I found out recently that I had hurt someone. It wasn’t calculated or cruel, just stupid and careless, but it gave me pause and reminded me of the fragility of our place in the world. After writing here about the many selves that we are, I am given pause because that idea, as much as I believe it, is no comfort to the person I hurt. In fact it would sound like a dodge, and it would be in some way. In this person’s circle of motion, the I that exists today is the same I that caused the hurt, no matter how much has changed in the meantime. So even though it was in almost every aspect a different person who did the hurting, the current me is responsible and apologized because I was wrong. It is a fragile world.

The issue is really one of meaning. Attaching meaning to an event is a dangerous thing, even if it is a positive, and making meaning exposes us to breakage. So while I traveled across the country looking for the sacred in my surroundings and in me, I realized that I was playing a dangerous game because the meaning you make directly affects the path of the journey. For example, I believe that there is meaning in small towns and the dynamic of life and landscape that is often found there. That belief about meaning led me to various towns across the country that few other travelers would have gone to and through. My belief about where to find meaning literally put me in these places, and it was good. But meaning-making isn’t always positive, and the stories we tell ourselves are not always constructive, though they do produce meaning and therefore identity. Another example–for years I have told myself the story sometimes known as the “impostor syndrome,” namely, that I am really not good enough to be a professor or to hold the positions I have held, that luck or inattention got me hired, and that eventually someone will find out that I am not qualified for my job. It’s a powerful–one would even say meaningful–story and one that serves a certain function. For example, there’s a built-in humility to that story because you think you are not worthy of what you have. Regardless, the story becomes so much a part of you that it is meaningful, and to let it go is to change, and we all know that change is hard because we lose our self in the process. Fortunately, I have let that particular story go, and I feel that I am more than qualified for the job I hold, and moreover, the universe has somehow placed me here at this particular time and place in a meaningful way.

But I hurt someone, and this person legitimately found a meaning in my words and actions that produced a negative effect. How are we to be responsible for such a thing, especially when we aren’t even the person we were when it happened? As I apologized to this person, I felt that same dissonance that I have written about here when I encounter my other selves. At the same time, I have to own those other selves because while they are not me, they were me at some point, and two of the strands that connect me to these other selves are memory and meaning. Both memory and meaning are constructs–fictions in some sense–but they are real because they have effects on us and the people we interact with. So there is a responsibility we carry for our other selves even though we don’t inhabit those identities anymore and may not even recognize them, and that responsibility is there because our selves do not exist alone, but in relation to other selves who themselves are making meaning of our words and actions. Sure, there are times when other people will use us to construct straw men or make us scapegoats, and we need not be responsible for those fictions. But there are other times when our words and actions contribute to the making and shaping of other people in a negative way, a way that enables them to tell a story that diminishes them rather than enlarges them, and part of the responsibility of being human is owning up to making other people less than they could be. The world is fragile, and we must take the utmost care and kindness in all things.

Every time I use or hear the word “fragile,” I think of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, and it so happens that Silko also articulates best what I am reaching for in this post, the need to be careful with words and actions because of the meaning that can be made of them. The passage concerns an old medicine man named Ku’oosh, who is trying to explain to a sick young man how to reach wholeness in a world that is fragile.

The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love. (35-6)

That is also a most excellent description of a writer: a person who is fulfilling his responsibility to be human and who does so with great patience and love. The world is a fragile thing, like a spider web, but the world is made of words, not things, and words are also strong, like a spider web, and so they hold us together in our fragile existence.