Terry Tempest Williams on The Paradox of Change and How to Live with Uncertainty – The Marginalian

It's amazing how, in a universe ruled by constant change, humans are constantly hungry for life – our bodies are wired for homeostasis, our minds are fixated on habit, our hearts yearn for eternal love. We live as unconscious self-perpetuating patterns, our painful resistance to change is reflected in the patterns and routines and patterns of relationships where we have built the belief base that sustains all our actions, reactions, and choices.

It's not easy, reshaping this superstructure to fit something new — a new habit, a new person, a new way of being. The more revolutionary something new becomes, the more challenging it becomes to fit it into the pattern of life as we know it – the pattern formed by what we believe in love, that deep personal muscle.

This gentle, difficult, highly rewarding renovation is what Terry Tempest Williams is experimenting with When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Changes in Voice (public library) – a growing reflection on life, love, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, prompted by an unexpected revelation: When Williams opened the journals his mother had given him, he was surprised to find them empty – a kind of “second death” that created a deep reckoning with the meaning of the word we write, of the story we write, and the meaning of the word we write, and the story we write. he was shown the love of birds that he shared with his mother.

Two decades later, at about the same age as his mother when she died, Williams writes:

Love is living a life that is like death. And so we risk everything by trying to touch the unspeakable with contact. Again and again. Often… Patterned behavior alternates like shadow and light… We can change, evolve, and change our nature. We can choose to walk like water rather than be shaped like clay. Life comes and goes in any given day. It doesn't have to be one way, one truth, one voice. And love shouldn't be all or nothing.

Because we suffer from an innate blindness to what lies on the other side of change – a blindness well illustrated by the thought experiment of The Vampire Problem – it is often luck, not choice, that brings about the greatest change. Life sweeps us away – a terrible disease comes, an unexpected opportunity appears, an unexpected person enters the heart – and suddenly we have to start again, rebuild a good foundation for being in this new place. (“It could happen anytime…”)

Williams finds unlikely solace in the challenge of change in his encounter with an out-of-place bird. Painted bunting – a brightly colored bird of northern Mexico, which so confused Linnaeus with its unusual plumage that he mistakenly classified it as native to India; a species now thought to be guided by a star during migration – “we flew into the tail of a hot storm, blew along the way, and landed,” making a new life in Maine, a new way of being: Each day just before dawn, the painted bunting descends on the neighborhood's bird study like clockwork.

Watching the bird one snowy morning, Williams writes:

At 6:43 a.m. the painted bunting arrived, like a dream between the shimmer of shadow and light. His silhouette grew in color for the seven short minutes it lasted. And when dawn fell upon his little feathered back, it burned like a flame: red, blue, and green.

[…]

The bunting was caught in the storm and stayed. I am caught in a storm of my own making. A storm. The spirit of the earth. You are distracted and removed. In the damage of being lost, I can fix myself.

Echoing Emerson's accusation that “people want to be resolved [but] only when they are uncertain is there hope for them,” adds Williams:

We can escape our lives in a different way without denying it and returning to our true self… Seeing accident, whether it is witnessed in the brain or in the dawn of winter, reminds us that nothing is certain.

A century after Virginia Woolf thought of finding beauty in the uncertainty of being between two world wars, Williams adds:

I want to experience both the beauty and the pain of the times we live in. I want to live my life without being numb. I want to speak and understand hurtful words without these words being my place of residence. I want to have a touch of light that can lift the darkness back into the realm of the stars.

This vascular dysfunction can bleed and burst. Even if I just go on living, I appreciate my position as a weak person in a vulnerable world, guided by the songs of the birds. What is time, holy time, but to speed up consciousness? There are many ways to change the sentences we are given.

Fill in these beautiful pieces When Women Are Birds with Milan Kundera on the mid-life conflict of knowing what we really want, Rebecca Solnit on how we find ourselves lost, and George Saunders on the courage of uncertainty, and we revisit Williams on our responsibility to wonder.