I miss David Foster Wallace. A lot. I find myself thinking about him, about his way of being in the world (and of course the fact that he’s not here). There is a new book coming out titled Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, written by Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky, and this little DFW quote is used in a number of feature articles about the book:

“If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.”

It’s coming out in paper, and in Kindle, and I just preordered the Kindle edition which will release April 13.

It is hard to do that, to be as gentle and compassionate with ourselves as we are with others. (Well, for most people anyway – discounting the truly mean and sadistic.) Of course we know our own true hearts, our own sometimes cruel and mean-spirited thoughts about other people or the world. We know those things about ourselves, and I believe we would be stunned to be let in on the internal dialogue of people we know…..we’d be stunned to learn the things they think, the things they think about us, even though we know we have the same types of thoughts. But we think we are the mean-spirited one, we know that about ourselves. There is a saying in AA (I think?) that goes something like “don’t judge your insides by other peoples’ outsides.” That’s brilliant! We do that, all the time. We struggle, but it looks like other people don’t so we must be failures.

I have a friend who was trying to learn how to knit – to offer a very simple example – and she made mistakes in her first scarf. She had to rip out rows. Her work was flawed and didn’t look all that great. And she thought there was something wrong, she didn’t have the makings of a knitter. But we all make mistakes, and rip out rows, and are aware of that weird place under the arm where we had too many stitches and tried to fix it by doing some strange decreases that really don’t look all that good but if we keep our arm at our side maybe no one will notice and anyway I don’t feel like ripping back so many rows I just want to get the damned thing done.

Of course there’s a fine line between being compassionate with ourselves and excusing ourselves a little too easily. I usually err on the side of keeping myself on the hook, flaying myself with recrimination for every lazy thing, every uncaring thing, I shouldn’t be so harsh, I should’ve I could’ve I would’ve. I don’t want to fail to take responsibility for what I do and say, probably to a pathological extent. But compassion….I could think about how I try so hard, and how I mean well and struggle with my own difficult places just as others do.

All at once, spring appeared in the trees and flowers in my city – it sure helps. The pale greens and bright yellows and pinks make me feel expansive, compassionate, open – even with myself. I wish I’d had my camera with me this morning to  show you, but someone else’s photo will suffice for now:

[photo courtesy of newyork808]