine and that of others—allows me to synthesize my minutes, days, and years into experiences with meaning.

Taking advantage of introspection, for me, turns the attention I give to my inherent ugliness into more than just escapism. Ugliness can be a sounding board, a rubric, a measurement, an impetus, a wake-up call, a catalyst, an enemy, or simply part of life.

Viewing the hard moments, mistakes, and utter failures of our lives, and those of human history, through the question, “What do we do with this?” has led me to some of the greatest realizations of my life, ones that ultimately lead to greater beauty and peace. Without a philosophy that encapsulates (without encouraging) ugliness, I would be unaffected by it—it only would stir up more of itself within me, which I would be forced to pack down, stuffing it into myself so as to disguise its presence. X-ing out my failures, deleting them from the record, is to X out my eyes, to relegate myself to a slow death in the land of the fake. Years, all those remaining, spent in the world of artifice, where we mail order a façade of greatness, manufactured in plastic factories—detachedly and with little care or satisfaction.

Zeal is not, then, the coveted virtue—though many energetically convince themselves of this, thinking to overpower ugliness— rather the fluid, churning passion and compassion that come from introspection—the greatest force with which to understand and reckon the distress and fracture of our world.

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