The great might-not-have-been

I never understood why old people liked to go on walks. Not even nice walks out in the country or the sunshine, just walks up and down unseemly neighbor streets.

But nothing makes you appreciate what you have like losing it. About a month ago I broke my foot. When you can’t walk, walking becomes a pleasure. Walking becomes this magical thing you’d never actually much paid attention to or even realized you were doing. This limitation and realization have made me wonder at so many other close, immediate realities.

In the book “Robinson Crusoe,” the main character Robinson is a man on a small island with a few comforts saved from his shipwreck. The author G. K. Chesterton asserts that the best thing in the book “is simply the list of things saved from the wreck… every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the bookcase and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship onto the solitary island. But is it better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck.”

Chesterton concludes, “It is one of hardest tasks to turn back and wonder at the simplicities we have come to ignore… The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.”

As I roll around in my wheelchair with my broken foot, I’ve received seemingly endless streams of pity and commiseration, but the reality is that I haven’t suffered much at all. I haven’t so much missed walking and running and playing as I have developed a renewed appreciation for them. It’s made me realize how many other things I have which I never even pay attention to. I’d been so eager to do things with my body that I never stopped and recognized my body for the miracle that it is. How many wonders am I surrounded with by which I never for a moment wonder at anymore?

We put all our time, energy, and focus into pursuing happiness and often forget about the happiness itself. We’ve all lost one thing or another that looms just out of reach. Like Jay Gatsby, we think, “It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning —”. But we get lost in the chase. We lean too far out and fall off the dock. It’s easy to get consumed by what we don’t have than to be filled with what we do.

For all of us there are “Great Might-Have-Beens,” as Chesterton puts it — squandered talent, misplaced trust, lost lovers. But Chesterton writes, “To me it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.” Whatever a man ought to or could have been, the great and startling fact is that he “Is,” with a capital-I.

What most people who are writing or reading a column in an Ivy League newspaper need is not more of anything, but more space to really experience what is already right before us. In almost every sense we have way more than what most happy people are content to go without. What we need is not a new position or a new experience, but the wherewithal to actually experience our experience.

There’s no better way to begin doing this than during the holiday season — not for any sentimental reasons, but because the government has literally built in space for you to practice this.

The reason you get a day off work on national holidays is to honor someone or something of the past, to appreciate and commemorate what’s already been done, not to pursue some new great height of achievement. A national holiday is a time during which the whole country stops pursuing and starts parading. We have a day of space to stop seeking who or what we don’t have and sit around the table with what we do.

It’s the same reason that food is central during holidays. We take space to give special attention, care, and meaning to something we do every day: eat together. The conventional, for one day, becomes the ritual.

For once, we become content right where we are. We become interested, not in some plan or plot of the future, but in what is immediate and close at hand. It’s what poets try and get us to, to get us to see with fresh eyes that which has become familiar from repetition, to, as Chesterton says, “prevent people from losing the humility and gratitude which are thankful for daylight and daily bread.”

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So I’m going to head out on a walk — well not quite a walk, probably a stumble or maybe even a roll — and try to see, for the first time, things I think I’ve seen for a thousand.

Luke Gamble is an English major from Eagle, Idaho. He can be reached at ljgamble@princeton.edu.