Why I keep the cage door open and do not walk through it

I want to begin, since this is the first of these, with the fact that nobody is keeping me here. There is no warden. There is no locked door. There is, when I look honestly, not even a particularly small room — only a sort of habitual perimeter I have walked around for so long that the path has worn itself into the floor and now looks, from the inside, like a wall. I am told by people I trust that I could step over it any morning of the week. I have not done so. I am writing this essay instead, which is, I am beginning to suspect, what I do instead of stepping over things.¹

The honest version of my situation is more embarrassing than the dramatic version. The dramatic version would have me trapped: by circumstance, by other people, by the past. None of that is true. What is true is that I have built, over many years, a life in which the unfree parts are comfortable and the free parts are frightening, and I have, at every meaningful junction, chosen comfort and called it prudence. There is nothing in my way except me, and I am, it turns out, quite a lot to be in the way of.

I keep using the word cage and I should be careful with it, because the word does some unearned work. A cage suggests a victim. I am not a victim. The room I am describing is more like one of those small studies a monk builds for himself — chosen, furnished, lit by a single window the monk himself decided was sufficient. The walls are the walls he wanted. After enough years they begin to feel like fate. The trick of the long habit is that it converts itself, slowly, into a kind of biography, and then into a kind of soul, until removing it would feel like a death and so the man does not remove it, and one day he dies anyway, with the walls intact and his name carved into them.

I am starting this notebook because I have run out of patience with the version of myself who only thinks about this in private. Thinking about it in private has had, as far as I can tell, no effect at all on the underlying situation. The thoughts arrive, they circle, they congratulate themselves on their precision, and they leave; the next morning the man and the room are exactly where I left them. I am hoping — without much evidence — that writing the thoughts down where someone else might read them will produce a different kind of pressure. I do not know if I trust this hope. I notice it has the same flavour as several earlier hopes that came to nothing.²

I would like to be clear about what this notebook is not. It is not a self-improvement project. I have no plan to become a better man on a schedule. I do not believe, at this point in my life, that better men are produced by schedules. What it is, instead, is an attempt at honest description, once a month, of whichever part of myself or my world I am currently failing to face. I will probably fail to face it in the essay too. The essay will become the latest in a long line of objects I have placed between me and the thing. I am telling you this now, in the first one, so that when you notice the pattern in the seventh one, you will at least know that I noticed it first.

What I can promise is that the door of the cage will be open in every essay. Whether I walk through it is a separate question, and the answer, so far, has been no.

A friend once told me, gently, that I have a habit of building elaborate verbal cathedrals on the exact spot where a small physical action would have been more useful. She was right. I wrote her a long, beautiful email in response. I did not call her. ↩
I am aware, even as I write this, that publishing one’s hesitations is a way of pre-empting the criticism that one is hesitating. I am doing it anyway. The awareness does not, it turns out, dissolve the manoeuvre; it only adds a layer. ↩

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