The air turning brisk this past week was a sure sign of the season turning to fall, as was the official month turning to October as of today.
“I think fall is my favorite month of the year,” I commented to Peter as we walked to the Nurau office yesterday in the fresh hours of the early morning, me in my brown leather ankle boots, Peter in his J crew navy sweater.
It’s probably the bittersweet of embracing the cool air and saying goodbye to long summer days, coupled with the nostalgia of remembering what your life was a year ago when fall hit.
We’re back in L’amour du pain this morning, perched on high chairs facing the windowsill as I type on my keyboard (the ratty old pink one now replaced with an unscathed lime green version) and Peter scribbles beside me in his journal.
This was the cafe we frequented every Saturday morning last year in our first few months of marriage, except back then Peter was in the thick of seminary, our Saturday mornings more of a necessity than a luxury so he could get his essays done.
The sounds behind me are the same, though.
The perky voices of the girls switching between French and English: “Bonjour, ça va?”, “Ça fait…that will be $3.61”, the grind of the coffee machine and the rustling of paper bags as fresh butter croissants get packaged for eager Montrealers in their touks and sweatpants.
But it feels like we’re living in a whole different season.
Today is the first day of Peter’s biblical counselling classes and Courses for Everyone for me – a series of classes run by Church 21 on church history and gospel fluency.
I have a new undergraduate intern – Victor – who follows me around and is trying to help me pick up the remnants of the brain cancer project I started in 2018 and have yet to complete.
I have days when the PhD still frustrates me and sends me into a frenzy, especially when I receive emails about my long overdue comprehensive that is finally about to take place. Days when I feel there should be more to my life than troubleshooting lasers and sonicating nanoparticles.
But also others when I walk into the lab at Universite de Montreal and the window shades are all drawn up so the sun is streaming in to wiped down benches, and it actually feels good to be in the lab that day.
I feel like my attitude towards lab work is a constantly moving target, changing with the wind of every experiment.
Our house has gone through many changes too.
For one, we invested in a Venus fly trap last Sunday ($10 at Home Depot) and it has been a source of fascination for the both of us as we try to swat fruitflies to feed into its carnivorous leaves.
Apparently, it only likes alive flies that we gingerly drop into it with tweezers, leaving any fly carcasses it knows is dead untouched.
The biggest investment over the past year was in our balcony:
The trips to Home Depot to get the wood Peter used to build the garden box, shovelling dirt into black garbage bags that we hauled into our tiny apartment that never seemed to be enough to fill the box, and finally seeing seeds sprout into seedlings and fully grown tomato plants that now overflow over our balcony, reaching up to the sky.
There have been other renovation projects – the rocking chair Peter rescued from the sidewalk that he spent long free summer days sanding down with a piece of sandpaper (a labor of love!) and an abandoned orchid that surprised us by growing 3 stems of 8 white orchid blossoms of weeks of complete neglect.
We’ve been of course, reading.
I’ve borrowed all sorts of farming books for Peter from the McGill library – restoration agriculture, for the love of soil, water for every farm and Paul Stamets Edible and Medicinal Mushrooms – which he has been devouring and enjoys educating me every now and then on how one can alter the contour of hills and valleys, the importance of microbes in soil or how much a pig costs on Kijiji.
My reading collection, on the other hand, is more oriented towards mental health and life philosophy.
The latest book I read that I found fascinating was “Healing” by Thomas Insel, which documents the treatment of mental illness in the United States, highlighting systemic deficiencies and ways forward.
I’m currently in the middle of “Nobody’s Normal: how culture created the stigma of mental illness” by Roy S. Grinker, an cultural anthropologist’s take on how stigma developed through three factors: capitalism, war and the division of body and mind.
The field of anthropology is so far from what I know and my mind seems to inevitably drift to what would have happened if I studied anthropology instead of chemical and biological engineering at Princeton.
In terms of life philosophy, the books I’ve been musing over have been “The Second Mountain” by David Brooks and “The subtle art of not giving a f-” by Mark Manson.
These have been bestsellers in the realm of secular self-help, topping New York Times charts and read by many rich, successful people who want something more than their current lives.
Interestingly enough, I’ve found them to be very Christian.
We’re small and don’t matter, Mark says.
We need to live simpler and more ordinary lives. Instead of searching for high after high – another partner, country, adventure, and hair-raising sport – we need to learn to settle down, commit and find joy in what we have now.
Seems revolutionary but really is only what Christian thinkers have been saying for centuries.
Mark says,
“After all the years of excitement, the biggest lesson I took from my adventuring was this: absolute freedom, by itself, means nothing.
Freedom grants the opportunity for greater meaning, but by itself there is nothing necessarily meaningful about it.
Ultimately, the only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief or one person.”
What both of them agree on is that our society is going through an existential shift.
We no longer believe that material success and the American dream is all we need.
We are searching for a life that matters – one that has meaning and purpose.
One in which we know who we are and live out of that identity. One in which we know what our values are so we can actually commit to them.
The problem is finding out what those values are.
Are they for us to decide which are good or bad values? Those worth living by and those not?
Are good values the ones that “work”, in the sense of leading to more human happiness or longer lives?
Or are there values we should choose to order our lives by, even if they make us more poor or lead to sadness?
I find Mark’s conclusions lacking in this regard.
He seems on one side to assert that we should be able to choose our own life values because we all have different life experiences that shape what is important to us.
On the other hand, he also asserts that some values are better than others.
We would all agree, he asserts as if it’s obvious, that a life like Onoda’s, a Japanese warrior who spent his days fighting in the forest of the Philippines even after the war was over, was not oriented around good values.
So – which is it? Should we be able to choose our values based on what we think is important to us and no one should judge us about whether those values conform to an objective standard? Or are there objectively better or worse life values to live by?
At least David Brooks is more concrete. There are four values worth committing to, he says.
Family, a life partner, a vocation and a community – speaking to our human need for deep relationships and meaningful work.
Pretty counter-cultural, considering wherever I turn, it seems like the young, unencumbered life of sleeping with whoever you want, travelling all the time so you can work remotely from the mountains of Nepal, or not even work at all due to your stream of passive income, and not being restrained by having to commit to one person or one God – is the one exalted above a bounded life in one place.
Perhaps we are finding that the freedom promised wasn’t as fulfilling as we thought it was going to be.
Like eating too much chocolate ice cream and wishing we didn’t stuff our faces thinking that satisfying whatever desire we had was actually a good idea.
I can’t get away from the existential fact that keeps staring me in the face – we weren’t meant for unbounded freedom as atomic individuals made for pleasure.
But instead to be bound to others in community, to come under authority and align ourselves with a way the world should have been.
And that being a Christian is exactly that – finding out what our existential and moral reality is, and re-aligning our lives with that reality.
It’s not about mountaintop experiences or achieving some sort of nirvana through long periods of meditation on uncomfortable cushions.
It’s not even primarily about the spiritual highs of being immersed in worship or the revelation of having our mind opened to a new truth.
It’s more walking, than running.
More about everyday mornings reading Numbers in the quiet dark of our living room.
More about 8a.m. Sundays in a drab, stuffy church building with creaky chairs and leaving encouraged.
More about dinners on our teal and bamboo plate set as we witness people share their hearts over pizza and wine, a glimpse of eternity as time slows down.
As Brooks says,
“the journey towards faith…seem[s] very ordinary, There’s nothing super miraculous and there are no dramatic moments.
There’s just a gradual suffusion, a gradual understanding.”
– The Second Mountain, David Brooks
Today feels like an ordinary day, though tinged with the specialness that comes with the turn of the season.
And so, this is my corner of the world today – where I find beauty in the margins and at the intersection of my day to day, the books I am reading, the people I am talking to, and of course, the inspiration that comes with new seasons.
