Grey space
There’s always trouble in the grey space between expectation and reality. To avoid it, we relax on the expectation side of the spectrum, our feet kicked up.
Weekly Three
HEAR: I vibe with Kali Uchis’ “telepatía”.
READ: You'll find something valuable in this short Ann Patchett quote about where ideas come from that begins, “I am a compost heap . . .” reposted from Austin Kleon’s Instagram.
VIEW: Spend 13 minutes immersed in the quiet intensity of this solo sailor’s life. This young Brazilian man has been sailing the ocean alone for a year. Could you?
No. 48: Grey space
There’s always trouble in the grey space between expectation and reality. To avoid it, we relax on the expectation side of the spectrum, our feet kicked up.
Expectation is comfortable and easy. It’s what and how we want things to be, dammit, and anything less is wrong, bad, stupid.
Right, wrong. Good, bad. Smart, stupid. Dichotomies are simple, unlike grey space, which asks us to locate and interpret the gap between expectation and reality. And isn’t that basically math? (Reality - Expectation = Grey Space?). Math is hard. We don’t like, math. We are anti-math. Go away, math.
But, like most things, our insistence to live on expectation instead of reality can never last. Eventually, the two meet, the numbers are crunched, and the house of cards falls. The difference between expectation and reality — a.k.a the truth — is eventually calculated.
The result? Confusion. Because the truth is hard to grasp.
Actually, it might be impossible. It’s ambiguous, challenging, shape-shifting. It’s buying a coloring book only to realize every page is blank. In the grey space, one truth isn’t enough. There are multiple and, unfortunately for us, at least one of those truths (probably more) is bound to violently shatter our expectations.
Take, for example, a couple of lovers:
A young man and woman fall in love and embark on the journey of a new relationship. All is passion. Passion is all. Living together will be paradise. Their sex life? HOT. What one of them wants, the other wants. They are, basically, the same person. They’re in love, duh.
But then.
The house is a mess. The food in the fridge is rotting. It’s an argument to decide who should clean, and when, and how often. One wants to play the guitar, but the other is studying. When one is horny and wants to fuck, the other is doing dishes and isn’t in the mood (and is, by the way, tired of the horny one’s cum-and-go routine, and would prefer a more drawn out, slowburn performance, for once in a goddam blue moon).
Or take, for example, a political perspective:
Mexicans! Haitians! Venezuelans! All these brown people running toward the border like a bunch of baby turtles trying to make it to the ocean. Did we say people? We meant, illegal aliens. Hey, aliens. Newsflash! This ocean is closed for business. Our country can’t handle the burden your presence adds. You’re taking jobs away from American citizens. You’re overpopulating the public school system. You’re enjoying American healthcare and walking away from hospital bills scot-free. And, by the way, who do you think you are, anyway, coming here and speaking your Spanish? Do you expect us, the citizens of this great country, to assimilate? No, you need to assimilate. And fast. But now we’re getting sidetracked. Point is, don’t come. Stay where you belong. Just in case, we are going to build a wall. And if we find any more of you over here, just know, you’re going to get deported.
But then.
Meet Teo. He’s 17. His small village in Mexico is the center of a gang war between two drug cartels. His father was killed by a stray bullet when a car pulled up on the street outside and unloaded a submachine gun into the neighbor’s house. Now Teo’s the man of the house. His mother and two little sisters need him. He’s been caught twice trying to cross the Texas border, but he will try again tonight. He has to try again. And he will keep trying. He dreams now, as often does, of making it to the other side. All he wants is to work — to find a job, any job, and work like no young man has ever worked before. He will be a model employee. He will work until he drops. Most of the money he makes he’ll send to his mother and sisters, but he’ll keep a little to make preparations for their eventual, hopeful, arrival. His dream is to forge a better life for his mother, his little sisters, and himself. He has hope that one day, all of them can live happily in the United States, free from fear, free from hunger, together.
I’ve recently come to realize a perspective I was comfortably enjoying was, in fact, nothing more than expectation. I held on to the idea that there was a single kind of artist. You know, the one that stays inside all day, brooding and working. The one who isn’t particularly active, whose bodily health deteriorates as his mind flowers. He works, and when he isn’t working, he studies. He creates worlds instead of living in them.
And then I got back into riding my bike. I’m deep in it now. I’m out adventuring over eight hours per week. It’s a fine way to live. But, wait, this isn’t what artist do, is it? Are there artist-athletes out there? Do artists love and crave this presentness, this action, this danger, this speed, this immersion in nature, these hours under the sun, this strengthening of the body the same way that I do? If so, how in the world do they ever sit down to work?
The confusion occurred when I saw that “the reality” was that my lifestyle was becoming much different from “the expectation” of what an artist should be. This evoked the “the grey space” that, among other things, suggested there is no single kind of artist. An artist can be anyone. Anyone can be an artist. The ambiguity, or the truth, is discovering what being an artist means for you. This is, of course, uncharted territory.
My artist expectation, like all expectations, wasn’t sourceless. It was the result of cultural indoctrination, which lead people to believe they can lose “inches from their waistline” in a couple days of only they sign up for this fad diet, or that relationships are blissful romcoms at every waking moment, or that every person has the same ideas of what it means to have sex and be sexual, or that, at a certain age in life, a person should have accomplished certain things.
Carrying these expectations with us, we aim to stick to the rule book when a circumstance arises where the expectation might apply. But, as in writing and art-making, imitation never pans out, as a quote I saw somewhere once suggests:
Perfectly imitating of your idol is worse than being imperfectly original.
What do we do with all our expectations then? Living without hopes, aspirations, and dreams in exchange for life rooted flatly in the real is guaranteed way to craft your own, personal hell. And hell can wait.
Maybe we don’t discount our expectations nor the reality. Maybe we (reluctantly) do the math in order to see the grey space. Maybe, when we see the grey space, we don’t try to make sense of it, but embrace the ambiguity. Maybe we develop an openness to all that may come. Maybe we develop a hard-won understanding that we will never fully understand.
But these are all just maybes.
Truth is, I don’t know. ♦
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