The Center Will Hold (You)

A Roundabout Way to Answering the Question, "How Are You?"

My wife and I started watching a documentary about Joan Didion until she—my wife, not Joan—reminded me that we’d already seen it. I must have fallen asleep, which is not uncommon for me. “The Center Will Not Hold” is, in part, about the writer weathering the storm of her husband’s and daughter’s deaths, which both happened in one cosmically tragic year.

The film presents a quandary, which is: When do you tell your story? Do you write it all down while it’s happening, ensuring you will inflate the importance of certain incidents and downplay others that you’ll later decide were far more important? Or do you wait until you’ve got a more nuanced and objective perspective?

When a client tells me, “I am living my book right now!” I tell them no, you’re not—you are living your life now and maybe in a few years you can write about it. But probably not yet.

Writing about your life is something best done after the fact. It takes time to let the detritus settle and sort the gold from the dross. Only time allows you to do this, to understand what something really “means,” usually long after you’ve forgotten what actually happened.

Sometimes, though, there is a point when you have to tell your story, when you don’t just need to document the events but write about them as they’re happening. Such was the case for Didion, it seemed, who wrote about her griefs as they unfolded—then published them later.

In my case, no great grief besets me, but I continue to marvel at both the difficulty and beauty of life. I know I’m not alone in this. We all struggle with what to make of our respective realities. These are confusing times for many, and we all need catharsis on occasion, which is what good writing can do, offering a reason for our sufferings and frustrations.

As I type this, I can overhear a couple middle-aged men complaining at the coffee shop about how expensive and hard things have been since the pandemic, how the whole ship of the American empire is going down soon. I get it. But I can’t allow myself to go there just yet. Still, I am far from always cheerful. Life can be brutal on occasion, and to deny this is to live in fantasy.

One of the vocational hazards of being a writer is I often feel compelled, despite the rules of common pleasantry, to tell people how I’m doing. When the checkout clerk at the grocery store, for example, asks, “How’s it going?” or the guy at the record store greets me with the same, I tell them. I know the inquiry is far from sincere, but I can’t help but indulge in a little honesty and sincerity. When people wonder how I’ve been or what’s new in my life these days, it’s hard to limit my response to just a “fine” or a simple “I’m good.” There’s just so much more to say. There always is.

Didion wrote an entire book—actually, two—on the devastating experiences of losing her two closest loved ones, and I can’t relate to such horror. But when you ask a writer a question, you will always get a novel. I will, therefore, in an act of great restraint, limit myself to a mere essay (it’s the literal least I could do).

So, since you asked, here’s how I am:

The best I can describe it is that there is a core to life, something towards the middle of it all, and this center is stable, secure, brimming. Beyond the center, there is chaos: barbarians at the gate, money troubles and environmental stressors abounding, clients to contend with, neighbors to borrow tools from, kid drop-offs and pickups to schedule, taxes to pay, bills to keep track, little pieces of mail demanding to be opened. And then, there are the friends and family who wonder how we’re really doing and what it’s like to manage all this.

But in the midst of it, in the eye of the storm, there is a calm, cool center. And that is where we get to live most of life.

Most mornings, I wake with the sun, roll over and kiss the woman I love, then greet the day. The birds are usually singing this hour of morning twilight, a neighbor’s sprinkler system kicks into gear, and we peel ourselves out of bed.

We feed and take kids to school, which takes about an hour and is something we do reflexively, like zombies or good soldiers. Then we return home and make our own breakfast. Today, there were scrambled eggs and fried potatoes, sautéed peppers and diced onions, scallions mingled in with flimsy bacon and extra cheese sprinkled on top—all wrapped in a tortilla.

We talk, we eat, we take our second cup of coffee on the porch. And at some point, never too early, there is work to do: phone calls to make, emails to send, someone coming by the house to deal with a newly-broken appliance. Before noon, I make a list of what must be done that day and get through the first few items. At some point, I go outside, do a quick stroll around the block, take a break and stuff some food in my mouth.

Then there’s another phone call and some more emails, and the urgent replaces the important. I make a new list for what will have to be done tomorrow—and another of things that can’t wait until then. This is the ebb and flow of any day, of every day. But there is always tomorrow, always more to come soon. Despite the headlines and fears of an election year, there is still something to hope for and something to hope towards—and that matters a great deal, because even the most urgent matters can usually wait a day or two.

Knowing this, I have grown accustomed to telling people I don’t answer emails on the weekend. It feels like an embarrassed admission, especially after years of overwork and a general disregard for my health and wellbeing. I don’t own a smartphone anymore and rarely check my voice messages. It’s too hard to text on this dumb phone that I barely lose and often misplace, so it’s best to just send me an email. That, I can control. I can turn off the laptop, shut it down when kids are playing around me, leave it in the bag at bedtime. It’s harder to transport and pull out of my pocket at a four-way stop, so I don’t. This is no great act of discipline, just a small measure of sanity, I hope.

I also remind friends, family, and colleagues that my wife and I take off Fridays, a habit I learned from a friend, and this time has become sacred to us both, a little time away in the middle of an otherwise busy day, just the two of us. It’s a nice refresher, and we try to do this even wherever we are, regardless of the schedule. It all feels so self-indulgent but also, somehow, necessary. We decided some time ago that we set the pace of our lives, and this is what it looks like.

Most afternoons are met with a foreign invasion of neighborhood children, occasional tutors for the kids, as well as sojourners from out of town, the occasional roof salesmen, and much, much more. We welcome these guests and try to feed them; sometimes, they relent, often they do not.

The rest of the day, starting sometime around four, is spent on dinner. This is a feat performed by my wife or me, sometimes both, and it takes at least two hours. During this time, our home fills with smells of cooked garlic and onion, the sweetness of rosemary mingled with chicken. There is the sound of potatoes sliced on a wooden cutting board, a pot of bubbling water steaming in the background, jazz music playing on the hifi.

At some point, a teenager or tween will sleepily stumble into the kitchen, moaning with derision, “Whenzzz dinner?” We’ll sip our cocktails and chuckle, winking at one another: “When it’s ready.” The child sighs and returns to whatever activity they were engaging in, and we go back to cheerily concocting the meal.

When we don’t cook, we heat up the dregs of a previous night’s dinner: something that’s been sitting in one of the dutch ovens for a few days, congealing in the fridge and reforming to make something better. When warmed, this dish gets placed on a trivet in the middle of our dining room table, along with a large serving spoon. We plop some bowls down beside it and declare dinner to be served.

If we don’t want to set the big table, we seat the kids in our breakfast nook, and my wife and I stand, taking our meal at the counter. It is our lazy version of dinner. On occasion, we will let the kids fend for themselves or cook for us, and those are special times.

As evening fades into night and the dawn of a new record fills the house with another kind of sound, we share what we can remember from our respective days. Rarely do we have anywhere to be after dinner or anything to rush off to, so we linger. The talk lasts half an hour, sometimes longer. There are things that call to us from beyond this place—cul-de-sac kids who want to play after dark and emails that need our attention, pieces of paperwork sitting on the filing cabinet—but these are blips, muted colors in the background. We easily ignore them.

As dinner concludes, our children have chores. They need to clear the table and do dishes, sweep the kitchen, and mop. The trash and recycling have to go out, homework needs to be completed, and teeth require brushing. The bedtime routine awaits.

At this time, we have our most sacred activity, my wife and me, the one practice that comes before anything but happens after everything. It is our only prayer we continually pray, the most powerful meditation we have ever known—a strange and wonderful sort of yoga.

No matter where we are in the world, no matter what we’ve done that day, we always end the day with a walk.

It is done religiously, this exiting of the home. We are sure to not start too quickly or with too much aplomb. You never know, after all, what last minute emergency will call you back into the storm. Once the escape pod has been jettisoned, though, and we have safely descended the stoop, we are now liberated. We have gone past the Iron Curtain and entered a new continent beyond time, a land far from cell reception.

It is just us and the pavement now and the movement that binds us.

We walk for an hour. It’s not exercise, not something we try to do. It happens unforced, when it wants and how it wants, like weather. This is a thing we have always done; it is how we fell and fall in love, an effort akin to breathing.

To suggest doing it would be as unthinkable as not suggesting it. It is a thing that is assumed. When we struggle to connect, we go for a walk. When we are confused about the state of the world and overwhelmed by the never-ending litany of demands on our time, we walk. When we lose touch with what’s right, when we are happy or sad or in a new place or the same old place, we walk.

At first, there is silence—just the presence of one body beside another, one that knows your heart and respects it enough to not fill the gaps with idle noise. Eventually, there is sound, the first word seemingly ever spoken. We move across the sidewalks and streets interchangeably, ambling through our neighborhood as if it were the Garden of Eden, eying each other for the first time.

We walk and name things, laugh out loud, notice Halloween decorations in September, the Christmas wreaths in July. We wonder why everyone is rushing to the next thing when what’s current is far from over, then recognize this tendency in ourselves. We repent and vow to do better next time.

We head down this street, turn right, then left, go around the cul-de-sac, enjoying a longer way this time. My wife doesn’t know the route, tells me she would never do any of this alone, says she likes not knowing what’s coming. I don’t have the heart to tell her I never know, either. All I have is a vague sense of how many right turns we’ve taken, a number that needs to be corrected with an equal amount of lefts. When we’re about to round a corner, I point out our next steps so that we don’t bump into each other. No walk is complete without one of us doing anyway, but it helps mitigate too many run-ins. That’s the extent of my navigation.

As we walk, we talk about the day and our life together, how we’re going to get through the latest challenge, whatever it is (and there’s always something). We go from concrete to pavement back to concrete, turn, and continue down any number of previously unknown detours. Still, no matter how far we veer, we always end up home right at nine, in time to say goodnight to the kids.

So, you ask, how am I doing? I am well, and I am stressed. Happy and aware of the hard things. I am building a life I can be proud of, one I hope some future me will look back on and describe as “the good old days.” I am having a hard time but a good one, in love with my wife and dedicated to her wellbeing, committed to loving and leading our children as best I can, to being a good man.

I am unsure but confident. Scared but willing to try. I want to take it one step at a time but get ahead of myself, dreaming of places we might visit soon. I think of that small mountain town in Montana we drove through when we moved my wife down here. And I still remember that small, sleepy village in Portugal my friends and I visited in college. I vow to go back there someday.

And I dream of a hotel in Kenya where they let you feed the giraffes and still want to make my way there. I’ve never been, but I’d like to go. I can still smell the stinky tofu in Taipei, and can think of so many more places I haven’t been, so many possibilities of a life lived. And I am hopeful and paranoid, here but distracted, feeling like so many people all at once. How does one fit all these experiences into a single human life?

I am unsure of my place in the world and curious if anyone else feels this way. For now, I live and work and cook and try to write down what I can remember, partly for myself and partly in hopes that it helps someone else in some small way feel a little more seen and known. I try to take deep breaths as often as possible.

And when things get particularly crunchy, when it all just seems like too much to bear and life feels smaller than it should, I go for a walk. We do this often, my wife and I do. This is the center we hold, this set of rituals we practice daily that steel us against the onslaughts of the world, and as we do, fighting for whatever margin we can find, we discover that this thing we’ve been holding onto—this center—was, in fact, holding us.

So, how are you doing?

P.S. I’ll be at the Sonoma County Writers Conference this Saturday, keynoting the event. If you’re in the area or can make it out, I’d love to see you. I’ll also be teaching a workshop on book marketing. All the registration details can be found here.

Thank you for reading The Ghost. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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© 2024 Jeff Goins
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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