Dear Reader,

A word on the genesis of apathy and its persistence in the lives we lead. An apology to the dreamers and inventors and thinkers and the gardeners, for their revolutions are surely not to be questioned by the likes of me. And to the barista I gave my real name to with all the cruel pleasure I derived knowing she would spell it with an A. That alone has surely closed the pearly gates in my face. But here I am drifting from the purpose of this letter at all: do you believe there is an upper limit to comfort? (Buckle up this is an extended treatise on impossible desires a la Dead Poets Society). 

At the end of your life do you think there is ever a quiet moment—a gentle breeze perhaps, a warm cup of tea, clean hair—that lays itself pointlessly before you, unappreciated? Do you ever reach a level of equipoise where you can check under the couch and see that it has been swept, open the pantry and find it full, go to the doctor and leave with the money you entered with, and feel nothing but equilibrium? Do we strive all our lives for stasis or surprise? If stasis, what a simple, content life we must lead. We must graduate on time and love with flowers and cards (no running after trains or crying in the rain though) and attend the funerals of persons over ninety with exclusivity. We must host our extended family and they must complement our cooking; we must look over old photos with our sisters and neither cry nor laugh. Indeed, the hat you wore in sixth grade will be sensible and your socks will match every single day. I do believe this is what it is to live in America, to be told the dream and find it as inviting as a dry bowl of oatmeal, and then turn around anyways, to walk with steadfast purpose into a sunset ringed with white picket fences.             

I have a grandmother who once yelled at the Alaskan heavens because a moose ate her cabbage crop, and a grandfather who dressed up as historical figures he taught to the sixth grade. My mother drives hours to oil paint tulip fields and my sister made dozens of bracelets for a Taylor Swift concert that showed up on seismographs. I wonder if imperfect appreciation ever becomes heritable—for I used my first paycheck to buy a family sized Pad See Ew and ate it all in the cab of my truck, with the windows down to catch unsuspecting fluff blown off a nearby dogwood tree.  

So is it presumptuous to believe that none of us are made for stability if the sensation of change is itself a nebulous concept? What percentage of my own eyes have the protein structure to see the dreams of others? Is it truly the fault of America or just humanity? Can this hypothesis of disappointment be disproved with a utopia on Earth, or must we always look to the blank white pages at the end of Revelation for something a little better?

In fairness, let us play out comfort again for I fear my bias didn’t give it a fair run the first time around. Imagine with me that you are walking down a path and you can say yes once, just right out loud in the open, and your money needs are gone— so long as you never learn a romance language. Another yes and your children are born healthy with your last name, but they enjoy pulling the wings off flies and siding exclusively with their father despite the times you read to them from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Another yes and your funeral is decently attended even though that one tactless cousin plays an acoustic cover of “Tears in Heaven”. Let’s zoom in a couple years prior to the grave. In every conversation you’ve had at one of those horrible, stuffy dinner parties your mildly sweating boss would throw, your spouse would say the magic words: “Well, we are comfortable.” I apologize, I did it again. Let’s say instead that your boss was young, and somehow both wealthy and moral, and threw lavish parties in Tuscan rural villas. Once, your spouse even woke you up to say they heard a wild boar rooting beneath your stone window and in every conversation that following morning they said: “Well, we are comfortable.” Lies! That is surprise. 

Comfort begs us instead to relinquish the good story. The price one pays for surprise instead, are sorrowful blisters on feet and hands and soul. Can I convince you yet to live that life? One who rejects comfort is immediately cast out into the wild sea. Into a farm in Alaska where a moose has eaten your crop. Your friends have moved to Ohio and Kansas because they follow comfortable jobs and children and the extended family of their new spouses, so you sit alone in overpriced cafés. Sometimes you daydream of the ending of the world, and that the ground itself has opened up and swallowed you whole because then you could prove your mettle, crawling out of the quicksand using a tip you saw from Bear Grylls or maybe Princess Bride. 

But at least once you get to go to Tuscany. And although someone broke your heart in a diner off the highway near Sacramento, someone told you they loved you under trees dripping with moss. And when you die, and they can’t do an open casket because the cats got to you first, your obituary will be a goddamn work of art. Your sisters will toast your memory with London Fogs and Elliot Smith and old photos so embarrassing your ghost blushes up to the roots of its translucent hair and you lived. What a cliché. 

So reader, I suppose what I mean is, when you finally look back it will be with gratitude. Even if it takes to the very end to know it—like the final chapter in those classic books you always said you’d read. Because Mary Oliver implored us to live like the migrating geese, and there is something more honest in the uplifting fog than a lifetime of squirreled away wealth, and something more comforting in that rare sunbreak than a year of bluebird skies. And you can read this and blame it on the Elliot Smith (and I would understand) or the cracked open heart of a person fed up with disappointment (also true and valid), but I think I would rather cry with puffy red eyes and a banshee-esque wail than be a consumer of comfort for the rest of my days. 

I worry now about the people who feel judged. I am certainly coming across strongly here, and no, this isn’t a ‘business majors live unsatisfying lives’ kind of letter. At least not intentionally. In full honesty if you read my description of comfort and thought it might at the very least allow you to have a semi-healthy relationship with your parents, or your god, or your body, and you are willing to trade the stories for it, that is fair. I do not think it was an accident that America/humanity (I guess we never solved the root of that) promotes comfort like it does. Simplicity does not inherently mean that you are excluded from living life, and making choices in the interest of safe children and a stable income and a yearly family road-trip… it’s the dream for a reason.

I worry that people will believe me to be spoiled that I could sacrifice so much for that rare, shining, pearlescent break of dawn. That I must be some Bruce Wayne character who just sits grumpy in not-New York, eating caviar off silver spoons wondering why everyone and everything is so mundane. 

In reality, I classically blame my father. He introduced me to poetry at a very young age and has altogether and ceaselessly corrupted my worldview. When I graduated high school, my parents read Mary Oliver’s A Summer Day, the last line of which reads: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?” When we went on a backpacking trip and the entire Milky Way scattered itself across the sky like spilled rice, my father sat outside our tent and read from Joy Harjo’s I am a Prayer: “I am a prayer of mountains, those tall humble ones who agreed to lift our eyes to see/ I am a prayer/ I am a prayer of forever making a path of beauty through the rubble of eternity.”

As you can hopefully see, there is no turning back from that now. One cannot unhear the call of generations of poets that shake your shoulders until the very ground beneath your feet (unintentional Salman Rushdie shout out) is alive and struck through with the song of the universe. And it is not that you cannot take that good job, or move to Ohio, or marry the sensible Mr. Collins. And you shouldn’t necessarily live in the woods off the non-poisonous berries and change your name to Spike and ignore the pleas of your mother to come in out of the weather—in fact the latter person has most certainly missed the point altogether. But the soul forever yearns for open meadows, do you not agree? And however it is you feel alive; pursue that thing, action, place, person—as though running for water in a desert. 

For the love of a windswept life,

Eilidh Keuss