washing dishes: a father’s glimpses

Getting at the complexity

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I’m stewing many levels, layers, and levers at once today, this week, this month, this season and this decade. I’ve had an abrupt interruption that’s causing me to reevaluate some identities that I’ve held dearly for a decade. It’s been a rude transition into the next chapter of my life as this November begins radically different than how October opened one month ago.

Through this massive ordeal, I am also noticing how similar my situation and context is to so many other people, that I am one of many people going through something terrible. There are others toiling, somehow enduring, thriving in some moments, in their own lane, which for the most part are parallel lanes to my lane. For most of my life, my lane and someone else’s lane will not intersect or collide or overlap. Nonetheless, we are going through similar shitty phases.

I know this to be true abstractly or philosophically and then I read Michael Walker’s interview of Lawrence Ralph on Public Books where Ralph states:

so a major aim of the book is to try to get at the complexity of who people are and to allow that complexity to sit there

Reading that was vindicating, and I was still digesting the beauty of the complexity inherent to each of us less than 24 hours after I’d heard Vince Staples’ one minute monologue (on the RapCaviar profile of Tyler) where he says:

It’s like impossible for the majority of the world to give Black people their own identity. it’s too much hard work for them to be like: okay, this is a human being with feelings and emotions, and their own unique story.

This first day of November is a new beginning, after spending much of August swirling in the hurt of multiple generations of hostility and hate followed by September where I plodded along with life as I proceeded with the mundane and procrastinated on the overdue. I made a couple of bold moves in October, which were met with resistance. Conflict is a given in life, so I am learning how to be in more conflict rather than running, collapsing or abandoning. It isn’t easy, it is painful, and yet, I’ll get through this where there will be plenty of life on the other side, fresh juices and misunderstandings, cool beverages coupled with suffering.