The Best or Most True

Rachel has a notebook called The Best or Most True. I like this because:
1) It's simple.
2) Small notebooks that can be thrown anywhere and used frequently are important. For remembering.
3) Remembering best and most true things is important. Less necessary to recall worst and dishonest things.
4) I like lists.
5) Write it down to let it go, maybe? Or to hold on? Both.
6) Reflection: not like Narcissus, nor Bloody Mary. Like Mulan.

That day, the best / most true I had was:

Give your next 4 pennies away. (...as my four pennies sat staring at me on the table at Mama's. Who needs em?)

I also put in one of my favorite quotes, by Zadie Smith:
The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.

I opine that most of what we write down is about best and most true, or its absence. Thinking we have found it, realizing we haven't, that we don't have anything. What is that Socrates quote, "i am the wisest man alive, for all i know is that i know nothing"? That's still something, old boy.

I admit that I don't know exactly what attracts me to the Zadie Smith quote. It always comes back to me when I think about what it means to love. It's from the perspective of a character in "On Beauty," a mother who is in the process of cleaning her teenage son's room. She goes on to describe the sheer mass of material one accumulates through relationships -- photos, clothes, music. Possessions, property, attachments. It's a heavy burden to bear, the physical weight of love. Smile and frown lines on skin, silky dark stretch marks, raised or concave scars, painful muscles and joints, even hangovers, to the extreme of organ donation. It might seem negative, these changes the body undergoes to be alive, to live, to survive the awesome power of love; due to that power, the visceral shove of life leaves tangible evidence behind. I want to see the marks there attesting to the reality of my experiences, my mistakes, my passage through time and space. We don't live under bell jars like so many McDonald's french fries, remaining perfectly whole and untouched over time (weirdly, this reference to the experiment on preservatives during the credits of "Supersize Me" also makes me think of Botox?).

So love takes its toll: I can't shake the belief it's the only way to live, to lose, to hurt, to falter and die and be happy, to matter. It can be so uncomfortable to look straight in the eyes of that "best or most true" thing. My (must include qualifiers: unschooled, outsider's, comparative-minded, American, progressive, very possibly inaccurate) interpretation of Muhammad's use of the word "muslim" is that as true believers in human potential, we "submit" to the power of love. I can only hope someday to look around the room of my teenage child and sigh in frustration, to look down at a body pockmarked by the risks I've taken and see their divots, a reminder of the extent to which I have lived. That's love, and it doesn't set you free -- it can't leave because it's part of you.