I've been reading an anthology on multicultural literacy that includes an entry from Wendell Berry's Standing By Words: Essays. I will admit to grumbling a bit to myself about its theme. Although eloquent on the subject of time and ecology, his ideal of multi-generational farming catches in my craw. I'm the unwilling partner of inherited farmland in a family of four adult children, all of whom have chosen non-agricultural paths. Our acreage is on the little island in Puget Sound where our father was born and where our family moved in 1984. None of us live there now, though our mother still has her house a few miles away.
We're approaching the third year anniversary of our father's death - with the land minimally tended but property taxes and other expenses an ongoing consideration. For me it has become an albatross. My memories of the place are more bitter than fond; I think of liability and loss when I must think of it at all. Consensus is not easily reached even amongst partners by choice and I've wanted to sell my share since learning of it. I've reached basically the same agreement with my sister to buy me out twice - and twice she has backed out.
Our father was an attorney and 'gentleman farmer' so while our lives were greatly influenced by his wishes and whims we were never at the mercy of the next harvest. I agree that some knowledge can only be learned over generations (and the hard way) but I'm digressing into something too personal.
The passage I want to excerpt says more about people than land. Berry talks about the stumbling blocks created by the ideas that information can be 'sufficient' and that in the scale of a human life "time and work are short." He's drawn a conclusion that resonates with me and scares me, "It is simply true that we do not and cannot know enough to make any important decision."
I've written before about 'tolerance for ambiguity' as the core competency I am missing in the success criteria of my corporate legal jobs. It turned up in my performance reviews annually, in both of the companies I worked for, as if it were just waiting to remind me that I was in the wrong line of work. I want to know the answer. I research toward certainty. Most days I would assist with creating an assessment of risk, often on a deadline made unnecessarily short by someone else's poor planning, always with the need to finish with incomplete data. I learned what was 'sufficient' and how to move forward. I did the work for seven years but I never really got comfortable.
Berry argues that there is no 'sufficient' when it comes to information. "On this dilemma we can take marriage as an instance, for as a condition marriage reveals the insufficiency of knowledge, and as an institution it suggests the possibility that decisions can be informed in another way that is sufficient, or approximately so. I take it as an axiom that one cannot know enough to get married any more than one can predict a surprise."
"What is not so well understood now as it perhaps used to be is that marriage is made in an inescapable condition of loneliness and ignorance, to which it, or something like it, is the only possible answer."
Oh, Wendell.
"We can commit ourselves fully to anything - a place, a discipline, a life's work, a child, a community, a faith, a friend - only in the same poverty of knowledge, the same ignorance of result, the same self-subordination, the same final forsaking of other possibilities."
I struggle right here, caught up in the inertia of uncertainty - professionally and personally - but he still sees some light. "Our decisions can also be informed - our loves both limited and strengthened - by those patterns of value and restraint, principle and expectation, memory, familiarity, and understanding that inwardly, add up to character and, outwardly, to culture."
As I take my walk today I'm thinking about the possibilities I've forsaken, some as yet unimagined, and the choice's I'm not making in the face of future's uncertainty. Can I really trust my character and culture enough to be guided by them?
What did you decide?
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