Late afternoon, the January darkness chasing away the chickadees at the window feeder, a friend phones about a film at a nearby arts center. Turns out, the film is about the broken-upness of relationships in America. Post-lymphoma, post-chemo, my energy by day’s end is something I can cup in one hand, a diminishment never illuminated by a nap. Grateful for the nudge and the company, I fill my woodbox, feed my cats.

It’s been a day of plenty here—of yoga and work, of slush on the roads and mush falling from the sky, a softness that threatens to harden overnight to ice. Midafternoon, I drop my car for an oil change and open my laptop in the waiting room. A stranger sits down in the otherwise empty room and drops his tablet on the table between us. I’ve kept much of this blog off the political realm, although surely any reader perceives my alignment is not with the aggressor in power. The stranger begins talking in a way that’s not angry but maybe more mystified about what’s happening in the country, the prohibitions about who can come in, with real consequences.

He’s newly retired. When I ask what he did for work, he says you don’t want to know, but oh I do, and so he begins unspooling his life. He worked for the fed’s immigration service. Military service, 19 nineteen moves, a residency in Germany during the Cold War, four grown children, one of whom is estranged. He says again, as if baffled, she kind of went nuts over this Trump thing.

The windows reveal spitting snow. He’s at a crossroads, that weighty retirement time. What will he do now? He says he’d like to put his hands to some good, maybe a Habitat for Humanity project. I close my laptop. He grew up in very rural Vermont, and he shares an accident that happened to him as a teenager, how it defined his life. Midafternoon, the light is as sooty as twilight. As a writer, I’m always looking for junctures: which way will a character act now? But I know, of course, that we meet crossroads every day. Crab at the post office woman? Curse the town snow plow driver? And I know well my own fallibility and hesitation. But I also understand how our lives and choices are enfolded into our culture and nation, that, as we live by the law of gravity, we live also by the constrictions of time and place. As for the country…. an immense crossroads. A collective atlas is under dispute.

Driving home in the snow that may or may not amount to much besides a dusting of ambiance, my friend’s son phones from a Texas freeway, lanes choked with rushing traffic. My headlights slice through the darkness. On either side lie hayfields, snowed in for the winter. The stars are swallowed in dense clouds. A year ago, another phase of terrible things that happen to cancer patients was barely beginning in my life. I didn’t yet know that there would be so many rushing drives down the icy interstate to the ER, all those grim hours when my daughters and I wondered which was this was going to shake out. Disease is a fierce and demanding instructor. The first lesson I learned, as I smartened up quickly, was to ask What’s real? What’s happening? even when I didn’t want to know the terrain of the landscape.

Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is… no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship…

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. ~ David Foster Wallace