Belonging and Your Perfect Day
I’m reading Toko-pa Turner’s book Belonging, and it’s slow-going because I’m underlining every third sentence. In chapter one, Something Greater, Toko-pa wrote, We must begin with absence—a longing for what might never be assuaged—and follow it deep into the heart of exile, to discover what, if anything, can be made out of nothing. To make a foundling of the orphaned life.
She wrote, The great irony is that modern culture is suffering an epidemic of alienation, and yet so many of us feel alone in our unbelonging, as if everyone else was inside of the thing that we alone are outside of. And keeping silent about our experience of estrangement is, in large part, what allows it to perpetuate.
She wrote, There are many different kinds of belonging. The first kind that comes to mind is the feeling of belonging in a community, or to a geography. But for many of us, longing to belong begins in our own families. Then there is the longing we feel to belong with an intimate other in the sanctuary of relationship, and the belonging we yearn to feel in a purpose or vocation. There is also spiritual longing to belong to a set of ways or traditions, the longing to know and participate in ancestral knowledge. And, though we may not even notice how its severance influences us, the ache to belong to our own bodies.
There are also subtler forms of belonging, like the one we must eventually create with our own story, and the gifts that have been forged from it. And, if we take a broader view, there is a belonging with the earth itself, which is felt (or not felt) at the heart of us all. Finally, there is the great belonging, which may be the most nebulous and persistent of all, the longing to belong to that “something greater” which gives our lives meaning.
I am so curious about great belonging.
Recently I was writing about what a perfect day would look like, and I was struggling in a way that surprised me. Part of the problem was that I don’t want my future to be my past, recycled. I don’t know what new or surprising looks like. I want to do things I don’t yet know exist!
What if I work backwards from the day of my funeral? What happens if I describe the perfect funeral and then work backwards, day by day, to see what I need to do in order to get my memorial to go the way I would like? Can I then find the elements of the perfect day?
The other day I joked with my daughter that at my funeral I wanted the sound Venmo makes when someone sends me money to be playing the whole time. She asked if I wanted some other music, also, and I thought about it and decided on Amazing Grace. She asked me what singer I wanted. I told her I didn’t care, and she thought for a second. “I’ll get a chorus of children,” she said.
That was what I had wanted. I just hadn’t known it.
Mostly I want people to be laughing. That music. And, yes, I want people to be crying: so that music, too. I want my death to be a doorway to inspiration. I want people to leave my funeral thinking, I’m going to kick ass today. I want people to be thinking, Fuck it. I’m just going to do it.
Last night I re-watched (third time’s a charm) the Paula Scher episode of the Netflix show Abstract: Art of the Design, and Paula Scher said she was worried that when she died she would be remembered as the person who designed the album cover for Boston, the cover with the guitar-shaped spaceships, a piece of work that she didn’t love.
So, note to self: don’t create anything (and make public) you don’t want on display at your funeral.
I don’t want to be known as the sad, traumatized person who wrote about adoption.
I want to be known as the person who was trouble, but in a cool not hurtful way. (Do you know the song My Name is Trouble by Karen Ann? I sure do.) I want to be thought of as funny, smart, loving, loved. Disruptive in a creative but not hurtful way. Healthy. Insightful. Intuitive. Engaged. Committed. Trustworthy. Curious.
In my life, I want to feel I have a purpose. I want to feel helpful. I want to feel so grateful for all of it, every second, that even the marrow of my bones knows to say thank you when the sun rises.
Can a perfect day be shaped by a list like that? Can we shape our days around the feelings we want to have?
What do you want?
What if we drop to-do lists and listen?
What if we are more song than body? What if life is more music than to-do lists?
What is your song?
