THE THREAD | swiveling back toward the light once again
The Habit of Cutting In the Edges
You gather one brush, one can of paint, one room, and one hand tethered to attention. You obsess over the smallest crack, the tiniest drip, the slightest deviation of the line. You know this is not just a room, but a context, a continent, a small container of someone's days. Perhaps a marriage will almost end here, or a father will hold his trembling son, or an almost-mother will weep alone. It is these possibilities and more that beg for attention, yours, here along the edges whose near-perfections, let's be honest, few will notice. Yet with the same extremity one uses when holding a pen, when forming a fist to protest or punch, gripping the bars of a prison cell, praising the sun rays, punching in the nuclear codes, you concentrate your best hand on holding the brush, the ends of its tiny hairs tipped with paint, and you take a deep breath and move to alter one small stretch of space. For a moment, everything is at stake again.
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I wrote "The Habit of Cutting In the Edges" five years ago, and it appears on the back cover of my first book, On Earth As It Is. I remember composing this small essay in my head at the same time I was taking this picture -- while I was actually painting a bedroom. It was the very last essay I wrote for the book, and I remember now the immediacy I felt in acknowledging right then that "everything is at stake again." When you're trying to stroke paint to a fine point without the aid of tape or take-backs, you discover a particular form of focus. I'm not a painter; I'm a writer. So even as I'm doing my best to make a straight line with paint, words and sentences are suggesting themselves to me more pressingly. In that moment, so much felt at stake.
For my last letter of 2021, I am reflecting on that impulse, that tendency to recognize how much, in any given moment, is at stake. I don't know that it's possible or right or reasonable to live every moment with such an intense awareness. Sometimes it can be too much. Sometimes it matters to find a way to just lighten up and laugh. (Sometimes you just tape off the edges and don't worry so much.) And yet the awareness presents itself, suggests itself, offers itself. And I think those moments are invitations for us to offer ourselves right back, in the form of small, loving, attentive gestures. It's an odd exchange: Pay attention. Give back.
As a writer, that's what interests me. Sometimes it's comical. Sometimes it's infuriating or endearing. Sometimes it's not helpful. Sometimes it's excruciatingly illuminating. Sometimes it's just another day, and sometimes it's life itself staring you straight in the face.
Anyway. We're turning the page on another year and it's worth pausing to thank all of you for reading The Thread, this small weekly offering of mine. I hope you enjoy it. It hope that, in some small way, it encourages you to pay attention, and to give back.
There's a new book coming in 2022. And more of The Thread. And who knows, maybe some other surprises. But I want to pause right now long enough to say: Thank you for reading. Thank you for writing back and sharing your responses, your reflections, your stories. Thank you for participating with me in this small weekly ritual during a time of disruption and dislocation. Thank you for finding the small connections, the thread that runs between us.
Peace and grace to you as we swivel back toward the light once again.
Andrew