Late flight to the coast

I’ve done this flight what seems like ten scores of times, the evening flight from Newark to Seattle.  I used to do it coming back from trips to the bankers and investors and rating agencies, then back from meeting with rating agencies and regulators and increasingly agitated bankers as the old bank failed, then back from depositions and court dates and consulting meetings.  Now it’s back from Maine, from parents and working online, to visit my son.  There is nothing to do in Seattle any more, and it makes the plane rides themselves far easier – it makes them releases, in their way.  I’m off the clock, a clock which ticks slowly when I’m in Maine through job searches, consulting work, writing, reading, waiting; instead I’m in a zone where it’s just about being a father and relishing having a son, being a partner for my ex-wife and feeling appreciated that I’m giving her a break.  I’ve done this flight a hundred times but it’s easier now than ever before, even knowing I’m going to do it a hundred times more before he hits middle school.

It’s been an awkward day but it always is when I head back to Seattle.  I have to say goodbye to the dog without saying goodbye – someone told me once that dogs handle it better when you go away if you just treat it like you’re going to the corner store, so I don’t make a big production, just take him for a walk and give him a pet and put my jacket on and grab my shoulder bag and head out.  I took a shower, put my laundry in the closet, made sure I packed the charging cables and the library books and the birthday gift from my mom to the ex-wife, and my father drove me to the airport.

I asked him if I should write a letter, a letter I’d been meaning to write for a long time but had been putting off.  I asked him if it would be a moral thing to do – if writing it would be “good”, or if not writing it had been “bad”.  It had been gathering dust, in concept anyway, for years, so I wasn’t sure if I was being self-indulgent or not.  He told me it wasn’t a moral act, that the moral act had been done a long time ago and what I was thinking about wasn’t moral or immoral, it was an act that might be an act of charity, of grace, or it might be an act of spite.  If it was an act of spite then yes, it was immoral.  I told him what I was thinking, what I had been thinking about.  He said no, that sounds like an act of grace.  But that’s not moral or immoral, it’s in its own space.  It’s just an act of grace.

I got out at the airport.  I wrote some emails from the departure area and checked my bank account.  I started a book – it was terrible, I doubt I’ll get more than a hundred pages in before I return it to the library but it seems important to read so I’m giving it my best shot for now – and I got on the plane.  I slept when the flight attendant closed the door, and woke up to find the plane in the air, although apparently there had been an hour delay on the ground.

I found the club lounge in Newark – I travel enough that a membership there is a worthwhile investment – and I wrote the letter I had talked to my father about, printing it out in the lounge – I had lost the email address a long time ago, and only had work address left in my contact folder which was in any way reliable, and only had that because social media was able to confirm that they did, in fact, have the same job they had five years ago.  I folded up the printout and signed it and put it in my bag; I’ll mail it from Seattle.

I learned over the past few years that you can’t ask for forgiveness; if you get it you’re lucky, but sometimes you can heal without forgiveness and it’s actually more genuine, more true for both of you, than it would be if you received some kind of absolution.  What you can do, as a human being who will hurt others without intending to or even sometimes when you lash out of spite and intend to hurt in your worst self but recognize after the fact that the other person is human and is just like you and therefore never deserves to be hurt even if they need to be brought into the light of something unpleasant but they never deserve to hurt, what you can do instead of ask for forgiveness is to atone.  Atonement is an act which is fully in your power; it may or may not be accepted, but unlike forgiveness, atonement is your gift to offer as the creator of pain, instead of a gift to request from the victim.

You can offer up your own understanding of what it is to hurt, you can indicate your sympathy for what they have felt, you can offer up a space for them to hurt in front of you and so as to make it known to your heart what it is to have the hurt they carry, and you can offer to share that hurt with them, even though you caused it.  You may not be forgiven, but you can atone.  They may not feel “righted” – they may still feel a gap, a loss, and may still feel that you are somehow lucky or bloody minded or terrible for being able to hurt but not feeling what they felt – but what I have discovered is that if you atone, even that anger that you have escaped without the depth of loss of them is reduced, it is brought back to manageable scale, it can be brought down to a scale that allows the other person to hold it in their hands and no longer fear it, no longer make it into a monster.

The divorce counselor was the one who said forgiveness is inappropriate – or at least, that forgiveness isn’t something to ask for or to seek.  He came up with the word “atonement” and I liked it, and my ex-wife liked it too.  When we had the conversation she had not been ready to forgive, and I understood that, but she deeply, resonantly understood what atonement was, and she appreciated that I had offered it to her in the process of reconciliation and rebuilding our relationship as parents, and it gave her a pathway to trust me in the wake of my destroying her trust as a husband by ending the marriage the way I did.  Sure, I had my steady post-divorce demonstration of actions which in theory should make me “trustworthy”, the way a company post-bankruptcy reestablishes its credit over time.  But atonement was a process, not an apology or a set of actions but an orientation for a time, and not forever but for a time that gave space for her to express her hurt, work through it, and start to release it, and as a process it enabled something to shift for both of us.  Part of why the counselor liked the idea of atonement was that it didn’t involve any critique or endorsement of the concept of the hurt person being a victim.  The one who atones simply acknowledges their own failure to be respectful, to be loving; even when another person doesn’t realize it, sometimes you need to atone for not being as loving as you wish you could be, or as loving as the other person needed you to be.  There’s no victimization there, and I think that’s probably the right expression of most failings between people.

Well, sometimes.  Sometimes there is a power dynamic and its abuse is at the root of something going horribly wrong.  In all fairness, that is at the root of how I ended my marriage, but the letter I wrote today, like most of my experiences on both sides of this divide, was not about a power dynamic.  It was about being unaware of the extension of our actions and our love.  It was about not loving because I didn’t know I needed to love, or momentarily forgetting that an act wasn’t loving when I was caught up in something else that I thought was.  For those accidents, forgiveness doesn’t even make a ton of sense; what you’re really looking for is a pathway to understand the hurt that someone else feels, and offer whatever makes sense to lessen it and help them to move on – and in so doing, to grow in your own skin as a human, as you learn from what someone else lived through at the same time.

Atonement is a practice we can offer to ourselves as well – and again, it makes more sense than “forgiving” ourselves.  Forgiving ourselves is actually kind of selfish and blasé; we tell ourselves that we’re okay, we’re good people, even though we do bad things.  How nice – we can hold our heads high knowing that at center, we’re all okay.  That’s smells like bullshit to me; we do good and bad things, but that only makes us “okay” in the sense that we’re neither saints nor monsters, generally speaking.  That in turn is only acceptable if we’re happy with a kind of personal moral mediocrity.  When we do good things, sure, we can celebrate them.  But when we do bad things – to others or to ourselves – we should own up to the evil, and engage in some kind of a practice that acknowledges our understanding of our capacity for not-love and also acknowledges some kind of an effort to learn from our error – no more so than when we direct our not-love, our fear, towards ourselves.  We all too often create monsters of fear, of hurt, of anger, and actually the majority of times we direct those monsters at ourselves, not towards others (at least, we do if we’re not psychopaths), but we need to turn around and give ourselves space to say I’m hurting, I’ve hurt myself, and I acknowledge that that was a failing in the act of doing it, and that I’ve recognized that and I’m seeking to learn from it.

I keep reading the Charles Taylor book on the self and keep finding new lessons – or keep drawing new ideas, perhaps – and today the idea that I’ve grasped onto is that the self is not actually “within” us, as the modern notion of the self would have it.  At least, it isn’t for me.  My self is a spiral inside and outside of my body, it is both my mind and my body and it is some vessel outside of it all at once, and at times any one of those loci can act as nurturer or as felon.  It humbles me to think that I can sometimes hurt me even as I am also caressing me.  And it humbles me to think of what that expansive, inside-outside, all at once self is capable of when focused towards others, others who have that same nature as being of and in and outside of their selves all at once.  That’s why I can atone to my self even as I atone to others, and I can empathize with others as they seek to demonstrate the same to me and I can understand where they are as they atone to themselves.

All of that is on my mind but also, I’m just thinking ahead to being with my son.  My time in Maine – with too much time on my hands, too much time to think of what I need to do to not be bored – has a tendency to negatively spiral into obsessive self-reflection, and the last couple of essays are probably the tail end of that.  Plus, the last week has been dark, cold, and wet – the last hurrah of a nasty winter that everyone wishes to see off.  Flying to Seattle, even with a five hour layover in Newark, puts me in motion towards my son.  Even the lousy book – Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (in fairness it’s translated from German, but knowing a lot of German people, the translation feels very, very true to form) – at least has me thinking about an essay I want to write.

The evening light is stretching out, with a pinky purple hazy triangle of shadow catching up from behind the plane.  It’s like this from mid spring until mid fall – with summer flights departing closer to eight o’clock, while this one was a six-thirty departure.  You leave the east coast with the sun up ahead, and I make a point of getting a seat on the north side of the plane.  People forget that you have to travel a bit north to get from New York latitude to Seattle latitude so the plane travels more northwesterly than people think, and that keeps the sun away from my window seat.  I have a habit of falling asleep on late afternoon flights as soon as the door closes and the plane pressurizes, and when I wake up I can look behind me, the plane now traveling true west, and see the thin triangle of twilight start to chase the plane, first far aft and then creeping closer, until finally the sun arc ahead turns away from green, to blue, then gets absorbed in the purple.  Then night falls but there’s still a glow – especially as the summer draws to its height, when even a ten-thirty landing can still seem to almost reach one last ounce of sun on the western horizon over the Olympic mountains, down somewhere in the Pacific, down somewhere far away from land.

Tonight, as the twilight shadow catches up with United flight 2151 so that now the leading point of the earth’s darkness is directly to the north, just over the jet nacelle, and as the greenish yellow western horizon begins to flash orange as we cross the Rockies in western Montana, Interstate 90 seven miles below me and hidden beneath cottony clouds, I don’t feel a need to atone to myself.  I have atoned to someone else, I have written my letter and I will send it tomorrow, a thin white envelope with a couple of pages, nothing more needed.  I have atoned to my ex-wife, and she trusts me to arrive tonight, ready for a few days with our son.

Tonight, I’ll pick up a generic rental car and head to my apartment, and tomorrow I will pick up my son, give my ex-wife a present from my mom, and I’ll be a volunteer chaperone for my son and his kindergarten class at the community pool.  I’ll swim in an overly chlorinated pool with thirty-five five and six year olds, and then stand around awkwardly trying to get the boys to dry off and change into clothes before herding them back across residential streets to their classroom.  And the rest of the trip has reading at the elderly home across the street, more swimming, shopping for his mom’s birthday, crafts and library time, and if he’s up for it, golf.  Plus hugs, and stories, and Sorry, and Scrabble (well, kind of – he likes to play it but likes it when I come up with all the words), and Uno and Go Fish and baseball on the radio and carrots and bell peppers and sushi and bath time and sleep, next to me, as I fall asleep a few feet away in my bed, and listen to him breathe as the pinky purple twilight takes over from the yellow green line of the sun to the west and the night falls.

For now, though, the plane ride is almost over.  The darkness is complete – no more purple, no more green, just inky black as we hit the clouds descending into Seattle.  It’s another late flight to the coast.