Touching Snow
There is nothing more clarifying—and more terrifying—than a health scare.
Something (I do not yet know what) happened to me one night in late November. My body, which for thirty-eight years had been humming quietly beneath my awareness, a small cat hidden beneath a blanket, purring gently, suddenly betrayed me. The purr became a snarl. Something thrashed about beneath the covers. I came away wounded, but how, where, and how deeply, remains to be seen.
When your body speaks to you like this, you listen. I became obsessed with my body’s every creak and groan. Trying to intuit a sign. Trying to figure out what it could mean. Does my headache signify a deeper problem, or have I simply not had enough coffee (or maybe I’ve had too much coffee)? Am I breathing normally? Am I too easily winded climbing the stairs? Yes, I have put on weight. Yes, I am not sleeping enough. Is that pain in my chest heartburn, or a heart attack? Or just nerves?
When he was dying of cancer, Max Ritvo wrote beautiful, haunting poems about his body’s betrayal. About the obsessive need to listen, to understand. Here is an excerpt from his poem, “The Senses”:
"Everything feels so good to me: my wool hat, the cocoon of dryness in my throat. The sound of burning vegetables is like a quiet, clean man folding sheets. But I keep having thoughts— this thought always holding at bay the next thought"
Ritvo writes about the need to make sense of our senses, and the strange paradox of how illness enhances the little pleasures of the body, how good it feels to feel things, but how our thoughts are always pushing them aside—thought following thought. The way the mind turns recursively back on itself, and how, especially in illness, the mind cannot not think about it.
But Max Ritvo knew he was dying. I don’t know anything yet. This is probably, almost certainly, nothing. I may read back over this essay in a few months, in a year, and cringe. I hope that I do.
I went to see my doctor, and she ordered tests. Then, more tests to help interpret the previous tests. I have three specialist appointments lined up. My doctor, after our fifth conversation, no doubt tired of answering my panicked questions, admitted that she “has never seen this before.” There are hints of one thing, shadows of another. While stuck in uncertainty, with multiple explanations slowly separating into diagnosis—like oil and water in a shaken jar—I want the world to pause. I want everything to stop! Just for a moment. Just until we can figure out what’s going on. It may be nothing; it’s probably nothing. But why keep rushing about until we know? Stop emailing. Shut down social media. Send everyone home from work. Let the economy take a breather; it will be good for everyone to stop buying stuff anyway. Even the weather should stop changing. Decide if it will be sunny or gloomy; if the snow will stay or melt into mud; if it will be warm or so cold the air cracks with every step. This variation throughout the day, cloudy mornings defeated by the sun’s effort, clouds coming and going as they please, snow falling gently, then ferociously, then not at all, ice hugging the trees before breaking free in the afternoon thaw. It is too much to keep track of. I am busy listening to my body, my inner ear cocked against a locked door. When I was a boy, I read a Dean Koontz novel where the protagonist, in the middle of a shootout in a department store, imagines his death: his blood staining the beige carpet, cleaners scrubbing it away a week later, shoppers returning, oblivious to what happened there. The world keeps on spinning even after he’s gone.
The day after Thanksgiving, it snowed all day. From morning until well past midnight. The brown trees disappeared beneath blankets of white. The air a continuous swirl of glittering ice. Inspired by Virginia Woolf, I decided to take a walk, to escape the house, to escape from the incessant thinking about myself.
The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.
At first, it didn’t work. My phone, buzzing continuously with alerts, kept pulling me back into myself. My mind, like a broken wind-up toy, kept going in circles, trying in vain to solve something it cannot solve. But as I walked, the cold air clawing at my face, I could feel myself slowly receding into the steady crunch of boots beneath hard snow. I looked down and saw in the snow a constellation of details I had never noticed. I had always thought of snow as uniform, a sheet of pure, unadulterated white; but what I saw was endless variation. Here the snow piled up into little hills, jagged mountains of ice that gave way to smooth plains; in other places, heavy traffic had kicked away the snow, revealing layers of gravel and grass; and everywhere footprints of all shapes and sizes, children and adult prints, and animals, too: dog paws, rabbit tracks, and even the clawed indents of turkeys on the prowl. The snow was not all snow, either, for little pieces of ice, remnants from the previous week’s rain, poked through here and there. The cloudy afternoon and the lit interiors of my neighbor’s houses lent a sonderous quality to the day; but as evening advanced, the sun, as though realizing it was running out of time, pushed through the clouds at last, leaving one final hour of irradiance, bright orange burning the southwesterly trees. As quick as it came, it was gone, leaving a soft purple in its wake. As I turned for home, my cheeks and nose cold-kissed with red, I noticed a bald eagle flying above. I paused as it flew near, lowering itself toward the earth. It passed right over me, close enough that I felt as though I could reach up and touch its feathers. Its white head was a blazing beacon in the dark sky, as if it had gathered all the remaining light of the day into its crown. As I watched it fly past, disappearing over the gray trees, I realized I had stopped breathing. The earth was completely still, still in a way only possible on a winter evening. A neighbor approached, walking his dog. His dog leapt at me, trying to kiss my face. We talked briefly about the eagle we had both seen, the shared recognition making it realer. He asked about my Thanksgiving, and I his. We discussed what to do with the turkey leftovers. He had made soup. I told him that we made ramen and that my son loves ramen. His son loves ramen, too, he said, and we laughed at how similar toddlers can be, as if they had all secretly agreed on liking and disliking the same things. He said he liked the idea and would make ramen that night.
When I finally made it home, my nose red with cold, my legs gently aching, I realized I felt much better. My house seemed cleaner (it wasn’t), the chaos of two kids and their toys better managed (they weren’t). I made tea, and it seemed to taste better. My problems shrink when the mind quiets. What was terrible about the health scare was how it made me constantly think about it. My mind going in circles trying to solve something it cannot possibly solve. The internet does something similar to us, which is why we are constantly exhorting ourselves to log off and “touch grass.” The internet keeps us ruminating, the mind running over problems it has neither the time nor the prowess to solve. The internet turns us inward, makes us obsessed with ourselves—paradoxically, by promising connection to a wider world than we could experience physically. But the paradox turns both ways. When we attend to the outer world, and by that, I mean the world right here—my desk, the solid wood, my fingers thumping the keyboard—we get out of ourselves. It’s counterintuitive. The internet makes us sick because it turns us inward by promising to expand our horizons; “touching grass” is healing because it turns us outward by promising to reduce our horizons. As I was writing this draft, I came across this note by Henrik Karlsson, who said much of what I’ve said in this paragraph, but better. I’ll just leave the full note right here:
But “touching grass” is a band-aid. It doesn’t completely heal the underlying wound (and that wound, I suspect, has been with us long before the internet, and will be with us always). The internet is too useful, too woven into all parts of life. Even when you try to escape the internet, you bring the internet with you. When I took my snow walk, I took my phone. In case something happened; in case my wife needed to reach me. As I walked out the door, I used it to check the weather. Would I need a scarf, hat, and gloves? Or just a coat? I used an app to meditate. The disembodied voice of a gentle stranger speaking through my AirPods. When I talked to my neighbor, he showed me a picture of his turkey—with his phone. Later, I texted him the soup recipe.
Our minds have been changed by the internet. Permanently. Often, when I am experiencing something, I wonder how I will mediate the experience later—online. Will I post about it? If I do, what will I say? Should I take a picture now, in case I want to post later?
While I was obsessing over my health, I was also thinking about whether I should share it online, and in what level of detail. Should I post an update? (sorry, I haven’t been responding to comments or sharing much lately, I’ve been quietly freaking out over here). Because thinking about an experience also means thinking about it in terms of our online social selves. We are always deciding, at various levels of conscious awareness, what to share, in what detail, and to whom. There is no way to share everything, unmediated, all the time, and to share nothing is to disappear from our world.
As Karlsson points out, the self is something of a distraction. A self aware of itself, commenting on itself. The internet is like pouring fuel on this fire. Writing, especially writing a personal essay, is a weird kind of balance between the outward self and the narrating self. In a sense, I am thinking about myself. I am thinking about myself intensely here in this essay. But I am also thinking about other things. And, more to the point, by forcing my thoughts into writing, I turn them outward, even if the subject of my writing is myself. Writing forces you to reckon with the idea of a reader. I can see you here with me right now, even though you are from the future. You are hovering over my shoulder, reading these words along with me. I am attending to myself, and also, you.
This essay is like a room. One that I have rented from Substack, but furnished to my taste. I picked out the couch, some complementary chairs. There is the rug, stylish and warm underfoot. I chose the lamps, the art on the walls. You will spend some time here; and I hope it will be a pleasant time. But not a lot of time. You will spend, according to Substack, on average, twelve minutes in this room. Then you will leave. You may choose to enter another room, spend some time there. Or, you may linger in the “hallway,” the liminal news feed, scrolling for something to do, without, perhaps, realizing that the scroll is the whole point. Or maybe you will log off, go outside, and touch grass. But this does not mean you have left this metaphorical building, for the offline world is also a series of rooms, choices of where to spend your time. When I finish writing this essay, I will go outside and shovel my driveway. It’s snowing again, and I can see it piling up outside. More and more of it. I will leave my warm office, put on my coat, hat, gloves, and scarf, and go outside. The snow will melt on my face. I will feel the heat building up beneath my coat as I lift each shovel-full of snow and toss it aside. It will feel good to move my body. It will feel good to accomplish something, even something small. I will be attending to myself, and therefore, far away from myself. Tomorrow, it will snow again. It will snow all month, and the month after that. Next year, winter will come again, and I will shovel the snow.
It is so much like life, these little rooms. For an average of 76 years, I will need to decide, moment after moment, what to do. My body is not mine, I’ve realized, but a room I rent. At some point, I will leave.
Amazing post! Quite thought provoking. I won't even attempt to say much, as you have touched on something I think is hard to speak of (though you have done it well). I quite agree, though, I find that, nowadays, touching grass...doesn't do much for me. However, in my efforts, there are those rare moments I actually find, which make the effort worth it: a quiet moment sitting with the neighbor's cat, seeing geese fly overhead, etc. Some touching grass is better than none. Even if some of us don't get much out of it, we still have to try. And, in the end, maybe the issue will be resolved, not in totality, but balance.