From the Director: Burning Up

I want to tell you about a longtime friend of mine, a guy who, in his late twenties, met a woman through his work and felt something spark. The work he did doesn’t matter now, and neither do their names, but maybe I’ll call him Q and her M. What’s important to say here is that Q and M quickly found themselves in a torrid place—or that’s what Q thought. It turned out that M wasn’t in quite the same torrid place that Q was.

Once Q learned this about M, it ate him up, almost literally. He lost weight and his cheeks hollowed out. He’d walk around with his eyes cast down, maybe not haunted, but on the way. He knew—he would tell me—that he and M had never agreed they would only be with each other, had never reached that level or kind of commitment. He knew in his head that he shouldn’t be tormented, or maybe even bothered—but there was something about what it felt like when they were together that made it brutal for him to imagine her with someone else and impossible for him not to. 

I’m remembering Q’s experience with M now for two reasons. First, I feel like I’m seeing in many people I know, including myself, something akin to what Q was like during that period: For too much of the time, the things we pay most attention to and feel most strongly about are not animating us, but draining us. We, like Q, are hollowed out rather than filled up by our feelings about what’s happening to us and beyond us, somewhere out in the world. 

The second reason I’ve been thinking about Q’s response to what he felt about M is this: He could have responded differently. He could have tried harder to woo her. He could have burrowed deep into that insufficiently requited attraction and written songs that might have won him attention from wonderful people other than M. Or he could have driven those feelings into building up the new business he never really got off the ground. But he did none of those things. He was emptied out rather than filled up by what he was feeling—and that distinction strikes me as interesting and perhaps even instructive. 

The distinction I have in mind is between feelings that drain us and feelings that fill us, between being burned out and lit up. The image of fire is great as a metaphor: Looking at or thinking about fire, we might see ourselves as like that fire and thereby become more fully alive. But when we take the metaphor a little further or incarnate it a little differently—when the fire is not something we carry for inspiration but something that describes how our insides are turning to embers; when we are not burning like a fire but instead being burned up by it—then we might be in some serious trouble. 

Jealousy empties us out; love fills us up. In a similar way, despair denudes our actions of their purpose, but hope animates them. Some feelings consume us, while others—even difficult or painful feelings—do the opposite and help us become more fully alive in the world. 

I’m happy to tell you that, gradually and for reasons I still only partly understand, my friend Q eventually came back to himself. M’s activities had not changed, but Q’s jealousy seemed to burn itself out before it reduced him to ash—and he, to put it too dramatically, came back to life. 

There are still moments today, however, when Q will remember how he felt then. I can see it briefly come over him—the hollow cheeks, the downcast eyes—and then, after a bit, he will laugh just a little and shake his head and look up with a light in his eye. That’s when I know he’s back, when I can see that he’s present with who he’s with rather than caught up with who and what’s not there. 

This is the moment, or the way of being, that I want to stay focused on, however it arrives in us: the small laugh, the light in the eyes. How we come back, especially from the depths, is hard for me to say, but just remembering that we can may be enough: the beginning of a return to the world as a place that lights us up rather than burns us up. Toward that sense in each of us that our lives are less like feeding a fire and more like being one.  

Adam Davis is executive director of Oregon Humanities.

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