to be or not to be: making choices

Hamlet is our most infamous ambassador of indecisiveness. In his utter non-agency, others begin to question his sanity as he begins to lose his grip on reality... or at least his ability to direct his own reality. Hamlet does indeed act, but because he does so without forethought and without the conscious decision-making, he acts when pushed against a wall because of emotions, reactions, or threats against his own life. In short, he acts based on impulse rather than thought. Rather than deciding to stand up and reveal the truth of his father's death, he attempts to trick others into revealing their guilt. Hamlet is far too clever for his own good. In devising what he thinks is a brilliant way to draw the truth out of Claudius, he merely avoids making his own choice and confronting the matter head on. One could argue that his self-hatred, with its need for an outlet, finally comes crashing down on poor innocent Ophelia. The people who love us the most are the easiest targets for our anger and discontent (even if it is with the self that we are disappointed.) Hamlet demeans and disrespects his once-lover and takes his cruelty to the point of destroying Ophelia. Her death is ruled an accident, though, and Hamlet never has to bear the consequences for his role in the matter. Even with his more direct role in the murder of Polonius, Hamlet rages, "...but Heaven hath pleased it so, / To punish me with this..." (3.4.174-75)

In his article "Hamlet's 'Too, Too Solid Flesh," R. Chris Hassel, Jr. posits that Hamlet's indecision stems from his "paralyzing desire for perfect knowing and perfect doing" (Hassel, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 25, no. 3, Autumn, 1994) -- a requirement for action that impedes all action through its obvious impossibility. One cannot have 'perfect knowledge' in order to enact the 'perfect action'. Hamlet cannot come to terms with imperfection, perhaps because his choice may then be the 'wrong' one... and so he never chooses anything at all. Indeed, Hamlet cannot even decide to commit suicide, the most selfish of acts, because he cannot accurately predict what will come thereafter... and whether it might be worse. Hamlet is frozen in his self-absorption with his own perfection. This leads to his indecisiveness and thereby this hubris may be more precisely his tragic flaw.

In his oft-repeated 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, Hamlet argues that "conscience does makes cowards of us all." Our conscience, our inner sense of right and wrong, our personal morality so to speak, is a poor guide according to Hamlet. Why? Because we fear that which we do not know and thereby cannot make a choice which involves the unknown. But, Hamlet incorrectly applies this statement to all humans and further asserts that over-thinking clouds the ability to decide based on unpredictable consequences ("the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought"). Hamlet cannot decide because he does not feel confident he can predict the consequences... or that they will be positive consequences. Yet, the irony of this paralysis is that he thereby is forced into direr unintended consequences of his non-action or his reckless impulsiveness.

Most of us are not as indecisive as Hamlet. Most of us are aware that decisions must be made, even imperfectly, to the best of our ability and knowledge. Most of us have some sense that, as Shakespeare said, "action is eloquence" and that inaction only leads to tragic endings and a sort of self-absorbed non-existence. Yet, the question remains. How do we make difficult choices? Do we use our conscience, 'go by our gut' as some would say?

It would be so convenient if we could 'see all' before acting. In Norman Mailer's Castle in the Forest, D.T. explains how: "Spirits like myself can attend events where they are not present." (Mailer, Castle in the Forest, 2007, p. 78) Yet, D.T. is also employed by Satan. "Yes, I am an instrument. I am an officer of the Evil One." (p. 71) Perhaps this kind of omniscience is only available to those whose souls are sold into just such a slavery. And so we must decide... and decide without 'perfect knowledge', decide without very much knowledge of the real consequences at all.

Caspar David Friedrich, Cloister Cemetery in the Snow, 1819 (destroyed 1945)

Many times people's decisions are their own in appearance only, yet in reality are due to pressure from others or desire to appear one way or another or to get a result out of someone else... or out of guilt. Judith Budnitz explores this last sort of decision in her short story, "Guilt." When his mother suffers a life-threatening heart attack, Arnie is pressured by his aunts (and later his girlfriend and the doctor himself) to give up his own heart to save his mother's life. "What your mother wouldn't do for you," Aunt Fran shames her nephew. "She would do anything for you... anything in the world. And now you won't give just a little back." After much deliberation and no answers to his questions about what will become of his own life, Arnie chooses to donate his heart to his mother. This is how Arnie rationalizes his decision to himself:

"This is what I've realized. All along I thought I'd publish a book, lots of books, get recognition, earn lots of money, support my mother in style in her old age... give her gorgeous grandchildren. I thought that was the way to pay her back for everything I owe her. But now it looks like I have to pay my debts with my heart instead. Under these circumstances, I don't have a choice. I'm almost glad. It seems easier this way. I'll just give her a piece of muscle and then I'll be free of her forever, all my debts paid. One quick operation will be so much easier then struggling to do back to her all the things she thinks she's done for me. Seems like a good bargain."

Not surprisingly, it doesn't end well. After initially accepting the heart, Arnie's mother's health declines again and she ends up dying. Then, rather than Arnie's heart being returned to him, it is donated to a young blond child who has "her whole life ahead of her." His aunts are not pleased with his self-sacrifice but blame him for giving his mother a 'bad heart.' Forced to choose against his will, Arnie winds up with nothing... and mostly likely only a few days left to live of his own life. "I'm sure deep down you want her to have it too, don't you?" the doctor prevails upon Arnie about the decision to give his heart to the young girl... just as have all the others in his life. In the final summation, this doesn't seem like much of a choice... or much of a life.

Sometimes people choose, not because they are forced by others, but in order to influence others. In her short story, "Complicities," Alice Adams writes about Nan, a young girl with undiagnosed bulimia, who goes to stay with the Travises for the summer, "from a desire to 'build her up' ... [and also] an unspoken wish to do good to Mary and Jay, who are known to be 'up against it,' as the phrase went." Nan finds a private power in her thin, bony body and "feels herself possessed of vast and thrilling secrets" though it is not clear if her power derives from some sense of self-accomplishment or more from the attention she is receiving from the minister she babysits for, the pedophilic Dr. Thurston, who 'adores her pale thin body' and removes "her clothes to cover her body with his mouth, kissing her everywhere, breathing as though he might die." The turning point for Nan comes when Mary and Jay host one of their many dinner parties with the exception that, at this particular party, Mary begins singing 'Honeysuckle Rose' in accompaniment to a guest who is playing the tune on the piano.

"She is singing and laughing, embarrassed, but still her voice is rich and confident and sexy -- oh, so sexy! Mary is wearing a new blue dress, or maybe it's old. It is tight, some shiny material, stretched tight over those big breasts and hips. Nan, watching and listening ("-- it's so sweet when you stir it up --"), experiences an extreme and nameless, incomprehensible disturbance. She feels like throwing up, or screaming, or maybe just grabbing up her knees so that her body is a tight-knit ball -- and crying, crying there in her corner, in the semidark. Is this falling in love? Has she fallen in love with Mary? She thinks it is more that she wants to be Mary. She wants to be out there in the light, with everyone laughing and clapping. She wants to be singing, and fat. Oh, how wildly, suddenly, she yearns for flesh, her own flesh. Oh, fat!"

In this case, Nan makes a choice based upon who she wants to be. Yet, rather than figure out herself, she decides to become someone else... much easier. After questioning Jay about the figures of his two previous wives and discovering that they were "on the plump side. I've always liked a little flesh," Nan begins to eat without purging. Mary seems pleased, yet it is surely the case that she doesn't understand Nan's true motivation.

"Slipping back into bed without even brushing her teeth, Nan continues what has been a waking dream, a plan: next summer, when she is sleek and fat-- as fat as Mary is! -- she will come back up here, and Jay will fall madly in love with her. He will follow her everywhere, the way Dr. Thurston used to do. But she will say no, no kissing even. You belong to Mary. And Mary, finding out what Nan has done, will say what a wonderful girl Nan is, how truly good, as well as beautiful, and fat.

And then Nan will leave, probably off with some boyfriend of her own by then, and Mary and Jay will mourn for her. Always. 'If only Nan were with us again this summer,' they will say, for years and years."

This story just proves what Kwame Anthony Appiah has suggested -- that humans are notoriously bad at predicting the consequences of their own actions. It is obvious to us, as readers, that things will not turn out as Nan has planned. Further, her choice was made not on the basis of what is really best for her, but in order to remain in a holding pattern of sorts. She does not receive enough love and attention at home, thereby leading her to seek it elsewhere. In choosing to become healthier and heal her eating disorder, she only really wants to substitute a new attention for the previous attention of Dr. Thurston. Eating disorders, though they have complicated motivations, are often, in part, about pleasing others. And Nan is still stuck in that desire. Her choice is not one of growth or progress but of stasis. She still seeks to be admired for her physicality and does not challenge herself to grow as a person... to do the hard thing despite its difficulty.

Fear plays into most decision-making, I think. Fear certainly relates to the unknown and relatedly, to the unpredictability of the real world outcome of our choices. Life is complicated and these complications tend to weave uncomfortably into our toughest decisions. Appiah writes that: "One reason that life is full of hard decisions is precisely that it's not easy to identify single principles... that aim to tell you what to do." (Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, 2006, p. 162) And even if we could, the outcome of terrible decisions can be beneficial in a broad way so that, in hindsight, one would not necessarily alter the original decision.

"What would the world look like if people always spent their money to alleviate diarrhea in the Third World and never on a ticket to the opera (or a donation to a local theater company, gallery, symphony orchestra, library, or what have you?) Well, it would probably be a flat and dreary place. You do not need to say -- as Unger would invite you -- that the lives of children you could have saved were just worth less than your evening at the ballet. That answer presupposes that there is really only one thing that matters: that all values are measurable in a single thin currency of goodness and badness. It was terribly wrong that slaves were worked to death building the pyramids -- or, for that matter, in building the United States -- but it is not therefore terrible that those monuments, or this nation, exist. Not all values have a single measure. If the founders of this nation had dealt only with the most urgent moral problems facing them -- and let us suppose that it was, indeed, slavery -- they would almost certainly not have set in motion the slow march of political, cultural, and moral progress, with all its sallies and its retreats, that Americans justly take pride in." (p. 166)

And so we cannot go by consequences, for we don't know them. We cannot go by what is the 'lesser evil' because morality and decisions do not 'have a single measure.' All is interconnected... and confusing. Thus, we are back to 'our gut.' What does your gut say? It interests me that this phrase is so physical as many decisions relate to our bodies. One of the worst degradations of colonial authorities towards their captive populations was the ability to control what happened to their bodies. As David Horn writes: "The ability of the criminal anthropologist to command the presence of the criminal body, to compel it to be undressed, to be measured, even to yield to painful manipulations, was in many ways an example of the broader relations of power that characterized the practice of medicine -- particularly in prisons -- at the beginning of the twentieth century." (David Horn, "Performing Criminal Anthropology," in Anthropologies of Modernity, Jonathan Xavier Inda (ed.), 2005, p.144) Early medicine, and colonialism, was fundamentally about authority and power.. and who wielded it. Indeed, power (and its relation to the body) has long been a function of executive decision-making. As, Inda explains in his introduction:

"In Machiavelli's thinking, the prince's chief goal in the exercise of power must be to protect and strengthen the principality. This last is understood not as 'the objective ensemble of its subjects and the territory' but instead as 'the prince's relation with what he owns, with the territory he has inherited or acquired, and with its subjects'. The idea here is that sovereignty is first and foremost exercised on a territory and only as a consequence on the subjects who populate it. Indeed, it is the territory that is the fundamental element in Machiavelli's principality. Everything else is a mere variable. This is not to say that subjects do not really matter. They do, but only as it concerns the law." (p.3)

The same can be at work in relationships. Unfortunately, all relationships revolve around power and power-sharing. In healthy relationships, power is shared and controlled by the various strengths of each partner, each person contributing a certain dominance over particular aspects of the relationship. It is not so much that one person has power over the other, but rather that each person has power over structural aspects of the working whole. Thereby, together, the two people build something that is more than the sum of its parts. In an unhealthy relationship, however, much the opposite can be true. One person, oftentimes the male, has (and asserts) direct power over the other partner... over that person's choices and over that person's body. Think about how many women are forced (by physical pressure or threats) into having an abortion when it is not what they really want.

Abortion poses its own challenge as a difficult decision. A human being, equal parts of its parents, begins to grow inside only one of those parents -- the mother. Because of the fact that that child is one-half of the mother and one-half of the father, it seems rational to argue that the decision must be agreed upon equally by the two people. Yet, because of the latter fact (that the baby is only in the mother's body), it also seems rational to argue that it is the mother's decision alone (or, at least, predominantly) since it directly affects her body... and nothing can be more intimate or personal than making a decision about one's own body. So, how is that decision to be made? What if the two parents disagree? To whom does the final decision belong? It seems an irresolvable sort of dilemma. There is also what I would call the 'aftermath' to consider. It is likely that the trauma of an abortion will most strongly affect the woman. It is she that has felt the life begin to grow inside of her. That child is already real to her. And it is she that will feel the actual physical pain of that life being sucked out of her and then the hollowness... literally. For after a woman has an abortion, she will lie in her bed at night and experience the physical trauma of what doctors call phantom limb sensation... the feeling of presence and pain or movement related to such existence but without the actual physical sensation of the limb... or in this case, the baby. And what when that feeling fades? It still leaves a sharp emptiness, one that women often feel horrible guilt for even if they knew they abortion was the 'right decision.' I could go on with this example, the point being that again, the consequences of a decision can hardly guide us. They can be a sort of trap of logic. One cannot say, with certainty, that the existence of a child will wreck his/her life more or less than the non-existence of that child. One cannot give as a reason for abortion that one is 'not ready' because no one is ever ready for the challenges in life that force us to grow. I go back to the first line of Hamlet's famous soliloquy -- "To be or not to be" he says. Yes, because decision-making is about who you are choosing to be more than it is about predicting outcomes that cannot be known.

A while back, I came across a book titled Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal by Rachel Remen, M.D. I am not the type to buy or even peruse 'self-help' books because so often they seem disingenuous, condescending, dominated by the author's personal agenda, or just sappy and cliche. But this is really a book of stories, life stories, stories of real people placed in both recognizable and extraordinary situations. As a physician and listener, Remen has heard and witnessed many such stories. And, being a writer and an English teacher, I believe that stories heal... and help. In her introduction to the chapter titled "Traps," Remen writes:

Those who don't love themselves as they are rarely love life as it is either. Most people have come to prefer certain of life's experiences and deny and reject others, unaware of the value of the hidden things that may come wrapped in plain or even ugly paper. In avoiding all pain and seeking comfort at all costs, we may be left without intimacy or compassion; in rejecting change and risk we often cheat ourselves of the quest; in denying our suffering we may never know our strength or our greatness. Or even that the love we have been given can be trusted.

It is natural, even instinctive to prefer comfort to pain, the familiar to the unknown. But sometimes our instincts are not wise. Life usually offers us far more than our biases and preferences allow us to have. Beyond comfort lie grace, mystery, and adventure. We may need to let go of our beliefs and ideas about life in order to have life." (Remen, 1994, p. 75)

Perhaps the hardest thing about decision-making is that it involves risk and it involves loss. Whatever choice we make, we lose the path of the alternate choice that we did not make. And if we knew 'in our gut' that that was the road we really wanted to go down, then we are left to live with regret... possibly the most painful and debilitating emotion on earth. Regret leads to more self-hatred and then to a more circumscribed world as we search only to do the things that will keep us protected, as Remen suggests, but not the things that will enable us to grow... or the things that will fill our lives with genuine meaning and fullness.

Choices are full of pain. But that doesn't mean we should hide from them or find the least painful solution. Pain can be an opening to meaning. Remen again:

We are always putting the pieces together without knowing the picture ahead of time. I have been with many people in times of profound loss and grief when an unsuspected meaning begins to emerge from the fragments of their lives. Over time, this meaning has proven itself to be durable and trustworthy, even transformative. It is a kind of strength that never comes to those who deny their pain." (p. 170)

I am in the throes of a difficult decision myself. I used to be a sort of mini-Hamlet of decisions. I thought and thought and fretted and researched and thought and thought some more. Two people in my life, on different occasions, have given me advice that has helped. First, when I was a college student, I spent a summer working for U.S. Fish and Wildlife in Alaska. I had been fearful to go in the first place -- not only because it was such a wild and unknown and disconnected place, but more directly because one of the biologists working there that summer had just disappeared, presumed dead by sinking into the mud flats as he crossed one of the glacial melts that fed into the lake where the field site was located. Now my sense that the place was dangerous was confirmed and I feared for my own safety. In hindsight, though, I can see that I used this knowledge as an excuse. I wasn't really afraid that I, too, would die, sucked into the lake. I was just afraid. Afraid of flying alone all the way to Alaska, afraid of what the experience would be life, afraid of whether I would be able to do it, afraid of the unknown and of my own inner strength. Was I brave enough, strong enough to do this? It seemed quite terrifying. This, too, almost makes me laugh when I think of it now. Perhaps because it wasn't really all that scary at all... and also because the experience came to be one of the more formative personal experiences of my life. I not only survived, I loved it there and I loved the person that I was... a person that I had not known I could become. A person I never would have become if I had succumbed to my own fears.

During that same summer, I was invited by U.S. Fish and Wildlife to extend my internship and move to a different field site to work for another month. Again, I was scared. It was unexpected, not in my plans, and again, it was a new place where I couldn't predict what the experience would be like. I agonized for a day or two over the decision. The problem was it was a decision that needed to be made by a particular deadline and that deadline was approaching fast. Should I stay on? Would I like the new site? I had heard there were more bears there -- would I be safe? How would I communicate my extended stay to my parents who were expecting me home in a few days? Finally, unable to decide either way, I went to talk to an older woman who had volunteered to work on the migratory songbird research through Earthwatch. She had become, over the past month, a trusted friend and a sort of surrogate mother to me. The advice she gave me was simple and profound. In so many words she counseled me: "What do I think? I think you should stay. Of course, it is your choice. I cannot tell you if you will enjoy the experience or not. What I can tell you is that, either way, it will be an experience... and we learn from experiences, both the good and the bad." Growth. That was her answer. Whatever happened in my second month out in Alaska, I would grow. Going home, I would merely return to comfort. I stayed. And I have never regretted that decision.

The other person who gave me similar advice was my favorite professor at the University of Michigan when I attended graduate school there. To be completely honest, I do not even remember what I was struggling with... perhaps it was leaving the program after the first year, as that was something I considered but did not end up doing. Perhaps it was something else. I often went to him under the pretense of needing help with something school-related when in reality I wanted some solid life advice. One such time, he told me a story. He had gone to Berkeley for his undergrad degree and he said that whenever he had a hard decision to make, he used to walk down along the rocky shoreline and then climb up to a place high above the sea, sit himself on a rock, and sit and ponder what to do. "Finally one day I realized that I could sit on a rock for days, even weeks. What I needed to do was just act."

Thinking can cloud our decision-making. Or, in Hamlet-esque style, it can paralyze our ability to act. I am still stuck with the question of how we are to make difficult decisions. Rather than trying to predict outcomes, it makes sense to listen: to listen to our past experiences that may provide insight, to listen to others who have had similar experiences, most of all, to listen to our hearts. Yes, our hearts... rather than our gut. I like to believe, in fact I must believe, that there is some knowledge inside of us that can guide us in the 'right' direction. We cannot choose to avoid difficulty or pain; we cannot choose because we do not think we can handle something; we cannot choose for others; we cannot choose based on what we think may or may not happen. We should not choose based on bargaining as Arnie does or on taking what seems the easier route. It can only lead to death, real as Arnie's, or a death of the soul... and living with a dead soul can be worse than literal death. We can only choose in this moment with the self that we are at this time... but we can choose the self we want to become. The self that stands up and faces a challenge head on or the one who hides his head in the sand because of his own fear or self-loathing. I can't imagine that living with your head in the sand will lead to becoming a person that you ever will like. I want to be proud of myself. I know that I can do the thing I do not think I can do... I have done as much in the past many times. In choosing our future selves rather than future consequences, we choose our own destiny. As Kahlil Gibran has said, "We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them." That is because we choose what kind of person faces our own future. We cannot see the amazing view at the top of the mountain without struggling through the forest, sweating and being scraped by branches. We cannot know where we will arrive, but we usually know when we should take that journey.

write it down

I had a big decision to make recently. I kept talking to my boyfriend about it and, often, asking for his opinion. He doesn't like to influence my choices too much so he held himself at bay... rather valiantly. But I felt like I was going in circles. In my head, I kept thinking of the decision and I could actually visualize the two possible outcomes... as if they were two huge rocks sitting in front of me and I needed to push one of them over. That was all I could see really. Just the overwhelming existence of the choices themselves and not the nuances of what might help me actually decide what to do.

At the same time, I resisted making a list. List-making seems such a dry, tedious, inane task... a whole lot of busy-work like elementary school teachers who used to make us copy sentences repeatedly in cursive writing on dotted lines in little workbooks. When I was younger and lived more in the shadows of my parents, I often struggled with decision-making. 'Should I drop swim team or not?' 'Should I take Economics or not?' 'Should I go to this college or that one?' I labored over decisions often to the point of frozen indecisiveness. It is possible to become so immersed in the decision-making process itself that the process becomes a place of inertia rather than an impetus towards growth and perspective and learning. I could (and still can) research a decision to death before feeling like I am equipped well enough to make a solid, well-informed decision. And these days, with the breadth of the internet and all of the information (and misinformation) that you can gather there, this phase of acquiring 'enough' information can go on indefinitely. I had a wonderful professor once who told me that, while he was at Berkeley, he used to go and sit on a rock high above the ocean and sit and think when he had to make a decision. It was a place for him to get perspective, to ponder possibilities. Yet, he told me, he found himself sitting too much and doing too little. He finally realized that sometimes you need to just act and let the rest fall into place. You can think forever about something, think it into oblivion... and that is the same place you will end up if the thought-process never pans out.

So, when I had these crises of indecisiveness in high school and beyond, my father would sit me down and tell me: "Make a list." I would roll my eyes at him and tell him I wanted his advice. "Make a list," he would repeat as if that was the be-all-end-all statement. I resented him for that statement, for that 'stupid' advice. I am sure that, many a time, I would huff and walk away theatrically and frustrated. But after calming down, and after finding no way out of my quandary, I would sit down and.... make a list.

Usually these lists would consist of two sides, often of the pros and cons of a particular decision. Sometimes, in the process of writing things out, I would realize that the decision was more complicated and required a sort of spreadsheet. I actually recall making a rather complex Excel spreadsheet when I was accepted into three different Ph.D. programs and couldn't decide which one to attend. I assigned different weights to various aspects of the decision and, in the end, gave each school a point total. It seemed too mathematical to be helpful. I am one to make decisions from my gut because I trust this inner sense that I have about things. Yet, looking back, my analysis of this decision was spot on... and I made the right decision for me at the time. Yes, it was a more mathematical analysis of myself than usual. Still, I was forced to confront myself because I was forced to put my thoughts down onto something... to expose myself, even if only to myself. That in and of itself can be revealing. We can 'write ourselves' into being, just as Escher knew.

There is something about making a list. There is something about writing out the jumble of thoughts that clog your head and seeing them in front of you. It organizes them, for one. It also makes them real. It is easy to dismiss certain thoughts. It is much harder to dismiss something once it has traveled from your brain to your hand through the pen and onto the paper into something concrete, something now separate from yourself, something that exists for others to see if you were to share it with them. It can be highly illuminating to write this process down. Often, you think you know... or are sure you know... what you feel about a certain decision, but, in the course of writing, you find (or see) that there is an altogether different dominating thought... or that something you thought was insignificant is actually huge... or that something else keeps repeating itself, perhaps in different form, but it keeps appearing like a blinking alert that you should have sighted all along.

Writing things down makes them real. You can avoid a decision if it knocks back and forth in your head like a wave. Or if you put the decision at the back of your head and the information-gathering process at the front as I previously mentioned. When you write things down, you realize you didn't need to gather all the information in the world about a particular topic in order to know how you felt about it. You learn to trust what is in your head because you see it and can read it back to yourself and may even be surprised to learn what you knew already.

Why write things down when we can just enter everything into a Smartphone or an electronic organizer or an online calendar? In my opinion, there is something psychological that happens as thoughts travel through your body, as they are forced to manifest from something intangible and shapeless and isolated in your head into letters and words and phrases scratched permanently onto a piece of paper. In a review of the book, How Writing Shapes Thinking: A Study of Teaching and Learning, Christopher Burnham writes of how research supports my hunch:

1) writing creates a permanent record and allows rethinking and revising over an extended period of time; 2) writing requires explicit expression so that meaning is clear in various contexts; 3) writing requires organizing ideas and developing relationships between ideas; and 4) writing requires active, engaged thinking that explores the implications and challenges unexamined assumptions. (Christopher Burnham, Review, Writing Program Administration, vol. 15, nos. 1-2, Fall/Winter 1991)

His review continues on to explain how the researchers study helped them to recognize that writing not only helps us digest old information, but prepares us for new information. Thereby, writing opens up the door to expansion: of thought, of knowledge, of perspective, of understanding, of self, of the world.

Writing things down is not only helpful in decision-making...or interpreting. It is an integral process of reflection and consciousness. And not only in the process of understanding literature or making a sound business decision. It also strengthens relationships.

My boyfriend writes me notes. Not just 'hey sweetie, have a great day!' dashed off on the back of an old receipt but long, thought-out, earnest articulations of his deepest feelings and hopes. Reading them moves me profoundly. His love becomes a story that we share through its written expression -- one which he makes real by the writing and I feel as real by seeing and holding and rereading it over and over again. These are very tangible pieces of our relationship, of our love. I treasure them because of this concreteness. I also treasure them because of the time and effort it takes to actually sit down and express the tingling in your soul. It is not an easy thing to do... or to say. I love that he is so dedicated to "us" that he makes us even more real. And that he preserves these thoughts for all time by doing so. Why do we write our names in the sand? Carve our initials in a tree? It is the same instinct, the same 'making real' outside of what we know and feel internally.

As an English teacher, I have always asked my students to do journal-writes. My prompts run the gamut from making literary connections, to broadening our reading to touch their personal experiences, and even to completely unrelated mind exercises or philosophical questions. So often, they express resistance and annoyance at arriving to class to see me writing out such a prompt on the board. But then they get writing and I can see them stopping from time to time, peering out but really looking inward attempting to verbalize all of the hazy indistinctness that lies in a blur in their heads. I know this feeling very well. I also know their initial resistance. It is the same resistance I once felt at my father's urging to 'make a list.' When the thoughts are in your head, it seems pointless to have to write them down. They are already there... or are they? Even if they existed in a logical expression in your head (which I would argue they don't), they exist only for you. Life is about sharing our ideas... and about being able to clearly express that muddle of thoughts in our heads to others. This is what I find to be the fundamental problem for high school freshmen in their writing. They struggle to translate what they think and what they are beginning to analyze and interpret and infer into something that makes sense to another person unfamiliar with the inside of their brains. This is a frustrating process and some of the kids want to give up. I try to be patient and encouraging and to act as an additional translator, often modeling ways of articulating thoughts. Writing things down and doing it over and over again... and using your own hand to do so... is really the only way to overcome this breakdown of communication, this loss in translation.

I think a lot about writing... being a writer. But even if I wasn't, I think it would fascinate me. It has structured and guided so much of my life. My grandmother and I used to write letters to each other. It was a process of reaching out... for both of us. Writing our thoughts down on paper seemed secretive and bold, intimate and expansive all at the same time. We both wanted to understand ourselves and to express that self to another human... to someone who cared... and to be accepted. Seeing thoughts written in the unique handwriting of those we love seems naked and personal and speaks of the personality of that person. When I read a handwritten note or letter, I can hear the writer's voice... I can see his face and his expressions, his gestures, his smile or concern. Not only the thoughts, but the person himself becomes more real to me.

Like me, my grandmother wrote poetry. She didn't get published, but she would often include her poems in a letter. I realize now that this was a sort of publishing of her poems. An audience need only consist of one caring listener. This is one such poem that she sent me long ago:

Senility

Spring leaps too hig

for me to follow

The heat of summer

cracks my brittle bones

Fall's riot tramples over me

But under the cold, frost-

hardened wings of winter

Lies the kernel of whatever

immortality

I possess.

There was an article in the New York Times back in April of this year entitled "The Case for Cursive." It argued, among other things, that there was a loss of something artistic in the decline of those who can and do write in cursive handwriting. Amongst the many comments, a number of people spoke of how they were not sorry to see the death of cursive. One reader wrote: "Cursive is NOT a 21st century skill. Language is constantly changing and evolving. It is not, nor has it ever been static and fixed. Neither has the way we express language ever been static and fixed. What we have witnessed and are continuing to witness with cursive being a dying art, is the constant, natural evolution of how humans communicate. Cursive no longer fits any need, so it is falling by the wayside."

It is true that cursive is not a skill required in the world we now live in. It is also true that language and communication are always changing and evolving. There is certainly a beauty to the malleability of language, to how words are added, to the ebb and flow of phrases and sayings, etc. I wonder, though, about the emphasis on 21st century 'skills.' Is that the only reason to write in cursive or to hand-write a letter? Is it only useful if it can 'get you ahead'? I fear the loss of those things I find most beneficial about writing things by hand -- about the self-evaluative process, about the process of thought, about the translation of thought, about the concretizing of self and love and living, about the uniqueness of communication, about the expression of each and every one of our personalities, about intimate gestures, about what is gained by the investment of time and self and a non-digitalized output. And so I will continue... to make lists, to compose poems by hand, to read love notes that feel like they come straight from my boyfriend's heart... I will continue to write things down.