“Not everything is about scampering headlong. A lion is formed for the art of not moving at all.”

Over at the reader comments to the Substack posts we’ve been talking about what it means to “live in the world” and “live life to the fullest” as this idea relates to our narrator. No one can deny that our narrator has a very active, rambling mind. She’s constantly thinking about not only her tasks at hand--baking, minding her kids, deciding what to make for dinner--but also about her past, all manner of local and international news, cultural trends, iconic films, music, and art, the subject of her husband’s work, and a seemingly endless supply of retained facts and data. Her mind is fully engaged with the world while she spends nearly all her waking hours inside her home or, if need be, the local community in proximity to it. In other words, a body in stasis possessing an experiential mind.

Perhaps the lioness’s passage early in this week’s reading sums it up best:

“Not everything is about scampering headlong. A lion is formed for the art of not moving at all.”

Likewise, our narrator is not formed for “scampering headlong.” In part, she blames her own shyness for this:

“the fact that as far as I know I haven’t contributed much to this place, the fact that I haven’t saved anybody’s life, except maybe with my own kids now and then, as any mom would without even noticing, the fact that I’d probably remember it if I had saved anybody else, no, the fact that I’m much too shy to save anybody’s life, the fact that shy people really are a burden on humanity, if you think about it, the fact that their cowardice is no help to anybody, the fact that shyness interferes with compassion, I’m sure,”

It’s clear that the narrator has a compassionate mind, her thoughts constantly running to the plight of wildlife due to environmental contamination and climate change, the senseless pain and suffering of victims of violence, the needless cruelty of governmental policies, etc. But she feels that her shy nature inhibits (or would inhibit) her ability to act on those compassionate impulses.

For someone like our narrator imagination and empathy are part of her essence. She is attuned to the pain of others because she can imagine what it’s like to be in their position.

“the fact that jumpers are another major factor in bridge design, because bridges always attract depressed people for some reason, the fact that I guess they stir the imagination.”

Perhaps in addition to her shyness there is the felt futility of trying to alleviate even a small fraction of the world’s suffering? Where to even begin?

Our narrator moves in, is moved by the world without her own actual movement, action, or assertion. This is living.