On restlessness
Restless is an inadequate term. I mean, what does “less than rest” really mean? It’s marked by the mind and body’s tossing and turning, which are its manifestations and signs, but it’s nebulous because it describes a mental and physical state by what it is not. We have to figure out what it actually is.
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My restlessness started around a week ago. When exactly, I’m unsure. That’s the thing with restlessness. By the time that you can say “I’m feeling restless” you’ve been at it for a while. For me, it’s been several days. I wasn’t able to recognize my restlessness until Friday morning while driving to Minneapolis. I was taking the non-interstate route: instead of taking the I-380/I-35 route from Iowa City to the Twin Cities, I took the state highways. I can’t tell you the numbers of them, only that I passed through Rochester, MN, and saw an old diner style restaurant called “Little Oscar’s” going and returning. I spent my windshield time watching the harvest still in full swing. Many fields were bare with the corn and soy beans swept clean like hardwood floors and raggedy barns abandoned a century ago standing naked here and there. And I saw farmers driving combines and tractors, pickups and semis, all part of the harvesting process. How does Wendell Berry do this all with a team of horses? My drive was a wandering game of “connect the dots,” which is what I love about state highways. They connect town to town, county to county, unlike the interstates that cut straight through the country, leveling mountains and hills while exposing the rock foundations of the countryside. I-80 connects a few major cities between New York City and San Francisco as part of the original “Interstate Highway System” of 1956 with its east/west even numbers and north/south odd numbers. On long stretches I’m grateful for interstates, but when I can I prefer to move with the land and see the passing by lives of everyday people in small towns than the green exit signs telling me where places are. State highways show instead of tell and in doing so teach me more about America than interstates do.
On my way to and from Minneapolis I listened to no music. The exception is a Jelly Roll song or two that I had seen covered by some inmates at one of his concerts and corresponded with some of my restless thoughts. But other than that, no music. I got through one podcast, but that was part of a test I was running to see if my restlessness was part of what I thought it was or not. The test was simple: did listening to Krista Tippett’s conversation with John O’Donohue inspire me as it usually does to write and live and be or not? If it could, I was pretty sure that my restlessness was connected to my bewilderment at what to do now that I’ve read bell hooks the will to change: men, masculinity, and love. Her central thesis as I see it is that men and women need each other to push back against patriarchal masculinity. Feminism can’t do it on its own because feminism needs male supporters—i.e., men who are feminists; men need women to help them see the destruction patriarchal masculinity is doing to men as well as women and all the different types of gender. I had hoped that the recent US election would be a reprisal of patriarchal masculinity, something that would deal a blow to the type of masculinity that Donald Trump embodies. Instead, the election shows that patriarchal masculinity is alive and well. The majority of Americans would rather vote in a convicted felon than an African American woman with a strong legal career.
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I arrived early in Apple Valley, Minneapolis, and spent the next hour and a half at a coffee house in the bottom of an office building that appears to be part of the Apple Valley Chamber of Commerce if there is such a thing. Reading was sporadic. I napped some of the time so that I wouldn’t be falling asleep during our scheduled meeting with a client in Plymouth suburb of Minneapolis. And for the rest of the day, my restlessness abated. I met up with my boss, who then drove us to our client’s offices, and from then on it was one thing after another: holding a training session, enjoying a happy hour with the team, and then dinner with a colleague. My Airbnb was filled with dark hallways and stairways and sufficiently kept my brain occupied until I collapsed in exhaustion for the night. But the restlessness resumed on my drive home, which is when I continued watching the harvest take place and then performed my litmus test using Krista and John.
I shared this restlessness with Rae when I got home along with my hypothesis. I acknowledged contesting secondary possibilities, too: I’m completely out of touch with the majority of voting Americans; I’m just as close minded as any nominal MAGA-hat wearing Trump supporter because I know we need to listen to each other but I don’t know that I have the emotional bandwidth to do it; I’m unsure of how to begin. She listened perceptively as she always does and then asked if I was open to some input. The key idea was an invitation to let myself simply observe what was happening. When we’re rapidly learning new things, it’s easy to feel like we’ve got to do something now, especially in the case of guilt and advocacy. Our knee-jerk reactions usually amount to nothing more than “virtue signaling” (she cleared up the correct usage of that term for me) that ends up doing more harm than good. And no, I don’t have the emotional energy to do something to say that I’m doing something.
She’s right. But I’m still restlessly wanting to act when I don’t know how. The result is that there’s a lot of energy being spent in all different directions than in the one that will address and quell the restlessness. Case in point. I woke per usual at 4.15 this morning with no desire to write—I don’t know what to write—and no desire to read—I’ve finished hooks and Plato’s not scratching the itch–and no desire to work. Any of these three are usually jockeying for position, and none are interested in running with it today. The fact that I’ve written 1,038 words so far is something to proud of, I guess.
And perhaps that’s the better definition of restlessness that I can accept: spending energy in ways that do not satisfy. Even this meditation is restless energy stemming from my own frustrations with the current state of our country. I’m choosing to channel my energy into writing about restlessness itself. It’s as creative as Natasha Bedingfield writing a song about her inability to come up with lyrics for a new song, which is how her second most played song on Spotify came about. It’s called “These Words.” Sure, there’s an advantage in being self-aware, in noticing what the soul is experiencing and identifying the source of that experience. I’m hoping that acknowledging where I authentically am will give me greater clarity and confidence so that I can decisively act when the proper time arrives. But that’s all I got this morning, a quiet desperation of spending my energy in ways that don’t actually deal with the problem.
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