inner monologue

I was stuck in the miseries this morning due to small funked up health problems and huge funked up world problems. I try, as a practice, to have a silent but earnest conversation with my insides when the miseries have a grip on me. I say to pain or fear or despair I see you, I acknowledge you, help me learn from you and beyond you. (Okay, sometimes my inner conversation isn’t all that polite.)

And I try, as a practice, to look around me with gratitude even if, like this morning, it felt like I was spreading a thin layer of appreciation over a turbulent inner mess. As I drove to meet someone I love for our weekly walk, I did what I could to savor the air’s spring freshness. I did what I could to notice light flickering through the trees, flower baskets hanging from storefronts, and the kindness of a driver waving another car ahead.

My mind drifted right back to the morass.

I don’t know how any of us go on with our ordinary lives lately. I am among those privileged enough to have my days largely unchanged, so far, despite—among other tragedies—a climate pushed past the tipping point, despite the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, despite all three branches of government stomping directly into authoritarianism. I’m aware my puny efforts to protest, write letters, support good causes, even drive around with a handmade protest sign on my car aren’t enough. I simply hope it’s a teensy contribution toward the transformative 3.5 percent rule invoked by Erica Chenoweth, author of Why Civil Resistance Works. After researching hundreds of social/political change movements over the last century, Dr. Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics depend on many factors, her data shows it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change. But what are the chances it can happen here, I grumbled to myself.

And then I drove past a dumpster. A beautiful dumpster.

It was a deep purple, a purple most often seen in delphiniums, pansies, hydrangeas, and irises. The sort of purple that would look good as a velvet dress or painted across a domed ceiling scattered with gleaming constellations. My mind gladly rested on that color purple for the rest of the drive.

On my way home after the walk and an appointment, I went the long way just so I could take that dumpster’s picture. It was right outside a small locally owned flooring shop. As I got out of the car I realized the dumpster had recently been painted. I could almost see the former lettering under its shiny new color. Someone, maybe the shop owner, had chosen that color. Chosen to grace this useful, much-maligned object with beauty. For all I know, it’s the only dumpster that color for thousands of miles.

I’m plotting to drag my spouse to that shop to see if we can afford to do something about our kitchen’s falling apart linoleum. Whether we can or can’t, I’m going to tell the shop owner how much that glorious purple dumpster lifted my sagging spirits. As Alice Walker wrote in her magnificent The Color Purple, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”

Maybe that applies to the color purple anywhere we find it.

At a monthly writers’ workshop, our lone male poet advised the 50-something and older women poets, “You don’t need periods.”

I kept quiet, although my inner voice made a few silly comebacks. Heck, I didn’t even smirk despite my tendency to alarm the people around me with sudden braying laughter that continues far too long. This man is a wonderful poet and was, of course, talking about punctuation.

Experts say we all have an inner monologue going on, at least some of the time. Imaging studies show a region of the brain called Broca’s area is active as we speak aloud and also active during our inner speech. In fact, our inner voice stimulates minuscule muscle movements in the larynx as if tempted to make our thoughts audible. Our inner monologues aren’t confined to words. They show up in pictures, imagined actions, visualizations, reflections, emotions, and much more. My inner monologue leans toward the emotionally intense. I often feel simultaneously in love with and touched by a tenuous fragility in everything around me. At the edge of that is a tickly inclination to take mildly funny oddities as absurdly amusing. I like to believe none of this shows up on my face.

After the writers’ workshop I stop to do an errand. As I approach a check-out line at the store I notice with pleasure that a lovely young woman in front of me, her hair done up in mathematically perfect braids, has turned to smile. It’s a genuine, glad-to-see-you smile. This stranger’s smile feels, to me, like a moment of oneness in our chaotic world. Until her smile fades.

“Oh,” she says as I get in line behind her, “I thought you were someone else.”

She explains that I look like her middle school counselor, a person who was a help to her when she most needed it. I wished I had been such a help.

“This,” I say, making an exaggerated circle around my very ordinary face, “is often mistaken for someone else.” We laugh and discuss being misidentified. I tell her someone once insisted we’d gone to college together in Wisconsin, another person told me I was the living image of her sister-in-law.

“There’s a word for that,” she says, looking up and to the right for a long pause. “Oh, generic! That’s it, you have a generic face!” We both grin uncomfortably, then she faces forward to complete her purchase.

And there it was again, my chronic inner monologue. I felt simultaneously in love with and touched by a tenuous fragility in this whole experience. I wanted to hug her as her middle school guidance counselor might have done at finding a former student doing so well, with tears in my eyes. I also felt a sense of celebration at being an age where I’m largely able to float along unnoticed, my inner self chatting along, sometimes making it all the way back to the car before my inner and outer selves contort my generic face with glorious braying laughter.