Whenever I drink kefir, I think of when I lived in Colorado and had a brief run-in with a holistic doctor. According to this doctor, almost every affliction known to man—indigestion, depression, menstrual cramps, anxiety—was attributable to failures of the gut microbiome. If you drank enough kefir and bone broth and kombucha, and avoided gluten and sugar and artificial thickeners, and ate refrigerated pickles and took supplements for building up your gut lining and prebiotics and probiotics, your gut would heal, and your life would suddenly become perfect.
I’ll never forget how it felt as the woman in the trim white coat sat across the desk from me, unfolding this regimen. The idea that everything that was troubling you—dizzy spells or energy spikes, trouble sleeping or sleepiness—was coming from one single cause that you could address was intoxicating.
The doctors put me on a keto diet and I got sick, and then put me on a SIBO diet and I got sicker. Eventually, I quit. I still get sick sometimes, and all my aches and pains and neuroses still crop up with the regularity that they do for the rest of the human race. Maybe if I’d stuck with it I would have become one of those superhumans without brain fog or indigestion or cramps—just like if I’d listened to my orthodontist, I would have kept my braces on until my teeth weren’t just good, but perfect. Now my teeth aren’t perfect, and neither is my gut microbiome.
But when I drink kefir I still feel like I’m doing something about that, just like way back then. It’s strange how much human beings are willing to put up with if we feel like we’re working for something, like we’ll achieve our goal. I think I literally got malnourished while attempting this exercise, but I don’t remember it being particularly effortful. I had the vision, and that meant it wasn’t too hard. When the vision failed, I stopped, but still when I drink kefir, I sometimes wonder if my gut is healing, if all my problems are about to evaporate overnight.
I’ve recently come to the realization that most of the fun of watching a home renovation show is the unlimited budget that the would-be renovators tend to possess. Netflix recently came out with a show called “Hack My Home,” where a zany group of female engineers and male designers solve home problems with motorized tables that come out of floors and secret panels to turn bedrooms into offices. Budget is, gloriously, never mentioned. What is, always, mentioned in home flipping shows is the troubles of the family. The young boys get in the way of the parents’ date nights, or the teenage girl lacks a space to call her own. Sometimes, the drama is even more intense in home shows—a father recently passed away, and the family needs a mother-in-law suite. A couple is expecting a baby. There is always some intense interpersonal moment the family is experiencing—and as viewers we are always led along with the life of the family starring in the show, seeing their struggles alongside them.
That’s probably why people cry so much in home renovation shows. This almost always happens in Chip and Joanna Gaines’ “Fixer Upper,” but it’s true of pretty much every home renovation show there is—the family comes in and finds that their problems have been solved, by people we saw working away through the nights, with a horde of contractors whose salaries are never a line item in the on-screen budgets. Then they burst into tears. There’s this moment of catharsis where you feel like all their problems have been solved—you’re not thinking about how dirty those white cabinets will get, or how the peg board they installed in the kids’ room will be destroyed within a week. You’re just feeling that feeling I had sitting in the doctor’s office—that there can be a moment where all your problems are solved.
The plot arc of a problem, a need, human beings working hard to solve it, and a solution, is deeply appealing to the human mind. We see it played out onscreen in home renovation shows; we are carefully walked through it in slightly shady medical offices. Just do what you need to do, and you will be healed.
But sometimes that isn’t quite how it works. Seeing a bottle of kefir on the counter opens up questions for me now—what if healing wasn’t something that you set out to do or to accomplish, but something that happened to you? What if no matter how hard you tried, sometimes you might still be sick? What if no matter how much you cared, sometimes you wouldn’t have a solution for another person in pain, except to sit with them in the suffering?
It’s very difficult to admit that maybe, just maybe, that vision of a perfect life and a perfect self isn’t ever going to occur. You might feel better for a bit—you might even feel good for a while. But once you’re over one hill the next one will loom on the horizon. You can’t just get a bottle of kefir and heal your gut. You can’t just go to a therapy appointment and heal your heart. You can’t just go to church one time and heal your soul. What’s more, you can’t prescribe anything like this to someone else, sitting across the table in your trim lab coat, and watch them walk away healed.
All of us want the kefir bottle and the unlimited renovation budget. We want healing to be something that we do, that either we do ourselves or we do for others. We all have our own vision of what might happen if we drank enough bottles of kefir. I would love to have that moment when Chip and Joanna Gaines pull aside their giant mural of my old house and I cry because I see my new house and my new life and everything is new. But I’m realizing that everything probably only becomes new gradually.
In his classic work The Intellectual Life, A.G. Sertillanges describes the process of inspiration in intellectual study:
Besides humility, we must recommend to the thinker a certain passivity of attitude which corresponds to the nature of the mind and of inspiration. We do not know very well how the mind works; but we know that passivity is its first law. Still less do we know how inspiration comes; but we can notice that it utilizes our unconsciousness more than our initiative. We go forward amid difficulties like a rider in the night; it is better to trust our mount than to pull unwisely on the bridle.
Activity which is too intentional makes or intelligence less sure and less receptive; if we strive too anxiously, we remain shut up in ourselves, whereas to understand is to become other, and in happy receptivity to let truth pour in upon us.
Simone Weil, in her essay on “Attention and Will,” writes: “There is a way of waiting, when we are writing, for the right word to come of itself at the end of our pen, while we merely reject all inadequate words.” According to Weil, “To attend means not to seek, but to wait; not to concentrate, but instead to dilate our minds.”
As part of a neighborhood club called “Beer and Buildings,” I visit a lot of houses that are midway through being renovated (while drinking beer). In a town full of old houses, falling apart at the seams, many fun, interesting people are learning to refurbish those houses themselves, being innovative about what it takes to make a place into somewhere beautiful. We all wander over the rooms, beer in hand, asking questions, observing the detritus of a complicatedly-lived life.
One of my favorite houses was full of children and grandchildren, with the walls and doors ornately painted by the children of the house, weird little forgotten corners, a huge kitchen with a wooden island cobbled together from materials the family had sourced. You could see the interplay between the needs of the family and the way the house had turned out, but not in the polished, HGTV way—here had just happened to be the best place to put the board games, the teenage girl had liked the attic room with gables and added the twinkle lights, slowly, gradually. There was still unfinished framing and bare plywood in places. There were bad paint jobs and things that hadn’t been fixed yet.
With this house, there had clearly been no great moment of transformation. There had been no catharsis when the mother burst into tears because this house fulfilled all her wildest dreams. Instead, slowly, with (I’m sure) many setbacks, the house had slowly started to respond to the needs of its inhabitants. And now it was something unrepeatable
Maybe healing is like inspiration. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with drinking the kefir, making the efforts, reading the books—but maybe life is really about attending, about setting the conditions for a good life until the good life gives itself to you. Maybe it’s a slow, gradual, winding road with setbacks, until you look back and see how far you’ve come.
Come back in two weeks: for a patron-only post on why an arcade is like a house plant.
A big hello: to all my new subscribers. I appreciate you waiting through the summer hiatus for your first piece!
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