There are landscapes so beautiful they are said to render a person speechless. Exhibit A:
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| The Isle of Skye: Showing off. |
Unfortunately, none of these vistas have yet been proven effective on one particular American Gen X empty-nester from Westchester who begins the majority of his sentences with “Well, actually...” I know this because Alec and I recently took a 3-day minibus tour (that we won pretending to be rich people in a silent auction last Robert Burns Night). The tour was a thorough historical and geological deep dive into Scotland's gorgeous jewel of the Inner Hebrides, the Isle of Skye, a place of such unreasonable beauty that it appears G-d may have become briefly competitive:
Mountains rise out of nowhere.
Water appears wherever water just, like, feels like appearing.
The light changes every eleven seconds.
There are literal Faerie Glens.
Sheep stand on hillsides looking all smug because their rock has better views than your rock.
And there I was, inside all this geological majesty, on a minibus, contemplating committing felony assault. Not actual assault, obviously! The theatre-person kind, where you spend hours imagining the immaculate delivery of a singular devastating sentence so perfect the offending party evaporates into the Scottish mist...
….
Just me? Oh.... Okay...
Our particular provocateur was a fellow American possessed of that magnificent conversational impulse to improve every statement made by another human being. A fact could not merely be offered by our intrepid, fully-trained, scholarly, fabulous tour guide Jamie. It had to be amended.
“Well, ACTUALLYYYYY—”
Every point clarified. Expounded upon. Corrected. Enhanced by information no one had requested.
"Aren't Americans the worst?"
They'd scream from the back of the minibus, proving their own point, accompanied by the ear-stabbing laughter of his (actually perfectly nice) wife as they sat immediately behind us.
For three days.
Reader? I began to hear his "Well, actually" and the wife's sanity-pummeling laugh in my spinal cord. On Day 2, the group experienced a magnificent vista at the top of one of Skye's highest mountains. Jamie (again: the fantastic, patient AF tour guide) told us there were two paths up to the top: the gentle winding path, and a slightly tougher “scrambly” one. Of course, Well Actually Guy took the scrambly path, and at the top proceeded to tell the rest of us that "WELL ACTUALLY THE PATH WASN’T ANY HARDER THAN A HIKE WE DID EARLIER TODAY."
........Okaaay.
I cracked my knuckles. Did a take to an invisible audience. I moved on. Breathed in the sea air. Then to Alec, I vocalized that I was experiencing awe. The emotion human beings experience when life feels "beyond us." I'm going to go to Merriam-Webster:
"AWE: NOUN. An emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by overwhelming greatness (as in beauty, power, or size)."
Awe can be positive and negative. It is part of awe's power. The negative part of awe is, in fact, the root of the awful, which is what this man was, and I would like Merriam-Webster to consider including his picture in the next printed edition.
This moment atop the mountain with Alec felt special. Sacred. Not only because we have both had such expansive and life/career altering half-years, but special because we get so few opportunities to experience this kind of natural awe in the modern world.
I said this aloud. I felt I uttered it privately, to my husband. But guess what? Before I could finish a breath, I hear:
"Well. actually, I recently read a book called AWE, that says we can train ourselves to experience modern awe if you just put you mind to it...”
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| Literally: Awesome |
You think he’d get the message.
But no.
The following morning at breakfast—at 7:30AM—before COFFEEFORTHELOVEOFGD, seated next to me at our B of our shared BnB, he just wants to “pick up on our conversation yesterday about modern awe…” I hadn't slept well. I already despised him and had attempted to be polite the day before. This was too much. Well Actually Guy proceeded to tell me every single way in which he say awe in the modern world ("the subway, the electrical grid, Broadway!") Oh FFS, he brought Broadway into the chat? Did he want me to choke him with the black pudding? Was his hypothesis that I was jaded, deficient at seeing beauty and experiencing sufficient gratitude? Sure sounded like it. But I hadn't had enough sleep or coffee or alone time to know that with certainty.
I tried. I nodded. I attempted silence. Cogent points that defended my right to feel or not feel emotions however was authentic for me. But turns out, I was too depleted to truly bear it. Unrelenting in his TedTalk, I pushed back.
- "I don’t believe in a forced gratitude posture, I find it is part of the #GoodVibesOnly movement that potentially represses important emotions like grief and disappointment that do truly need to be processed."
- "Thank you so much for sharing what YOU find awesome in the modern world"
- "I wonder if you would feel the same way if any of those were your every day reality—is there a possibility that you might not feel that way? If so, I think that is allowed."
He wouldn’t let up. And I hadn't had enough caffeine. I finally looked at Alec across the scrambled eggs and begged aloud, not even that quietly: “HELP ME,” and Alec escorted me in a side conversation before I could commit murder over toast points.
_______________
*EXHALE*
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All of this irritation presented a problem you see, for I have recently been making an effort to become a psychologically evolved, emotionally mature person, and psychologically evolved, emotionally mature people presumably do not spend vacations silently composing closing arguments against irritating know it all strangers.
Ugh.
So naturally I did what I have always done: I made my extreme irritation mean something: that obviously I am a monster. Fine. So maybe this guy found me cynical. Or jaded. Or intellectually lazy. Or perhaps I just… annoyed him as well. Who knows?
Was I intolerant?
Ungenerous?
Depressed?
A bad traveler?
Had I become one of those awful middle-aged women who simply hates everyone?
Shouldn’t I be GRATEFUL?
LOOK AT THE ISLE OF SKYE!
Alec is SO HANDSOME AND HAPPY!
There are GOATS! SHEEP! WATERFALLS!!
Why are you thinking about pushing Well Actually Guy into one?!
But somewhere during those three days, something surprisingly profound shifted. I realized I didn’t have to hold a trial. On either of us. There did not need to be a prosecution, a defense, witnesses, or a final ruling from the Supreme Court of Alexandra Silber declaring either THIS MAN IS OBJECTIVELY INSUFFERABLE and/or YOU ARE A TERRIBLE PERSON FOR FINDING HIM SO. Sometimes two perfectly decent adults have different values about how one occupies shared space.
And they irritate the shit out of each other on a minibus.
And that can be the whole story.
This might sound ridiculously small. For me, it isn’t.
I am a sensitive being. There are pros and cons to this. I'd like to think that my sensitivity is part of what makes me an artist of excellence. But it also makes me enormously sensitive to human stimuli: a person's volume, moods, interruptions, energies, and proximity; strong smells, bright lights, and in general, whether human beings are considerate of a shared, collective space. Add crowds, travel, reduced agency and twelve people sealed inside a moving metal tube, and my nervous system begins processing every human quirk as though NORAD has asked me personally to assess the threat.
For years, I have hated this quality in myself and done everything in my power to "toughen up." I have, thus, compounded my innate sensitivity by adding morality to it:
First comes the irritation.
Then comes the shame about the irritation.
Then comes the analysis of the shame about the irritation.
...Until a blowhard talking too loudly and too much has somehow become a referendum on whether I deserve citizenship among humankind.
What if I simply… didn’t do that?
What if irritation is information?
What if I can notice it, make room for it, perhaps move seats—and decline to construct an entire philosophy of good and evil around it?
"Too much input. Too little agency. You are irritated. No big deal."
Because the other, very real truth is that Skye WAS magnificent.
I felt things there I had worried I was no longer capable of feeling. After years of struggle and a numbness that likely helped me bear an adverse physical existence, awe came back. Wonder surged . Pleasure returned in flashes so clean they almost startled me! I looked at my beautiful Alec—watching him experience a country and landscape he loves, that has given us both so much, watching the particular happiness of my husband being fully himself—and felt enormous pride and tenderness.
And none of that—none—was cancelled out because a couple of loud American Gen Xers on the bus annoyed me.
Perhaps this is one of the quieter freedoms of growing older: discovering that contradictory feelings do not annihilate one another.
We can be overwhelmed and grateful.
We can love humanity and need humanity to please STFU.
We can stand before something staggeringly beautiful and still be tired, hungry, irritable, preoccupied, or desperate to be alone.
Scotland does not need me to perform wonder for it.
The mountains are not taking attendance.
And honestly? if Scotland doesn’t know how much I love it this, of all years? It never will.
Maybe emotional maturity isn’t finally becoming so healed that nothing bothers us. Maybe it is becoming spacious enough to allow things to bother us without making the bother mean everything.
On Skye, I noticed the weather passed over the land with astonishing speed and drama:
Sun, rain, mist, wind, brightness again.
No condition appears embarrassed by the one before it.
The mountain does not panic when the cloud arrives.
The cloud does not apologize for obscuring the view.
It just... passes.
Perhaps feelings are allowed the same dignity and irritation can simply be weather.
And perhaps, once we stop interrogating every cloud, we have considerably more time to behold the mountains. And feel the awe that arrives within our heart, naturally.
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