In Praise of Quiet Daring 3 comments

By Lindsey Crittenden

I’m not a shouter. Oh, I lose my temper or patience from time to time and cry out in exasperation. And a few people can make me so angry that I completely lose it. But no one would describe me as volatile or passionate – at least not on first view. Twenty years ago, an editor I worked with, using categories from a book that counseled women to determine their type, deemed me a “cool sophisticate.” Or, as others have put it, a WASP, a shiksa, an ice queen.

It’s easy to say that these people don’t know me very well. It’s easy to draw up, as evidence to the contrary, the words a former lover said to me after our first night together—I won’t go into specifics, but suffice it to say the queen’s ice had melted.

I’m not nearly as aloof and cool as I once was. Loss, love, maturity, and faith will do that to you—crack you open, let you walk around as we all walk around, wounded.

Thanks to Allison Backous’s post a few weeks ago, I’m emboldened to write about my recent re-entry into the online dating world.

As I’ve browsed the sites, I’ve considered my mix of hope and dread, my eagerness and my almost pathological conviction that once again I will be disappointed. In the men, in myself. I remind myself of the advice of friends—Keep a sense of humor; Don’t take it too seriously; It’s a numbers game; Kiss a lot of frogs; Be yourself.

Amelia Earhart has never captured my imagination. (Bear with me; this is related.) Like Jo March, she represents a tomboyish type I never identified with, although I admired the drama of the lost plane over the Pacific as well as the flair with scarves. But I recently found myself struck by a comment made by Mira Nair, the director of Amelia, that Nair hopes “that people will see themselves in [Earhart’s] decisions to set aside her fears and live her life to the fullest.”

I read this quotation in my armchair on a Friday night. I’d stayed in to watch The Lehrer Report, to knit, to read. I’d been out every night that week. Living life to the fullest? Nyah—just vestry meeting, teaching, Education for Ministry, a movie with a friend. As I ran errands Friday afternoon, I found myself looking forward—eagerly—to sitting in my chair and picking up the needles. Not the stuff of a biopic.

Eudora Welty wrote that a “sheltered life can be a daring life.... For all serious daring starts from within.” Miss Welty lived her life in the house in which she grew up. She cared for her mother, her brother. She worked in an upstairs room and never installed air conditioning (in Mississippi!) so she could keep the windows open and hear voices float up from the street. She wrote magnificently, slyly, daringly. That’s the kind of daring that stirs and inspires me, the kind of daring that can happen within four walls firmly grounded on planet Earth.

Back when I would pay to see Meg Ryan on the screen, I went to see a movie in which she played a feisty-yet-brainy woman who falls for Tim Robbins as an auto mechanic. Walter Matthau played her uncle, Albert Einstein, who counsels her to take a chance on the guy even though he wears a tool belt. In one scene, Meg’s character goes out to a field to watch for a comet discovered by her deceased father. The comet streams by, she runs and hoots and hollers and waves her hands and yells “Hi Daddy!” We see her spunkiness, her love for her father, her zest for life. A Hollywood version of grief: a few tears, some moping, and then a comet sets you free and Tim Robbins cooks dinner for you.

Watching this scene on the big screen, only a few months after my brother’s sudden death, at age 26, I felt annoyed. And troubled. Was I too circumspect in my grief? Should I be perkier and noisier, more attention-getting? My brother didn’t have a comet named for him, but I’d had plenty of moments of looking at the sky (day, night, sunrise, foggy afternoon, you name it) and seeing something of him, of love, of mystery, of life everlasting. I hadn’t hooted and hollered, or waved. I’d sat or stood and felt myself open up, almost inside out, with love, as tears poured down my cheeks. I may have whispered something.

And what about the other message, that men worth catching love spunky women? Ahh, that’s one I still grapple with, as I describe myself, my likes and dislikes. For each “loves movies and reading,” I add “hiking and swing dancing.” Be myself, yes, but which parts of myself? And what about the moment of falling, and falling hard, not just when boy sees girl running after comet but when they both sit, holding hands or not, take a deep breath, and reveal themselves in a quieter but no less daring way?

It might not be the stuff of cinematic action, but it’s what I’m looking for. Let yourself be vulnerable, one friend counseled—and I see how her advice has allowed me not only to put more of myself out there but to recognize the vulnerability in the men whose ads I read. To think not just of what I want but to see through and in their words something of them.

That feels like the true daring right now. I’ll let you know how it turns out.