This. This is my life. This is it.
Isn’t it grand? St. Louis, Missouri. In my cute bedroom, seated in my cozy, leather chair. Black writing desk in front of me, inevitably accumulating clutter, despite my best intentions and self-directed entreaties. The aesthetically out of place Scottish-plaid wool blanket from Russia draped over the equally out of place white molded plastic chair pushed in at the desk. Electric space heater — the one Mom insisted on getting for me, rather than a more modern model, because of its slightly better reviews in Consumer Reports — quietly supplementing the loss of heat in my bedroom, surrounded by the outside on three sides and five woefully underinsulated windows. The unremarkable view out the window — a cul-de-sac, the colors of an early winter gray light that subdues the impressively persistent green of the grass and other plants that seemed to insist on maintaining their color. The public housing apartment building across the street, a source of a regular flow of vibrant people who happen to be of lower economic means than most of their neighbors (and, in St. Louis, who happened to all be Black).
This is my life. There is no future where I will live in a perfectly designed, modern home. I will not live in a sprawling mountain estate, with rolling woods as far as I can see out my kitchen window, where I may spend mornings gazing meditatively as I hold a steaming cup of coffee that stays warm forever, on a morning that drags on for just as long. I am not in a temporary stage of passing through, on my way to permanent perfection.
My life around me reflects the sum of my choices and efforts. My desk accumulates clutter, because I choose to be reading many books at once. And because I choose, intentionally or not, to place them there rather than somewhere else. My neighbors across the street do not ceased to exist when I close my blinds, or when I move to a sprawling mountain estate. They are the life that I may gaze at out my bedroom window, holding a cup of coffee that stays warm only long enough to burn my tongue before quickly releasing its heat to an environment desperate for more. The shrinking pile of clean laundry on my bed reflects not my moral failings, or an intermediate state before the ideal one. It reflects my choices. My choices are good, because they are my own, and they are made fully informed by my greater context — by my vast landscape of pressures, obligations, anxieties, tensions, impulses, joys, melancholia, and yearnings.
Earlier this year, I discovered a concept, often referred to in social work, called reification. It is the idea that we experience our societal systems and structures as very much real, concrete, and immutable, despite the fact that they are entirely human-made. The term actually has its origins in Marxist thought, offering a framework by which to critique systems like private property or exploitative practices that are very much made up but are perceived as “facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will” (Wikipedia page). I find the term more broadly useful as a way to question my conceptions of what is real and what is made up.
I have reified my vision for my future. I have been experiencing it as perfect, settled, stable, always just out of reach, and only just consistent and coherent enough to make it feel concrete and attainable. “The next life stage is when I’m really going to start building toward that vision.” Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Meanwhile my life marches forward, each moment gently holding an eternity and not caring what I think the future may should hold.
My life, my space, my state are inherently perfect — beautiful even. They reflect, represent, and result from my life lived. It is all perfect because it is (“is” meaning exists). And it is perfectly impermanent. Each moment, snapshot, picture, state — no matter how serene, chaotic, grounded, energized — is perfect in its own moment and bound to change profoundly as it passes to the next moment. Even the “ideal“ future state that I may see in my mind — communal living with lots of nature, family, and free time — if that comes, will itself be but a moment, ephemeral in its alignment with my vision in this moment. Indeed, I imagine (hope) that this very moment I am in right now, as I write this, is a perfect moment I imagined once in the past, in a past perfect moment.
