Meaning
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Crash. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
This was a tough week—following my bicycle accident and encompassing a turbulent surgery on Tuesday. High among the challenges I’m facing is a sense of reversal. I’ve had more than three years of upward climbing, progress I could see in my athletic, creative, and relational selves. It was the fruit of big, hard work—in the pool for hour after hour, at the writing desk, on therapy Zooms, under the gaze of my beloved. The effects of that work were evident and sweet and had the heft to balance out my fears about being so long in untested territory, climbing without the safety ropes of a salary and a career track and a prestigious entry on the resume. This had been the era of truly personal, independent growth, the assembly of a new foundation. In an instant I reverted to the bicycle crasher, the ER patient, he of the suspiciously soft bones—a mode I first got to know in a more contingent chapter of my life.
Reading through the surgeon’s notes from the operation to repair my wrist, I could see his plain surprise at what he encountered under the scalpel, a bone blown apart by the same forces that snapped my wheel from my bike and turned its carbon-fiber top tube to granola. He describes not a calm and orderly realignment but a wrestling match, a slippery dealing in fragments. Surgery took twice as long as the anesthesiologist told me it would, about three hours in the event, and when I woke up I asked to be admitted overnight rather than go home in that level of pain. (Three fentanyl shots and four Percocets later, despite a hurricane of post-op ineptitude, I managed to sleep in my own bed.)
In my heart before the crash I always knew that I would cross the Ironman finish line this summer no matter how difficult, and that this would represent a narrative node, the end of one thing and the start of something else. I knew this incorrectly, it seems, but I knew it. More than ten years since my last serious accident, it did still occur to me to fear and guard against calamity, to brace myself for it in some psychic recess somewhere—but rarely, faintly, submersibly. That fear was a voice I’d had to quiet in order to recover a certain kind of joy, and I did. The recent evidence spoke to promise alone, to the tenure of a better fortune: I wobbled now and then but didn’t fall, or fell but didn’t break.
I notice in just about everyone the wish for things to follow an ordained path—ordained by divinity, or by the constellations, or by one’s own fortitude and self-organization, or failing those then according to our age’s shining gaslight upon a hill, “Everything happens for a reason.” But they don’t. Narrative in real life, not yet subjected to creative reprocessing, is neither linear nor progressive. It stands at least as ready to tear down a triumph as to steady it. That’s not an embrace of nihilism; just the opposite. Meaning is there because we make it, digging around in blood and bone and dark to find our purchase.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.