Everything Leads to Something

One of the great things about living in a city the size of San Antonio is that you can, once in a while, surround yourself with people who love the same things you do. I spent some time this past weekend at the San Antonio Book Festival. I was part of a standing-room only crowd listening to novelist Ann Patchett discuss her work; then I had the great honor of listening to poet Hayan Charara talk about the ways poetry can help us make sense of politics. (His poem “Animals” nearly stopped my heart.) Toward the end of the day, I attended a session featuring past and present San Antonio poets laureate, moderated by the magnificent Naomi Shihab Nye.

That’s where I heard the line at the top of this post. Current poet laureate Jenny Browne cited this as a piece of advice Naomi Nye had given her some years ago. I’ve been turning it over in my brain ever since.

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I don’t subscribe to the belief that Everything happens for a reason. I would not be able to live for long in a world where the deaths of small children by chemical weapons are, in some way, necessary.

Human beings make choices. Everything happens for a reason suggests that our choices don’t matter. In that universe, the choice to murder children is equal to any other decision. I simply don’t believe that’s true.

Novelist Ann Patchett talked about the power of our choices in her session. She responded to a question about her writing process by saying that, at this point, she doesn’t choose to use her time to write more novels. Instead, she’s using the power of her notoriety to do more good in the world while she can.

That’s the world where I want to live: instead of believing that everything happens for a reason–which means there’s not much we can do, as individual human beings, since any reason big enough to govern a universe is surely more powerful than us–we believe in our own power to do good.

All of which brings me back to Naomi Nye’s words: Everything leads to something. Those words were specifically directed toward the writing of poetry. The idea behind them, I think, is that whatever you’re doing, or writing, or thinking, can lead to a poem.

But those words are bigger than poetry. (That’s what talented poets do best: they mean more than they say.) They tell us that whatever we’re doing, however small and unimportant it might seem, matters.

No doubt you’ve been made aware of this, at some point. Perhaps a friend told you that something you’d said lifted her spirits exactly when she needed encouragement. Maybe someone sent you a thank-you note explaining how much a small gesture of kindness meant. I’ve had students come back to me, years after graduation, to say how reading a particular book changed their lives.

Everything leads to something. Every action I take–choosing a particular book for a class, writing a blog post on a specific topic–makes something else possible.

We can’t always know what that something else will be, of course, and it won’t always be good. Nor can we live our lives wondering about the consequences of every single action. That would be paralyzing. But we can remember that this is true when we feel small and powerless.

If you’re raising small children and putting your career on hold–devoting your days to the care of people who will one day be in charge of important stuff is something.

If, as I did for many years, you’re doing your best to balance kids and career–whatever that means for you–there is goodness in this balance. Your kids see a mom who’s trying. That’s something.

Maybe you’re between identities right now–maybe the life you’d imagined for yourself hasn’t fallen into place. Perhaps you’ve been working long hours at a job that isn’t the one you want, but you don’t know how to move in a new direction. Maybe your kids are grown and you don’t know what’s next.

Money is a limitation. Or time. Or family obligations. Perhaps, as is often the case, the difficulty is some combination of those things.

Simply thinking through the possibilities is something. Allowing yourself to imagine a potential future–whether or not you plan to take action right now–creates a space that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.

There is goodness in remembering that you have the power to make things happen: to change your life and, perhaps, in doing so, to change the world. Whether you know it or not.