Musing Interruptus is a podcast for sharing thoughts and stories and enjoying idiomatic phrases and words. You can read along; the transcription is in the description of this episode. The idiomatic expressions are in italics. Try to get the meaning from the context and then look them up to see if you were right. If you like it, share it, but more importantly, continue the conversation. The music is called Down by the Bank by Blue Dot.
I’m Renée Valentina and this is Musing Interruptus. Welcome, pull up a chair next to me. Today, Paris, Pancakes, and Platitudes.
Es muss sein means it must be. I read this phrase in the Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. It was recommended by a new love interest. At the time, he was more interested than I was. I was happy to meet him. I was happier to jump from El Rayuela to the Unbearable Lightness of Being until I wasn’t. I read this book during one of my first and biggest crises as an adult. An important relationship had ended. I had just graduated from college and right off the bat, six months in at my first non-teaching job, my mental health was devastated by the subject matter at hand, prevention, and awareness of human trafficking. The guilt from feeling less than adequate to face both processes was enough to overwhelm anyone. I was sure I had failed my first task adulting. So overall, a perfect storm in my head came out of my eyes and darkened my days. As a person who enjoys dreary rainy afternoons, I became acutely aware of the difference between enjoying the quiet and relaxing rain, the chaos limited by fuzzy edges characterizing a summer storm, and the feeling I resented, the colors of my life were gone. I especially resented the young man who said the sparkle in my eyes was lost. He happened to be part of the other half of the relationship that didn’t work out. I think he wasn’t wrong, I also think he said it out of spite. I didn’t know they sparkled to begin with, and I had lost that. Where? Was there a lost and found? Once lost, always lost? Can it grow back? I was just messing everything up, left and right.
There is an opportunity cost to being true to your values and self, much is at the expense of desire. 2007 was a time when guilt held my pieces together more than the muscles, tendons, and ligaments. I would have given anything to taste lightness and happiness, a moment on my lips. I wanted to be light. I imagined being a warrior of the light. I knew I had to build over what had seemingly so easily crumbled. Erecting a building, let alone a city in the face of faithlessness is hard enough. I felt I had to rebuild my life, shattered, too fragile to begin with.
Es muss sein was the reminder of what must be, will be. What isn’t should be let go. This played into my most private thoughts on the metaphysical plane. I would not allow myself to become entrenched in obsession or guilt. There was a heaviness I wanted to abandon. I resolved I would strike a balance between determination and organic growth and development. I understood a one-track mind would not take me where I wanted to go, nor would passiveness. Holding on to work, love, people, expectations, and duty, would weigh me down. The only thing I was sure of, is I was es muss sein, the rest would be up to my capacity of rediscovery. So today, I will share a story of Paris, pancakes and platitudes.
People and places can feel es muss sein. The feeling is a marriage between fixation and want. Cities can call to you, and so can forests and bodies of water, for some, even the arid or semi-arid beckon to be visited and inhabited. People can also be meant to be. In Mario Puzo's The Godfather, the description offered is of being hit by lightning. I don’t know if it is lightning, but intuit
