The Trough of the Wave

We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid that it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity… Intermittency—an impossible lesson for human beings to learn. How can one learn to live through the ebb-tides of one’s existence? How can one learn to take the trough of the wave?... Perhaps this is the most important thing: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid…. One must accept the security of ebb and flow, of intermittency.                                             (Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1906 – 2001)Recently I encountered another writer who lives in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area as I do, someone I haven’t seen for a number of years, and as we talked she mentioned something curious. She said she had been in an audience sometime in the past when I was speaking and that I had I announced I was out of ideas. “It happens,” she told me I said. “I don’t expect to produce more books.”I don’t have a clue how long ago that was, how many books ago. I know only that the time I spoke those words wasn’t the end of anything. The fact is, I have forgotten the moment and the public statement I made. Equally I have forgotten the trough of the particular wave I was speaking out of. If I was going to express such a conviction publicly, I’m glad I spoke it instead of publishing it. At least this way most of the people who heard me have long forgotten what I said, so I haven’t had to come up with embarrassing explanations. I find myself, nonetheless, rummaging for those explanations, mostly for myself.How long ago was this? Did I have so little self-knowledge as not to realize that ideas come and go, that sometimes a field—even the field of the brain—must lie fallow, waiting for seeds? What else was going on in my life that I was ready with such bland assurance to announce the end of all my dreams? I have been through times of wrenching transition and loss, but my writing is the one piece that has always held. That, however, is a long-term perspective. I know my writing has held because it fills my days despite the fact that I have lived in that trough from time to time, waiting for the rise of the next wave, uncertain it would ever come.Those troughs catch me less frequently now after more than forty years of the steady work of writing. One might think I would be more apt to run out of ideas in my age, in my greater distance from the young I write for. (And a confession, I do find myself drawn more strongly these days to an adult audience, hence these blogs, hence the memoir I’m currently immersed in.) But I don’t seem to have gone fallow. Perhaps it’s that my days are no longer encumbered with the responsibility of family or students, giving my imagination a more steady fecundity if not a wilder one. Perhaps it’s simply that I’m more consciously working against a mortal clock and as a consequence am less apt to let myself get distracted.And perhaps it’s that I’ve learned not to get caught into one single way of seeing, one single style, one single audience. In any case, I know that the troughs, when I find myself in them, are less deep and hold me for a shorter time.It seems to be one of the blessings of age that I don’t expect to find myself any time soon making another speech about my career being over.