on longing & peeling
and living the questions
Hi, loved ones! Today’s letter is all about contending with the many longings of the heart. This is part of an ongoing series where I’ve been dusting off bits and pieces from this year’s archive, tidying them up, and sharing them with y’all. If you enjoy being here, consider tapping the ❤️ above!
I have struggled with decisions more or less since exiting the womb. Mint chip or chocolate? This movie or that one? Bangs or layers?! (To bang or not to bang: That is the question.)
In college, I changed my major seven times. I actually went to three different colleges in the span of four years, and this year have lived in six different apartments.
The thing is, I love to try things. In this big beautiful world, there are so many experiences to be had! The possibilities for novelty and adventure are endless! I would like to taste them all, because otherwise how could I possibly know what I like?!
But this inclination can also be crazy-making because at times I feel pulled in a million directions. Like, limb from limb.
This year, I have been pondering what it means to make decisions in an uncertain world, and in doing so, reckon with longings of the heart which are oftentimes contradictory and impossibly strong, like a game of tug-of-war, but instead of rope, the tugs pull on questions, diverging life paths, with gravitational force.
I have caught myself wishing so much that I could split and peel myself off into a million versions of myself, so they could go forth and frolic and live out millions of parallel lives, à la Julie in The Worst Person in the World.
One Me would live in a cozy flat above the river in Hackney and see green all around me and drink steaming mugs of tea while it rains and take weekend trips to the Cotswolds. I could see what would have happened if I moved into that flat with my then-boyfriend: would we have stayed happy and together? (Flowers on the sill, pasta on the stove, weeknights cuddled up on the couch.) Or would we still have ended up hurt and apart? (Maybe.)
I would also live in San Francisco and watch the fog roll into the sea and eat dinner with my parents and little brother every Sunday. I’d have a favorite bakery (it would sell the best morning buns, I just know this!) and take drives up and down the 1 as the sun melts into the horizon, an egg cracked open over an endless span of blue.
Another Me would live in Australia, where the ocean is wild and the coffee is perfect and everything is loose, warm, and sunny. Where the sand is orange between my toes and I can stroll through campus under a leafy canopy of trees and marvel at how much has changed since I studied there on the cusp of this second decade, and how much has stayed the same.
These parallel lives have tugged my heart in a million directions.
Nestled within them are questions: Rooted or floating? Single or committed? Here or there?
Writing this, autumn leaves crunch underfoot as I walk to work through my sweet Brooklyn neighborhood and I live out one version of Me: one who lives up four flights of stairs, and takes the subway, and stays out way past her bedtime wayyy too often.
Living this particular question — what about New York? — has spooned up heaping cups of novelty, excitement, and adventure alongside platefuls of uncertainty and insecurity and heartache.
As dreamy as the parallel fantasy lives may be, I suspect I’d find a similar mix contained within them too.
For a while, these longings and questions became the source of much inner torment because I found it impossible to accept that choosing one thing would cost me not choosing another. I would have much preferred to experience it all, without any trade-offs or sacrifices.* Essentially, I hoped to bend the rules of the universe to my will. (And felt like that was not too much to ask?!)
Despite my mightiest wishing and bargaining, this has remained physically impossible. So until I am able to mold physics to my liking, my one singular self and I have been practicing the art of making peace with our decisions, and inhabiting the life we are choosing, because it seems to be an essential task of Being Human.
And I have been thinking about these words from poet Maria Rainer Rilke:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
The insistent voice in my head that tends to bombard me with gnawing questions — sure you’re here now, but what if you were somewhere else, doing something completely different — can be a bit of a terrorist. I think it finds comfort in escapism: offering up a crystal ball of infinite alternate futures, in case this one doesn’t go as planned.
So these daydreams can be romantic, but they also provide a kind of perpetual exit strategy, hedging bets against the risky and vulnerable endeavor of life itself. They offer insurance in case the life I’m currently living doesn’t quite pan out, or becomes sticky and uncomfortable. Their promise is don’t worry, you can always come here.
But in becoming so ensnared in their siren song, I inadvertently end up living my actual life halfway, skimming its surface instead of immersing myself entirely in the experience and all it has to offer: the lessons, the answers, the questions.
This is not a very satisfying way to live.
Living the questions, and even loving them, asks that we enthusiastically inhabit our choices even when the outcome is entirely and ridiculously uncertain. All of life is like this: taking bets in an uncertain world. As we make our gambles, there is no guarantee we won’t fumble, or find an answer we didn’t expect — or want — to uncover.
But as Rilke pointed out, there really is no other way.
We cheat ourselves of the human experience when we engage with life’s questions solely through thinking, our hamster-wheel brains trying to predict and compare and assess various scenarios. We also cheat ourselves of the full human experience when we live half-consumed by a fantasy world of other options, parallel lives, in doing so distancing ourselves from the one that is miraculously (!) unfolding before us.
One cannot arrive at the answers, or marvel at the richness of the questions, without surrendering to the fullness of the experience: the hard parts, like biting winters and crowded trains and the vulnerability of new friendships, and the beautiful parts, like watching these friendships blossom into a whole entire garden of people I love, or witnessing the hushed pitter-patter of snow, or the quiet satisfaction of guiding visitors through the labyrinthine subway system with the (near) confidence of a local.
Living the questions asks that we become intimate with the moment at hand. And it gifts us with that intimacy too.
And so I am beginning to learn how to honor my heart’s countless longings: perhaps counterintuitively, by giving myself over to one at a time.
In this practice of living with both feet in, I have arrived at a far deeper sense of peace, calm, and presence than when the warring questions and longings groped and tugged so ferociously at my heart that I became exhausted by the constant entertaining of possibilities, so consumed with anguish over what I might be missing that it became impossible to enjoy the only path that actually exists: the one miraculously (!!!) unfolding before me.
I can’t too precisely pinpoint what inspired this shift — from the bone-cracking pull of parallel lives to feeling so at home in this one. But I’d like to credit, in part, the humble revelation that these lives are made of days. And within these days, the warm glow of moments. And so rather than reinventing myself through lives, I am turning my attention to their smaller and more immediate ingredients: in nourishing the quality of my mornings, my thoughts, my friendships, I am beginning to understand that maybe it matters less where we are, and more how we are going about the business of living.
I think this is how we cultivate our dream lives: allowing them to unspool bit by bit, day by day. When we focus on the quality of our inner worlds — the place we really do live, rather than in a million fantasies — we are able to live the questions from the inside out. And trust the unfolding.
In big and small ways, we are each living our own questions every day: How can I be a good friend? When do I feel most alive? Where am I the truest version of myself?
To me, this feels like being wrapped up in a constant dance between ourselves and the Universe: asking and discovering, falling and trusting. When my heart gets a ensnared in the pull of all these other lives — people, places, fantasies — I remind her: slowly, with love, one step at a time.
Perhaps gradually, without noticing it, we will live along some distant day into the answer.
Xoxo,
Eden
*P.S. Some Thoughts on Having Your Cake and Eating it Too1
Meaning: the impossibility of enjoying all of the wonderful parts of something without experiencing the hard bits alongside them. (If you eat your cake — yum! — you can’t also have it in your possession — sad! — because you ate it.)
It sounds very simple. But to my brain, this idea can seem slightly preposterous. Like, I can’t at once be single and in a committed relationship?! And I can’t simultaneously build deep-rooted, lasting community whilst indulging my free-spirited yearnings to travel the world out of a backpack? And I can’t peel myself off into a million versions of Me so they can follow all of my dreams to my heart’s content?!!
Having It All2 is not just impossible (requiring vast stretches of the imagination), but also, I’m coming to realize, ultimately unsatisfying. As humans, the choices we make give our lives meaning. Choosing requires compromise and sacrifice, but that’s what makes what we do choose all the more meaningful.
When we accept that, we can go about the business of living, which is basically a constant scavenger hunt of discovering what brings us joy and fulfillment, and then making choices (and yes, sacrifices!) to prioritize those beautiful things. The fun part is that this will probably change with every new season of life. And doesn’t that all make it so interesting?!
I guess what I’m trying to say is what people have been saying for a very long time, which is: you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Maybe that’s a good thing.
P.P.S. I was so delighted to interview the lovely, brilliant, creative
for this newsletter last week. She is the author of and host of the podcast A social life, with friends. I’ll be publishing our conversation in the coming weeks — keep an eye out, and in the meantime go soak up all the wisdom and joy of her thoughts and reflections!
Until very recently, I thought this phrase referred to Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake!”. I just discovered these are actually two famous yet very distinct cake-related phrases, and that “having your cake and eating it too” has nothing to do with the French Revolution?!
Trying to have your cake and eat it too feels similar to the optimization trap: where “the quest for the best…throws a veil of dissatisfaction over our days.” This dissatisfaction, writes
, becomes a “sort of lingering fog, demeaning [one’s] experience of the world.”
This is a treasure trove! The feelings, the films, the thoughts — I'd already saved the piece to share, and then I saw the gorgeous mention of our conversation at the bottom. What a delight it was to talk with you, and what a delight it is to be immersed in your words here ❤️
Once again, Eden, what a beautiful and raw pondering...and while some of what you describe are reflections of the very unique you that you are, much of it also mirrors the inner ponderings of many, especially when we're in (or were!) our 20s. So many thoughts, feelings, & questions stimulated by your post for perhaps a future in person conversation, but for the moment: I fall in love with virtually every cat or kitten I see and want it to be part of my life, and yet...!🤣💗 And a fabulous title!