The Moon Is Always Whole

There is something curious about our language. We speak of the moon as if it were something that changes, that becomes. We congratulate ourselves on a full moon, watch with approval as it becomes a crescent, become pensive when it vanishes behind some distant horizon, and even grumble when it fails to appear at all. In our speech, we treat this cold, distant rock as if it were something that is always becoming more or less itself, more or less real. What nonsense! Nothing has been added to it when it becomes full, and nothing withdrawn when it contracts back into a narrowing sliver. Our relative position to it is the only thing that has changed. The light comes to it from one angle or another, the Earth is now here or there, and we are seeing only what circumstance allows us to see. We learn this as children, accept it with hardly a murmur, and proceed to spend the rest of our lives speaking as if appearance and reality were something other than what they are. Curiously enough, that is one area in which we are most often willing to speak more loosely than we think.

Such certainty evaporates when we turn our attention to ourselves. Here, appearance and reality become conflated at the root. We begin to treat what we can see as if it were all there is. A season of confidence convinces us that we have become someone truly remarkable; a season of grief persuades us that we have been hollowed out completely. We confuse productivity with virtue, certainty with wisdom, poise with power, and exhaustion with futility. We rarely if ever suspect that there might be something more to us than what we see, present, and perform. We begin to take today's performance as tomorrow's identity. It is hard to say where this is helpful or otherwise not. But it is certainly true that we believe far too often that we are defined by the evidence.

I suspect that this is where our fascination with the moon comes from.

There is something about the way we treat it that speaks to a longing we all feel, which is that for something deeper, more permanent, more lasting than our likes or dislikes. Other natural entities are not quite so forgiving. The mountains demand to be conquered, the sea offers up its bounty to those who would take it, the forest takes what it pleases. Only the moon is entirely indifferent to us, and perhaps that is why we feel so strongly about it. It has nothing to say about us: it will neither congratulate us nor judge us, it will not punish or reward. I think it might be one of those rare things in life that is permanently disinterested. I sometimes suspect that that is the very thing we most desire from the world, the thing we most need it to give us. The moon has no opinion at all, as humans do, about our worth. I am sure you understand that human beings, meanwhile, are deeply disinterested in anything that is not interested in us.

There is something terribly lonely about the thought that the only reason we recognize one another is because we believe ourselves to be alone in what we feel. It is lonely to think that we need relationships as badly as we do simply because we have never experienced anything that is unilaterally kind to us. It is lonely to believe, as we so often do, that recognition is a precondition of reality. This is not entirely false, of course: we can believe ourselves to exist only so long as we can perceive. But those are easy things to conflate, and I think it is a mistake to confuse our critical need with recognition with a need for recognition to possess worth. There are plenty of things for which that is true, but I do not think any person should consider it to be a universal.

When I was younger, I used to imagine that whole people were something that existed only at the end of successful improvement. If I learned the right lessons, healed the right wounds, succeeded in the right endeavors, or improved myself in the right ways, then there would come a day when all of those things would add up to something resembling a real, completed human being - and that I would finally know what it meant to be one. In hindsight, it is easy to see how naïve that was. It made so much of my life feel transactional, the value of my experiences measured in how much closer I was to some arbitrary and inaccessible end. And I think it is important to note that I never felt quite as whole no matter how many of those things I did achieve, because that is also an easy conflation to mistake for truth.

Whole human beings always seemed to exist just out of reach, and I think that still does. I suspect that has to do with something we said earlier about completion always being more accessible than examination. It is much easier to believe there is such a thing than it is to define precisely what it might be. After all, we tend not to think about the thing quite as much as we do the idea of it. We imagine that if we could just see an example of a completed human being - a human being that was not lacking in any way, that had resolved every contradiction within itself, that had attained some kind of lasting and unquestionable identity - then we would understand what it meant to be whole. But that is assuming that such a being or example even exists, which we should not be so quick to do. It occurred to me recently that what such a person would look like would, perhaps, be someone who no longer had any contradictions at all. Someone who always did what they knew was right, who never failed to deliver under pressure, who never questioned the truth, who hardly ever doubted themselves or their motives or decisions. If that is not the case, then I do not know what is.

It is not that whole people do not have contradictions, I suppose, so much as that whole people understand that they are contradictions. We are rarely so willing to defend the presence of doubt in our lives, although I think the healthier attitude is to recognize it as inevitable rather than dysfunctional. We speak as if a mountain landscape were not complete because it contained an oasis, but we all know that it is no less a desert for containing one. We speak as if life had to be something other than it is in order to be worth having. I think it is hard for us to think of ourselves as whole unless we think of ourselves as constant - that we never change or grow or doubt or learn. But we are none of those things. I think that is part of what makes us human, in fact.

It was loss, rather, that made me think about this. Grief has a strange and particular relationship to identity, since it alters both in ways we are not always prepared to acknowledge. When you lose something or someone important to you, it is natural to feel that part of your life has shifted irreversibly. But once the shock wears off, you also realize that there is something else happening. It turns out that the grief has changed you, as well, although that is harder to perceive. In fact, it often takes quite a while for you to realize it at all, since it tends to manifest in the subtlest ways. You find that you behave differently around people and things than you once did, that certain things feel strange to you in ways they never used to. Your joy seems somehow thinner, your time stretched out unnecessarily, your memories dulled and lacking in clarity.

We sometimes express this by saying that we are no longer the people we used to be, but I think we are being untruthful if we say so. I personally suspect that most of us are still the people we used to be, only with more information. The people we knew before grief were not wrong in who they thought they were, any more than the people we have since become are whole in some objective sense. Both of them are simply products of their circumstances, only the latter has had more time to accumulate evidence. Neither of them is any more authentic than the other, in my opinion, because they are both made of the same substance. They exist within the same life.

That is a strange thing to think about, but it is also instructive. It has helped me to rethink what I think about growth being something incremental and cumulative, not something absolute. We tend to think of it as a sort of vertical movement, like climbing a hill. As one goes up, one leaves one's failures and inadequacies behind and begins to approach a more objective, stable, and reliable identity. But it hardly ever works that way in nature. Trees do not simply leave behind their old rings as they grow new ones. Rivers do not forget the lands they have passed over in favor of new ones. Mountains do not erase the evidence of the pressures that formed them in order to rise anew. Growth in the natural world is cumulative rather than corrective, and I suspect that we are no different.

I suspect we are no different because I think it might be the only reasonable conclusion. We may not outgrow our old selves the way we think we do, but we certainly incorporate them - and the same might be said for the selves we outgrow. All of them are present in us still, although they must be recognized as such. Maturity does not consist in abandoning those childish parts of ourselves, but rather in learning what to prioritize when we are faced with multiple competing instincts. That does not mean we must always defer to our wiser selves, only that we should recognize them when they speak to us. It is a strange and difficult balancing act, but one that I think most of us are capable of.

I suspect that has helped me to rethink my ideas about wholeness, in turn. It is easy to become fixated on measuring ourselves against some imagined standard of completion when what we really want is simply for things to remain as they are. It is tempting to say that everything is fine as long as we feel whole, but it is also easy to forget that feelings are sometimes misleading. We wake up some mornings believing ourselves to be small and defeated by life, only to find that other mornings have convinced us of the opposite. We can be so focused on the idea of completion that we ignore the parts of our lives that seem to have been left unfinished. It is not as if we know exactly what we are talking about when we say so, either, which makes it harder to take such statements with any degree of seriousness.

I think I have learned a great deal from listening to the moon, then. It has reminded me that darkness is not always an illusion and that things which are not visible to us are no less real for being so. It has given us perspective on the strange way we have of believing things only insofar as we can see them, and it has corrected some of the more delusional aspects of that thinking. If we think we understand reality by looking at things, we must also remember to look at the spaces between them. The parts of life that are unavailable to us at a given time are no less a part of it for being so, and our inability to perceive them is not evidence that they do not exist.

I suspect that is why we need stories. They remind us of that, that life is a much broader concept than we often care to admit. They teach us patience with our perceptions because they force us to think carefully about their limitations and the ways in which they might fail us. The best ones do not delude us into thinking life is one thing when it is clearly another, but rather convince us that it is not one particular thing at all. Villains are rarely purely evil, heroes rarely purely good, pain rarely purely instructive. They all have a place in life and a role to play, even if we do not always recognize it at the time.

The characters in stories understand this, which is why they are so useful to us. They act as our cautionary tales and remind us that we must be patient with ourselves and others. We do not judge fictional people as harshly as we should, I think, because it is much easier to forgive someone whom we know is not real. We have so much difficulty applying the same leniency to those around us, even when we should.

When I look at the moon, I think of all the things I used to believe about it. It was always a comfort to me, a reminder that no matter how things were going, they would eventually turn out for the best. But I am growing to understand that, perhaps, is a uniquely human delusion. Storms still come, winter still leaves trees bare, and the moon itself will always disappear behind the horizon. What the moon has taught me is that seeing everything is not a precondition of believing it all exists. I already knew that when I looked out at the night sky, and I think it is what makes us so strangely reluctant to apply that knowledge to what we see when we look in the opposite direction. A life can contain plenty that we do not see at a given moment, just as a person can remain whole despite spending a season in a particularly unilluminating place. The moon has never needed to become whole in order to appear so, and I suspect the same might be said for us.