Are You Sure?
[November 6, 2020]
This being the week that it is, I woke today before 5 a.m., scrapped my article for the week and wrote this. I shared a story last night with friends from Nashville’s Actors Bridge Ensemble and want to share it with you now.
My grandmother Cornelia Dodson Steakley was born on September 14, 1920. She died in 2018, just shy of her ninety-eighth birthday. This year she would be 100. She was an independent, scrappy woman and lived on her own until she was in her mid-90s, when a tumble at home made her decide to move into an assisted living facility.
In her time here, she lived through the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts and 9/11 with all its aftermath. She lived through the civil rights movement and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr and the Kennedys. She lost a son, a granddaughter, her husband, parents, siblings, loved ones. A southern working class matriarch, she loved the Atlanta Braves and she voted for Barack Obama. She flew in a plane for the first time at 85. She made amazing cornbread.
The last time I saw her, just a week before she died, she was disoriented in the way we often become in our final days. She had completely let go of the present and instead occupied a pastiche of her earlier life, mistaking my father and myself for any number of people she’d known over the years.
But she wasn’t frightened. Tiny, birdlike, her skin and hair almost translucent. She was happy, if a little befuddled.
At one point that day, in the middle of confusing me with people from her past, she squinted at me and patted my hand.
She asked, “Where are you buried?”
I said, “Granny, I’m alive.”
She squeezed my hand hard, smiled and asked, “Are you sure?”
Was I? That moment, like being pushed into freezing water by a tiny, smiling woman, jolted me into awareness. Was I sure?
Today, I got into a Facebook argument before 7 a.m. Nauseous, morning pretty much shot to hell, I stopped and asked the cat, “What am I doing?”
Where are you right now? How is your heart? How is that hidden, precious thing deep in your spirit that thrives in love, in hope, in compassion and creation?
This week, this year, we’re in a bizarre purgatory of in-betweens. We feel genuine worry for democracy, for the safety of our friends, neighbors, loved ones and ourselves, for the future of our country and the world.
However weird and scary this moment, this weird liminal space between certainties, we are still us. We are humans in need of love and purpose; humans who deserve peace, beauty and safety. During an in-between time, we still live each and every moment. We don’t go on pause.
Inhabit this moment. Don’t hide from it. Don’t lose yourself in anger and news addiction, in social media battles or fights — that’s your brain and culture’s insidious way of making you hide while convincing you you’re engaged.
Don’t hide from uncertainty by replacing it with dangerous certainties like hate or “othering,” easy blame or the seductive arms of purity cults of “correct” views and actions.
Inhabit this moment. Sit with the hurt, the rage, the fear. Also sit with the sweet moments, with the year’s steady turning away from autumn toward winter. Sit with the wonderful, liberating fact that you don’t know all the answers.
How do we know we’re really living? We feel. We hurt. We laugh. We weep. We joke about Mondays and daylight savings time, we battle over red states and blue states at the same time that we bond over The Queen’s Gambit, The Bachelorette, baby Yoda. We lose loved ones. We reach out at night to make sure someone’s there with us.
We are so much more than we think.
If this election cycle taught us anything, it’s that we’re not listening to each other and that we don’t know one another nearly as well as we pretend.
We can only achieve true change if we see each other. If we listen and not just talk.
This is where art comes in.
Art creates openings where debate cannot. It accomplishes this by expressing a human story, a human experience with immediacy and truth, be that through a film or play or through painting or conceptual art.
Art changes hearts. The story of an individual’s experience is always more effective than a list of facts about a group of people. Art gives causes a face, and it gives disparate people communion.
I cannot change the minds of 69,687,188 (as of this writing) predominately white individuals who voted for Donald Trump that this is a vote for fear and hate. I can’t heal the divide in America that not only split us almost exactly in half but that also contributed to so many white voters’ hearts not changing after months of racial reckoning. I cannot fix the problems of whiteness.
But, I can appeal to individuals. I can tell stories. I can share the dignity and worth of others with them. I can listen to them to better understand where we’ve grown so far apart.
Art heals our own hearts. If we sit with these feelings — the uncertainty, anxiety, anger, fear — we can work through them in our art, by expressing them, analyzing them, sharing them so that others don’t feel quite so isolated.
Art reminds you that you really are alive. When my grandmother asked me if I was sure I was alive, I realized that I wasn’t. I was mired in obsessive, circular thoughts about work, I was neglecting my creative practice, friends and family and, to be brutally honest, I was coasting down a slope to depression and dissociation.
What is the act of art? It is the act of creation. It’s the breathing of life into a thing — an idea, an image, a story told or song sung — that moments before didn’t exist. This is how you and I connect most viscerally with our living, bleeding, hollering, precious inner spirit.
Embrace it. If anyone asks if you’re sure you’re alive, you’ll know the answer.
