wake up

I notice it in the morning on the way to school, the careful way Riley places her finger at the top left corner of her cell phone, straight pointing like a plumb line, the excruciatingly slow way she then drags her finger along the edge, as though it were a pen making an invisible outline around the phone. What in-the-world is she doing? Sometimes in our lives, repetition plays the poor substitute for meaning.

“Umm, what are you doing?” I ask, even though experience tells me not to expect her to know.

Her eyes flick toward me. I feel it, catching the jerky halt of her hand in my periphery. “Huh?” She’ll have a look like she’s startled by my notice, like somehow she thinks while she’s obsessing she turns invisible.

“What are you doing?” I lift my right hand off of the steering wheel, gesture lamely toward her phone with my hand.

She glances back at the phone; I can just barely see the turn and bend of her head. “I have no idea,” she says slowly, lifting wide eyes back to me.

I say nothing. What is there to say? She watches me just a beat, two, then realizing I can’t look in her direction, she returns to the ritual, holds that finger up again against the edge of her phone. My eyes have been fixed on the road and the traffic, but something about the way she started and then restarted and then restarted that movement drew my attention. Apparently, whatever she’s about, her finger has to be exactly at the top left edge. A little sigh, also silent, escapes my lips.

At the stoplight, I turn my head a little to watch, finding Riley lost in this new ritual and completely unaware of me. Now I understand: she obsesses and we become invisible. What is it about our routines that make us forget each other? I drive the same way to school every day, and sometimes I think the familiarity of the route makes me less aware of all the specific people with their specific loves in the cars around me.

Riley’s lips move just the tiniest bit as she sets that finger and then begins the slow crawl around the edge of the phone, and I imagine the little script she recites in her mind, a snatch of something she often says out loud at home, something beginning with, “Okay, and umm, yep…” It’s not uncommon for Riley to halt her narration midway and start over, as though she’s unsure of the beginning or discontented by the particular sound of the words as they come out of her mouth. It’s as though she’s running memorized lines and trying to get the corresponding motions just so, even though she’s performing for an audience of one. It’s like a prayer that has lost its soul, or maybe a history that’s lost its memory.

In my college psychology class years ago, I saw a video of a man with damage to his frontal lobe who had no short term memory. The man, who was somewhat distraught, kept a dog-eared journal noting the time. Minute after minute after minute he scrawled, this is the first moment I’m awake. I remember coming away from that class resolved to wake up to my life. Sometimes I wonder if Riley starts her routines over because she’s perfecting or because she’s forgotten. Or maybe that moment when she starts again is the moment when she feels most awake. Maybe there’s some part of her that suddenly wonders, “What am I doing?” I could ask, but she will not know or will not know how to say. Where these repetitive behaviors begin, what triggers them, what they mean, and why it is that they make her feel more satisfied, remains a mystery.

So, I wait out the light, and I pray, “Lord, free her from mindless routines,” and then I pray the same for me. Don’t, by rubbing repetition, let calluses harden my heart. Wake me up to life. I read somewhere recently that the dailyness of life hides in plain sight as a great spiritual stumbling block.

I make my pleas silently, tapping two fingers on the steering wheel, and suddenly Riley drops her hand in her lap, the ritual forgotten. At the edge of my sight I see her head turn, her brassy hair drift over her shoulder. She starts talking to me, asks me if I’ve heard from one of our friends, if I know how they’re doing with some hard thing, asks me to let her know about them when I do. Freedom from futility always leads us back to people.

Paul wrote, “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing (1 Corinthians 13:1-2).” In other words, love makes living meaningful.

Sometimes, Kevin makes Riley laugh when, finding her absorbed in some obsessive stepping routine in front of the bar (we call it the Riley two-step)–literally two steps up, a lean, a slide, one step back, and repeat, repeat, repeat—he joins in and turns the whole thing into a line dance. Something about the way he just starts bobbing and stepping alongside her, loving her, frees her to acknowledge the absurdity of the ritual without feeling chastened for the inexplicable and meaningless skips—like a record player needle bouncing back again and again over the same stretch of vinyl–in her life. It’s as though she comes alive, and then her laughter fills the room. Suddenly she’s not performing a mindless routine but engaged in a relationship. So, it works the other way too: We are loved, and that frees us to live meaningfully.

I turn my attention back to the road as the light changes, and I continue my prayer. Lord, show me how to live a life of love.