Change, Stories, and the Enemy of the Good

I’m over sacrifice.

In fiction, that is. I’m not quite as excited as I used to be about climaxes where Mr. Spock gasps out his last words on the other side of the radioactivity-shielding glass or Harry Potter whips off his Invisibility Cloak in the middle of a Death Eater meeting or even where Dr. House gives up his ordinary life for the sake of his best friend. I don’t want dramatic gestures:  not even Dexter refusing to hurt his foster sister Deb or Sherlock Holmes shedding a tear as he watches Watson from his post-Reichenbach hidey-hole.

Those things don’t interest me (well, certainly not as much as they did before) because I don’t feel that they have anything new to say to me. And I’m not sure I enjoy what they do say.

Fiction, by its nature, distills life into a vivid series of moments, concentrating emotions and thoughts so they can be painted bright across the page or screen. Sometimes, this means that fiction has trouble portraying subtler, more complex feelings or evoking broad perspectives.

The trouble with Spock and Harry is that if your model of goodness is giving up your own well-being for the sake of others in big flashy set-pieces, it’s going to be awfully difficult to be good. Big flashy set-pieces aren’t so obviously The Big Moment  in real life, for one thing. There’s no dramatic swelling music or timer showing only ten minutes left in the film — no guarantee that if you throw everything into the ring right now, a more dire moment won’t come along later, making all your present effort for nothing.

But it’s also that life just doesn’t work that way. It’s not about the one transforming experience you may or may not have that gives your whole existence meaning. It’s about living.

In Hebrew school, I was surprised to learn that halakha (Jewish law) treats  the Sabbath as the most important Jewish holiday. You’d think that honour would fall to something more special, like Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, or Passover, the celebration of the birth of the Jewish nation and its redemption by G-d. By contrast, the Sabbath turns up at the end of every week. And yet, if Yom Kippur happens to fall on the Sabbath, the laws of the latter overrule those of the former.

It’s precisely the fact that the Sabbath does show up every week that makes it most important. As anyone who’s ever made a New Year’s resolution knows, putting together the effort to do something really big and special once is pretty easy. It’s relatively easy to go to the gym for a day, to ride your bike to work one morning, or to give up coffee for 24 hours. It’s hard to go to the gym every day for a year even when you feel sick or you just want to curl up and finish your book or you bought Netflix; it’s hard to ride your bike to work every morning even when it snows and it wouldn’t be horrible, not really, to take the subway just this once. And as for never drinking coffee again? Most of the bean-iacs I know would go bonkers (bean-kers?).

But unfortunately, going to the gym or riding your bike or kicking your caffeine habit for one day aren’t going to have the effect that made you want to undertake them in the first place. If you want to get fit or save money or stop relying on stimulants, you need to make a permanent lifestyle change. Every day. Even when you don’t feel like it, or other things go wrong. It’s so easy to leave change to perfect-you: heroic you. Protagonist you. The you who isn’t busy or tired or omigosh, maybe coming down with something, is my throat scratchy? *swallows again* It is scratchy. It’s totally scratchy. I’d better take it easy if I don’t want to get sick…

Perfect-you is good at some things. She’s the one who’d definitely sacrifice herself to Voldemort to save the wizarding community, no questions asked. And she’s the best Jew ever for one day on Yom Kippur.

But nobody is actually friends with perfect-you for the excellent reason that she exists only for extremely short periods. 99.9% of your life, you’re plain old imperfect-you. Who didn’t get enough sleep last night. And who has to send eight e-mails, finish a project for work, get groceries, wash the dishes, and find time to get a haircut, all by tomorrow. And who really, really deserves a break, just this once. (The difficult part is that imperfect-you almost always really deserves a break.)

Very few people care how good a person perfect-you is. Sure, the starship full of colleagues and cadets perfect-you saved by sacrificing herself to fix the warp engine probably likes her a lot. But they don’t see her very often, so for most of their lives, they don’t really care what she does. Imperfect-you, on the other hand, is bumbling around them every day. They’re stuck with her. It matters to them whether she’s good or not.

The everyday is so important because that’s what shapes imperfect-you, or what imperfect-you shapes, or both.

To put it another way, making a single, dramatic gesture requires surprisingly little in the way of lasting change. Jumping out of a plane, parachute notwithstanding, was really scary for me. It still is. But in some ways, it was easy. I didn’t need to become brave enough to jump for my entire life. I just needed to be brave enough for the two seconds it took to actually do it. After that, I could go back to being scared.

Sometimes, when I want to accomplish an immediate goal (like going skydiving), two-second change is okay. But I want most of the changes I make to my life to last longer than that. I want to be fit, have good sleep hygiene, be more confident in my social skills, and be better to other people for always, not just for the next two seconds.

So I’m interested in stories that show me the challenges and negotiations inherent in this kind of long-term change. The Good Wife is one. The Fire and Thorns series is another.

But I’m not sure how to write those kinds of stories. They pose a daunting challenge, because it’s so much easier to write that crisp, clear, climactic scene in which the protagonist’s dichotomic choice has a clear meaning than to show a subtle, complex journey that might not have an obvious destination or even an endpoint.

Perfect-me, I’m sure, could set the ideal words on paper without having to go back and revise the heck out of her first draft. But I guess imperfect-me will have to struggle with it and muddle through the drafts.