One of the most charming parts about New York City is that more likely than not, you will chat with a stranger. Most of the time, I don’t remember anything from these fleeting interactions. In February thougn, I had a bar interaction with a woman that I’d been wanting to write about for a while, and it never congealed. Today, something clicked inside me, and thus: April newsletter. I love how these come together, not on any timeline, but a truly organic merging of thoughts. Of course, like all other ones of my blogs, it features the books I read, my original inspirations. Happy Easter to anyone who celebrates, and may we all lodge ourselves into the minds of our bar-mates.
I’m hunched over the bar, left hand jammed palm-down between wooden stool and jeans, the other flicking the page of a paperback, Ticonderoga between fingers. The mise en place: in front of me, a half-finished Red, marinated olives with more oil than olive, to my right an older woman sporting a 6-inch mohawk, and between us, her hot-pink helmet dangling from the counter hook. Engrossed in the cryptic patterns of my book, I hear, “Stop right there – what did you just underline?”
She’s wearing black shades, left arm extended towards me with a degree of urgency that takes me aback. Immediately, I’m sheepish and show her the beat-up cover: Milan Kundera’s Immortality. Just something I picked randomly at my favorite coffee shop, I say, aware that this esoteric book evades description. The line freshly marked is something about egoism, intellectualism, or power. It’s not often you meet someone who immediately dives into such topics with you. We talked for 2 hours. She was deeply spiritual, and before leaving, she asked me for my name.
Annie. That means Grace. I almost snort and say if I were to inscribe my own tombstone (the chapter was about being one’s own gravedigger), I would certainly not have written “full of grace.” Two months later, her response is still stuffed into the folds of my brain.
Grace, she articulates slowly, is not the same as graceful. At the oppositional end of grace is mercy. Mercy is when one has sinned or wronged another, and rather than bestow punishment, one is absolved with a degree of eyebrow-raised warning. Grace, though, is about some additional benevolence – favor bestowed in and of itself. Grace. That’s powerful. Accept it, she says, clipping in the fluorescent helmet to scoot away into the night. The bartender and I meet eyes and chuckle, shaking our heads. Some people truly are singular.
It's Easter today, and I’m thinking about how I’ve never been a religious person. In fact, I joke that my first real encounters with religion were during my music degree. First, in a history class on Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion (I was extremely confused because apparently everyone else had read the Bible), and second, when my flute professor decided to take me to a Sunday service at her Catholic church. I was a few months from graduating into the Great Unknown, having applied to jobs here and there and another degree program as a cushion option. She sensed my deep confusion coupled with my aversion to a freelance musician lifestyle. I remember knelling on one of the church cushions and glancing up at the vaulted ceiling with a hitch in my throat. I was moved not by the hymns or the setting, but by my teacher’s intuition. She knew that by bottling up everything I wanted to feel into a single choice, I was trapped within myself.
This week, I just finished reading Michael Pollen’s In Defense of Food, which provides a surprisingly aligned perspective. He warns against the nutritionist’s view of food, focused on the seduction of precise scientific answers. By distilling food to its chemical workings – Vitamin C, protein, carbohydrate, fat – the illusion of control is granted, both among the nutritionists claiming a coherent understanding of food, and among eaters who gravitate towards “healthier” labels. Pollen posits that this type of one-control-group analysis foregoes the reality: food is a system. The soil from which your carrot grows carries nutrients made rich by the diversity of other crops throughout the year. A field housing solely corn harvested year in and year out will have little value to our bodies. The grass (or not-grass) that the cattle eat affects its flavor and the nutrition we get as well. This can’t be one size fits all.
In fact, after something like 250 pages, there really is no scientific conclusion at all. Healthy eating has more to do with widening the aperture from the nutritional unit to a holistic system– an awareness that even with the precision of scientific power we possess, it is near impossible to explains the exact workings of diets that have developed over years of evolution. The stomach, after all, is fixed (we can only eat so much) and the scientific possibilities of testing changes are thwarted by variables like stress, lifestyle, self-reporting, culture, source of food, awareness of consumption, economic status, and more. Beyond the large scale governmental change, at the individual level, we can trust a simple maxim: that even if we don’t know why, if we eat real food from local farms, not too much of it, and mostly plants, we will be alright.
Sometime in my early adult life, I decided what kind of person I was. I am bubbly, good at working crowds, thoughtful, obsessed with finding connections between concepts, and deeply Type A. I like giving gifts, seek charm, and want to consistently learn. I get bored easily but am intensely committed and loyal. And yet all of these traits and more were couched between four corners – that of practicality and stability. I never said it out loud, but I always felt like my life would be something predictable. There was no room to dream otherwise. So, when my flute professor invited me to let go, and this mohawked woman three years later told me I had myself all wrong, I felt myself hold my breath.
This narrative I’ve given myself didn’t allow for the person I’ve grown into these last two years. Since starting this newsletter, I’ve met so many people, tried innumerable new things, and in many ways, embarked on what feels like a completely new life path. I’m realizing that these parameters for myself may have been based more in fear and self-preservation than any true desire. I guess the question of who we are falls somewhere between a list of who we think we are, and the grace we give to knowing that there is a shifting synergy amidst those elements we might never understand.
Strangely, in a book about immortality, Kundera never lands on a definition. Rather, he explores the various stakes we have in our time on earth: how we might be remembered in the minds of our loved ones, or the heft our legacies may have on history. Plot does not drive this self-proclaimed novel. In fact, each vignette is like a different glint of a diamond turned this way and that, the object itself already held in our hands. There’s an impermanence and randomness to it all such that any hubris is obliterated: immortality is completely moot, and so this whole book is about finding the magical threads – whether spiritual or not – and trusting that something is carrying us forward.
I wonder if that’s what grace is: trusting that despite not understanding a higher order, I know that I can be carried by it. I wish I could go back to high school Annie or new-to-New York Annie and gently embrace her. I wish I could tell her everything will be okay even if you don’t know what okay means. Grace is allowing myself to release that urge to understand. It is knowing that I can start to imagine something bigger, and whether or not I change one variable, the workings that make me me will still stay intact.
Many of the people I’ve met this year have been surprised by my gravitation towards cooking, perhaps the most affected of all activities when one loses smell and partial taste. Actually, the only way I was able to move through that time was knowing that everything would be okay – that cooking and being open to new channels would keep me afloat. Ironically, in learning about change, I feel closer to one of the original fixed elements I have – my name. In the Mandarin version of my name, An means peace, whether in the term for peaceful, or serene, or at peace. Grace is not quite like peace, but I do think they are interwoven in this Pollen-like way of reliance. On the back cover of Immortality, there’s one of the stranger synopses I’ve seen: one gesture witnessed by the author at a hotel poolside launches an entire reverie on the nature of uniqueness, on what enchants us and feels entirely improbable. From one arm motion, an entire novel comes forth. From a bite of a carrot, a web of codependence. From a name, an utterly unfixed vision for a life.
In seeking clarity, I am also attempting to see opacity as a blessing. We can’t impose upon the food system the same rules, regulations, and reductions that the capitalist mindset calls for. We can’t quantify multiple, diverse systems that rely upon each other and generations of ancestral knowledge. This forces me to see that a lifelong pursuit of clarity will not come. Inscribed in my destiny is a kind hand, rested gently on my back, assuring me that for everything I learn, there will be another mysterious string pulled.
This woman who interrupted my solo bar hop - she just wanted to talk. She was simply looking for someone with whom to clink martini glasses and muse about the forces of the universe. I’m glad she placed her hand on my shoulder for just long enough to unite Kundera, Pollen, and my younger self and tell us that we were all going to be okay.
Leave me a comment if you would like! I love reading them.
Annie, reading this makes me think of something I've heard before. I was watching this video where couples describe what they like best about their partner and this one person said - "their ability to let me process and unravel the things that scare me most in this life and not identify me as those things is one of the the kindest things that a person can do for someone else". I think about this a lot and this post reminds me of that. Truly a pleasure to read about your relationship with "grace". Thank you for sharing!