The great danger is to stand motionless on the bank as the river of your life rushes by. It is not easy, learning how to stop waiting and start living; not easy not to waste your life; not easy knowing whether or not how you spend your time and mind and love is worthy of the improbable fact that you, against the vastly greater odds otherwise, exist.

And yet to the unnerving question pulsating beneath everything — Why you? — the only answer is your life, lived.

Emily Ogden hones the blade of that question in the very first sentence of one of the essays in her altogether wonderful collection On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays (public library):

Is your boat also becalmed? I ask the authors of my books. Your commitments made, your loves chosen, did the wind drop? Did you wonder whether you were meant to wait for the next breeze, or whether you should row for your life?

With an eye to a fear the poet Mary Ruefle once named with her typical winking poignancy — “the deep-seated uneasiness surrounding the possibility that one day it will be revealed that I consecrated my life to an imbecility” — Ogden observes the fractal nature of this fundamental fear, branching into every aspect of what and whom we devote ourselves to. She writes:

In my attitude to these loves of my life, I find the same mixture of conviction and shame. I am devoted. I am embarrassed by my devotion. I cannot help but envision the contemptuous face of the one who sees my idol as a lump of clay.

Suppose a life that might, or might not, be consecrated to an imbecility. What then? What answers are there, beyond trying to answer with a certainty that can never be secured?… To put mattering in the form of a question concedes too much. The question mark’s business with me will never be finished. It stands like a cow in the road, uncomprehending, unmoving.

For my part, I stand with the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska: “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems,” she wrote in her splendid poem “Possibilities.” I prefer the absurdity of devotion to the absurdity of indifference.

At the heart of devotion is a recognition that the reality of the other — whether or not you understand it, that is, can extract personal meaning from it — matters. Iris Murdoch captured this in what remains the finest definition of love I have encountered: “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.”

Ogden considers the poems of Emily Dickinson — those great love letters to reality — as a paragon of art that “evades the demand for ultimate meaning,” an opening something “that will not come to a point.” In Dickinson’s poem “A Bird, came down the Walk,” she observes, the bird is not the bird of the Romantics that sings and symbolizes, not the bird of divinations, but a creature occupied with the “prosaic things” of its own life met on its own terms: surviving, weighing its wants against its needs. Ogden writes:

John Keats’s nightingale warbles continuously across centuries. Walt Whitman’s thrush mourns Abraham Lincoln. Dickinson’s robin comes up close and gets about the work of surviving. This poem is about watching a series of alien troubles managed and dispatched. If poets are like birds, then on the view of this poem, it is not because they sing; it is because they mind their own business. The poem goes down the walk. It does not know I saw. It does not ask itself whether I think it matters. My doubt will not annihilate it.

Each existence — yours, mine — is a living poem and every experience in it is, if we let it be, a bird. Its business is its own. Our business is not interpretation or rumination but observation, integration, devotion to what is — pure presence, without fear or judgment or the impulse for control, with reality and the infinities nested within it: all those realities different from our own, beyond it, never fully apprehended by means of reason, reachable only, and barely, by love.

This requires what Iris Murdoch so memorably termed “unselfing” — the same difficult practice that offers the best relief I know for the clutch of selfing that is most suffering.

Ogden writes:

The other day I watched a song sparrow perched on the topmost point of my arched bean trellis, feathers on his striped throat erect, his body the trumpet of his territorial call. The entirety of the tiny body became the huge sound. I rejoiced for him; I took a total interest in his interest in singing. In a similar way, I take comfort in walking my hound dog. His is a different world from mine, but one equally organized by keen preferences. Because of what he can smell, areas of grass that seem undifferentiated to me are intensely important to him. Rattled by the passing of another dog, he will carpet the affected area with his snuffling, pulling in the air so hard and quick that his whole snout shakes. Looking back at you from a wild face is striving and a wish for sequence; not, however, a striving or a wish for sequence that is like yours. You can follow along with a different mathematics; you still get to calculate, but not about yourself. It is only because the animal pursues a real project, and not an idle dream, that watching it is a relief.

We don’t know what it is like to be any creature other than ourselves — the bird, the dog, the person we love. The great triumph is to let the fantasy of understanding go and love anyway.