One thought too many

The plan was the kind I could say out loud and feel steadier for having said, which is perhaps why I said it to my wife more than once: we would move only after I was regularized, six months into the new job, once the work was secure and some of the loans we had been carrying since Bobbi died had gotten smaller, and not a day before. That initial plan was what was ideal at the time, because I did not want to compromise her health again, and I think there was some pride in how reasonable it sounded, a plan that had accounted for everything except the person it was meant to protect.

Since the plan hinged on waiting for the perfect opportunity, that period of waiting opened up to a series of difficult situations. The house we shared with my family, which had been enough for a while, stopped being enough. She needed more space and a more controlled environment than it could give her. She applied for work in the city and was accepted, three months into my new job. That changed a lot of things and I immediately broke the initial plan.

There is a version of this story that turns it into a leap of faith, and I distrust it, partly because we still did not have the money to move, so what I actually did was take on some loans, reconsolidate a few debts, move some of them to a lower interest rate, and run through what I can only describe as a lot of possibilities and computations until I could believe that where we would land was something we could fix, or at least overcome, within three to four months. I found the apartment myself. She has told me she likes it better than where we were, and I am seeing her get better, which, more than any of the numbers, is what I was computing toward. Whatever happened in me when I broke the plan happened next to a spreadsheet. I would rather keep the math and the impulse as both sides of the same coin than let the spreadsheet disappear behind something that sounds more like faith or the work of the universe.

When I described all this to myself, there was a tiny voice objecting to it as if this decision was me bending my will toward hers, a small décréation, as if it's the self's plan yielding to someone else's suffering. That voice didn't sit well with me and I resisted the idea without being able to say why. What I managed was that I was doing it only from the perspective of trying to do the right thing even if I did not know what would happen, that I only saw it as a way to make her condition better, not as actively bending my will, and then, trailing off, I guess. Perhaps the hesitation was the most accurate part of the answer. The philosopher Bernard Williams tells of a man who can save only one of two drowning people, one of whom is his wife. He saves her. Williams argues that if the man needs to reflect on whether his actions are permissible—searching for a moral rationale either before or after the rescue—he has had "one thought too many." The love was already the reason.

Hearing that nagging voice in my head, telling me that I am merely bending my will, feels exactly like that extra thought. It is a description of the act from somewhere above it, as if a self had to overcome itself, when what I remember seeing was only her, and what would make her better—nothing in me needed overcoming. I knew then that it was a voice from the ego, surfacing as a narcissistic impulse to protect myself from suffering. That line of thought is a smokescreen of the self, trying to preserve itself against a difficult path when a visible, easier option is right there. The path of least resistance has shown itself once again, masquerading as a choice with deep moral consequence. In reality, it is a betrayal of the self I have spent years trying to build. Choosing the easier path here is choosing hypocrisy.

Yet, there is a part of me that wonders if I am being too cruel to myself. I could be wrong about that. The philosopher Simone Weil argues that true moral alignment—what she calls "grace"—doesn't feel like an agonizing battlefield of the mind. Instead, she says that when we are genuinely doing what is good, the internal struggle completely vanishes. If she is right, then the absence of friction in my choice wasn't cowardice; it means that whatever bent in me bent long before, so quietly I never noticed it happen.

That nagging voice in my head perhaps reacted semantically with the word that I used: bending. Whereas bending my will implies a willful subordination towards something I am unable to control. Seen from this perspective, it is an act of weakness, which is something the voice cannot fully accept. To move forward, it is something that I only need to acknowledge. That something in me feels weak in making this decision since I have my own aspirations and desires. Choosing a more difficult path means postponing my desires. It means more work in keeping the reins of responsibility that my free will can decide not to choose. Acknowledging this means that I am not weak. It actually means the opposite since there is much strength needed not to bend to the selfishness of the ego. The voice is only doing its job to keep me in check. It has done its job and I had done mine. In this alignment with my ego—where I understand how it works, why it reacts, and what it is doing without fighting it—I find what Weil was talking about all along. I had already applied the grace before I ever knew the concept.

When I try to name what sits underneath all of it, what I find is a rule rather than a philosopher: that I will always have to do what is best, not only for me, but also for the people I love. The best thing to do is often the hard thing to do. It almost always requires doing things I would probably rather avoid, either because I feel ill-equipped and unprepared, or simply because they are inconvenient. Recognizing that, I understand that both are merely excuses by the ego, masquerading as rational justifications for avoiding what I do not want.

The frameworks came later. The basho, the knot, attention, grace. All of them arrived retroactively. I find them afterward the way one finds the word for a feeling long after having had it, already shaped like what I did and never once consulted beforehand.

So I keep philosophizing anyway, conscious of my propensity for it, because for some time now I have not had the words for how I am, intellectually or spiritually, in the present tense, only for how I have been, and the writing is how I catch up with myself, a way to keep in touch with how I am doing and to keep myself sane while I care for another person and try to be the anchor she will most likely need, and to still be there once she is doing better. It is also how I catch myself, if I am overreaching or starting to crumble.

What I have not fully let myself take in is the limit that comes with all of this. Levinas describes the responsibility we have toward another person as infinite, something no amount of giving ever discharges, while the one who carries it stays finite, with one body and a fixed number of hours, and it might be possible that I cannot be the whole anchor, that some of what she needs will have to come from other people, or from her own returning strength, a thought I keep picking up and setting down again.