1/3/21
Over the years, I’ve spent most of my non-school reading time in the land of classic lit. I’ve wanted to know what was up – what made a work stand the test of time? Great characters? Beautiful words? Shocking plot twists? In all that I’ve read, I’ve always returned to Aldous Huxley. He was a prolific writer of the twentieth century, and although he wrote some incredible novels, he became one of my favorite writers as I realized what an odd bird he was. He was quite tall (6′ 4½”) -Virginia Woolf once described him as a “gigantic grasshopper”. After contracting an eye condition called keratitis in his teens, he was nearly blind for a while, and throughout his life, people debated whether his eyesight had significantly improved or if he had just begun memorizing writings to give everyone the impression that it did. Briefly, he taught French to Eric Blair (George Orwell), and his students remembered him as a bad teacher because he couldn’t manage the classroom. His first wife, Maria, was bisexual, and the two of them were part of a long-term affair with writer Mary Hutchinson. On his deathbed, he asked his wife to shoot him up with LSD (meaning he was tripping when he left the world) – this day being November 22, 1963, the same day that C. S. Lewis and JFK died. In the time leading up to his death, he wrote his final book, a great one called Island. This book is a utopian fiction novel, and it contains one of my favorite literary passages.
Lightly, child, lightly. You’ve got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them… So throw away all of your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling. On tiptoes; and no luggage, not even a sponge bag. Completely unencumbered.
Although its context is important, this passage has shaped me and spread to many areas of my life since I read it years ago. As we enter into this new year, maybe you’re holding tightly onto moments you’re proud of and moments you’d like to forget, your feet are in a different position than where you started because time inevitably moves you in some direction. Maybe you’re numb or overwhelmed, and you’re finding it increasingly difficult to exist anywhere in-between. My desire as we walk together into 2021 is to encourage you, and myself, to exist lightly. To breathe and pursue and laugh and rage and eat and love with a lightness that doesn’t negate passion or depth but that frees you into the fullness of it all.
Lightly,
Leah
Leah Kepley, M.Ed. 