The List

Beauty, balance, justice. Just a few outstanding issues.

It is September 23. The autumn equinox.

I crossed something off my list today by submitting my complaint to the Parliamentary Ombudsman, JO. Happily, there is nothing in today’s paper for me to comment on, either.

So I get a break from it all, and that is about the sum total of what I have to say about “the incident” for today.

Sorry drama llamas. You’ll have to take your popcorn to Netflix instead. Thanks for the readership though.

For others wishing a change of pace, read on.

Even my brain sometimes needs a break. A bubble bath and a little bloomscrolling on Insta could be in order. Pumpkin desserts. Poems. Beautiful quotes. Inspiring stories. Flower arrangements. Beautiful landscapes. Kid art ideas. Maybe with a glass of wine?

I love beauty as well as sharp biting wit, you know.

A couple of days ago, a good friend suggested she would like me to write more about myself. Alyssa. The person. The woman behind the mask. What are the things that add up to who you are and why you do what you do.

As I mentioned in Conduct Your Blooming, my birthday is fast approaching. The internet is therefore explaining me to myself through a series of attractively designed squares and age-appropriate ads, informed by whatever the algorithm thinks it knows about my life.

Its current working theory seems to be: she likes flower gardens, stargazing and might need a good eye cream. Oh, and here is a legal AI.

I do confess I am quite susceptible to an attractively designed square. We should probably put that on the Alyssa-list.

From my bloomscrolling, it seems Libra season also begins today, so my feed has also acquired pop-culture checklists of stereotypical astrological traits of upcoming birthdays. Apparently my friends and the algorithm have agreed in spirit as to the next writing assignment.

Let’s see how personally I need to take this:

• Loves beauty, especially a beautiful home. Check.
• Loves balance. Check.
• Loves comfort with slippers, cozy sweaters, and roaring fireplaces. Check.
• Greatly appreciates art, nature and aesthetics. Definitely check.
• Generally diplomatic, affable, pleasant. Check.
• Can turn “one final point” into a new branch of political philosophy. Also check.
• Loves justice and fair treatment. Triple-check.
• Will go to extraordinary lengths to keep the peace… Check.

…until you mistake that effort for permission once too often, or threaten something I love. Then I trade flowers for a flamethrower. Check times infinity.

What has gotten into her? But she was so nice!

Yes. Yes, I was. For quite some time. There were numerous opportunities to appreciate it.

Now suddenly come the bewildered looks, the sudden enthusiasm for dialogue, and the people crying for their mothers. Then, I’ve apparently lost my mind. What I’ve actually lost is interest in explaining the same fucking thing again.

I came for the excellent taste and some autumn comfort food recipes. I did not expect character witnesses. But so it goes. It is eerie how much social media knows, such as when you mention you hate your curtains, and suddenly are bombarded by home textile ads.

When I do finally go nuclear, I become even more articulate, precise and pedantic.

Perhaps you’ve noticed?

This must be a particularly disappointing development for anyone who was hoping I would eventually run out of words.

I won’t, by the way.

Now today also happens to be the official Everyone Can Flourish Day, and we have been encouraged to mark it in our own way. Having spent a considerable amount of time as of late thinking and writing about what makes a life worth living, I thought it is fitting to check on the woman doing all that thinking.

I mean, somebody ought to.

The beauty section should go well. Balance may be a more delicate conversation.

(Nice thoughts, Alyssa. We are doing nice thoughts today. Cleansing breath. Exhale.)

The day itself is in balance. Today, I am just trying to recapture some of my own.

Loving balance and possessing it are, apparently, separate boxes on the list.

To write this essay I did a little Googling and found this article in a Delaware newspaper from an astronomer. Astronomy still carries many of the old names and images in its maps of the sky.

Before he starts to break down the Libra constellation into its separate stars, he points out that it is the only zodiac sign represented by an inanimate object: the scales. The scales of justice to be exact. I find something beautiful in that image. There is the weighing, the movement, the adjustment. The effort to give things their proper weight. To take into consideration all things.

Their old association very specifically connects with the autumn equinox, when the sun once occupied that part of the sky, carries an image he mentions that I love:

the “balance point of heaven.”

I love that the ancients looked up at the sky and found a way to think about how to live with one another. Even our longing for fairness has a place among the stars.

The same astronomer describes the scales as specifically representing the rational and emotional balance out of which justice should arise. That was a new thought I want to spend some time with. Ironically enough, the meaning of my name Alyssa is “rational.” Reason and feeling both have work to do. I want to understand how something works, and what it asks of the people living with it.

I notice the precision and the struggle. Both belong in the reckoning.

But the year keeps turning. Tomorrow the light will shift differently again, towards darkness. There is something reassuring about a balance we can return to, something we are allowed to keep working at.

Beauty and fierceness may seem to be opposites to some, but they have always made sense together to me. I can be furious with someone and still worry about how they are doing. I can understand the pressure they are under, see why something is difficult for them, and still need them to answer the question. I might understand that they are human, but they still have to show up. We all do.

My concern for their comfort does not conveniently switch off when it would make my life easier. Occasionally I wish it would at least take the afternoon off. But, in fairness, I give no quarter to myself either.

I see the connections. The decision and the person who will have to live with it. The precision of an argument and the struggle of the person trying to make it. Walking into a room, I am taking in the people and what is happening between them. Once I care about something enough to fight for it, I know I have to be prepared to go the whole way. Some of that is muscle memory by now.

It asks a great deal of a person. I also had other plans.

A great deal of my patience is compartmentalized restraint. Sometimes through gritted teeth. Another conversation. Yet another explanation. Another attempt to find a way forward that leaves everyone their dignity. By the time I become quite emphatic, there may have been a very long conversation that nobody else has stopped to listen to. My restraint has been taken for granted.

And then, it is enough. I am done.

The balance I crave most is reciprocity. I need that consideration to travel both ways. I need my discomfort to matter while I am still expressing it gently. Sadly, I note it seldom does. I usually get compliments for my endurance instead.

This isn’t obtuseness to me, but rather missing the point—deliberately.

I can be patient with how hard it is to put something right. But I need both of us to be trying.

Of course, I am also the person assessing myself here. I have selected the evidence and retained editorial control. Some of the people who know me may have notes and have other thoughts.

Here is one I can supply myself: I should have bought IP legal insurance last year instead of assuming my homeowners insurance covered it.

A remarkable place for me to decide that further questions were unnecessary.

IP legal insurance. Add that to the list.

If I want to be recognized accurately, I know I have to leave room for someone to tell me something about myself that I would not have included in this post. I want to be someone with whom difficult things can be discussed. That requires me to listen when I would rather defend myself, and to care about what happens after the conversation. What is it that I will do with the information I have been given?

There is no greater compliment to me than being recognized simply as myself. It can bring me to tears because it happens so seldom. I try to pay it back. Someone seeing the flaws and still wanting to make things work is a form of care I understand the most. So is someone trusting me enough to say that I could do better.

I would despise to be quietly written off as incapable of it.

One thing I do know about myself: if someone I dislike has a good idea, I will say so. I will support it. Finding something I recognize in an unexpected person gives me enormous joy, actually. That is why you have seen me agreeing here with Moderate Wille Valve, or even Liberal John Holmberg.

See what you made me do. (Just kidding.)

But I also have a lot of Trump voters in my family. That is far harder. So you could say I have had quite a lot of practice.

These are my values, of course. You are reading my list. Your mileage may vary.

Given the circumstances as of late, I’ve reflected that the scales also lead back to an old story from the Ancient Greeks about Astraea, the goddess of justice associated with the neighboring constellation Virgo that has just departed from us. She lived among human beings and remained as the world grew increasingly unjust, until she, in deep despair, too withdrew to the stars. She was said to be the last immortal to abandon the Earth.

I understand the appeal. I hired a lawyer. Her method does involve far fewer emails.

What moves me in that story is the idea that justice once lived among us. Close enough to belong to ordinary life and walk right along beside us. I find myself wondering what would have made it possible for her to stay.

That question brings me back to the things we ask of one another. How long we can keep trying. What allows affection to survive disappointment. Whether the effort to make something work is shared.

Flower lore gives Astraea’s story another image: asters, September’s birth flower, growing where her tears fell.

Flowers and an unresolved ethical question. Practically a personalized Alyssa advertisement.

But it is the tenderness of the image that stays with me. Grief and beauty occupying the same ground. I can understand that. I can be deeply disappointed in someone and still remember, with affection, what first made me glad to know them. The affection is real. So is the disappointment. Both have weight. I carry both. That too, is a kind of balance.

I want to remain capable of being surprised by something good. An unexpected kindness. A person who understands. A conversation that makes room for something no one had seen before. I want to have enough of myself available to notice when those things arrive.

And that is part of what I am doing today.

I am sharing my posts on my Facebook, but turning off the comments. The internet will have to survive without my supervision. I am just not here for it. People can come to my website and if they want to read, they have to put on their big kid pants.

Perhaps I, too, need a little distance. I have stopped short of the stars and made a home here instead, where I can put down my thoughts and find myself among them. I am monitoring the traffic, which has surprised me, and want to say thanks for stopping by.

With time, you will see that I have things of beauty to say, too. There are people I want to enjoy, ideas I want to follow, and parts of my life that deserve more than whatever attention I have left over. The woman who cares so much about what makes a life worth living would quite like to live some of it.

A beautiful room. Someone who is glad I am there. A conversation I am sorry to see end.

It is a rather ordinary wish to have beneath so much philosophy.

I am putting it on the list.