But it does make an appearance.
On the first Saturday of the New Year LL and I have our second actual date night since before our first child was born. It is fabulous. We check into our hotel early, then meander down to a coffee shop for afternoon coffee and a freshly baked chocolate tart. Fabulous. Then back to the hotel, then out for a leisurely dinner. The hotel is fabulous. Dinner is fabulous. LL checks her phone one last time before the movie: the boys are doing great. We go next door to the Rose Theater for the first episode of Star Wars released in a decade, and the first not under the direct control of George Lucas. The movie, too, is fabulous. It is hard to imagine a more blissful half-day.
Three hours after the start of Star Wars we are back in our hotel trying to fall asleep. My mind is still going, maybe not 100 miles an hour, but more than 10—a long ways from sleep speed—when our next-door neighbors arrive back to the hotel. We’ve never met them in person and likely never will. They are loud. Loud for the hour, loud for the type of hotel we’re in, loud period.
I would like to say that I do the grown-up thing, ring the operator, and ask him to intervene. This would not only be more polite, it would likely be both more effective and efficient. And here’s the rub: even as I consider my course of action, the one that I’m allowing myself to lean towards makes me angrier and more awake. I was already aware, before our hotel-mates arrived and started making so much noise, that I should have gotten up and done something to wind down: draw a picture, maybe journal a little. Now, even if my action results in quiet, I’m very unlikely to fall asleep anytime soon. But I do it anyway. I knock on the wall. At first pretty softly. Then, when nothing changes, a bit more assertively.
The voices do quiet down. Now I’m riled up but stubbornly stay in bed. We try turning on the bathroom fan for a little white noise, but it’s got an occasional rattle that results in the opposite of the desired soothing effect. Finally I do get up out of bed and start to write. The light of the microwave I open up, which is the dimmest thing I can find to turn on, is small enough it doesn’t shine into the bedroom where LL still is. I’m starting to feel better.
And then, a good hour after my knock on the wall, comes the retaliatory pound.
I leap up, rip the microwave oven from the counter, storm out into the hall, and throw the oven through—no, no. There’s no question that I am furious. But this time reason prevails and I call the operator.
All noise ceases, but now I’m fully angry. LL is up too, of course. I want to leave. The hotel. Right now. On principle. I’m not staying here. I’m not sleeping here. I want a full refund, and I want it now. How dare…yes, I get it, I’m acting worse than either our 1-year-old or 3-year-old is capable of. The Force has been Awakened, and I’m sad to say it is not the Light Side.
Thankfully LL talks some sense into me and we do stay. We stay, I write some more, I allow some forgiveness, I forgive our neighbors, I forgive myself, and we get some sleep, far more sleep than we would have gotten (obviously) if we’d packed up, driven up the hill to where our boys were staying with Nana and Papa, and likely woken everyone up. As it is we sleep until eight. Eight! That is fabulous! We soon learn that our 1-year-old, usually up at six, had gotten up at five!
Before leaving the hotel I write our neighbors an apology and place it in their door. I am genuinely sorry. They probably had no idea they were being so loud. They were, after all, just talking; it just happened to be right on the other side of what was obviously a fairly thin wall.
As I write about this now I think back to last month’s entry, which was also about a situation falling apart and about “digging myself in deeper.” Is there such thing as The Force, an intangible yet quite consequential energy that exists in all living things but especially in the relationship between them? Absolutely. Is there a Light Side and a Dark Side to that Force? Absolutely. Is this Force explainable in terms of evolutionary psychology, in terms of adaptive actions that had and have benefits for their actors?
Absolutely. In the span of human history, itself a blink, a half-blink, in the history of the planet, we have evolved a set of behaviors that has factored into our remarkable and meteoric rise. Some of these behaviors would make Darth Vader blush, others are more altruistic that Obi-Wan could possibly imagine. We label them “good” and “evil” and every shade in between, and yet all of them meet or in the past met, on some level, some need of ours. One could certainly make a strong argument that many of the behaviors we developed that served us well throughout most of our tenure, when we lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers at direct risk from the environment and from each other, no longer serve us in today’s uber-connected and uber-crowded world.
The challenge we now face is not whether or not we can evolve quickly enough. In terms of actions needed to reverse or at least stay a future of catastrophic climate change and mass species extinction, we don’t have centuries or even decades but likely years. I don’t want to say we “can’t” evolve quickly enough. I love the Brian Andreas quote that says “if we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination.” So anything is possible. It’s just that evolution, at least in traditional terms of behavioral traits passed down through genetic mutations, won’t give us enough time.
The real question then becomes, can we imagine enough? What I do know is that we can’t do it alone. That I can’t do it alone. My imagination, alone, isn’t big enough. My emotional self isn’t even big enough to not bang on my neighbor’s wall at midnight! That’s why I write in a public space, and why, after years, I’m finally starting to re-kindle connections to others. To those heard but unseen neighbors: I gave you my email address. I hope you write. I truly wish you nothing but the best. I wish all of us nothing but the best. We’re all in this together. And all questions of morality aside, what I do know is this: The Dark Side is less fun! ☺
*ii: "episode i"--I wrote a post titled "The dark side" in November 2009. Obviously I must complete at least "ix" episodes!
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