Maybe I’m late to the game, but I recently watched, for the first time, Philip Kaufman’s 1988 film The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Now, I can’t stop thinking about the interplay of lightness and heaviness in my own life.
The basic idea of the film is that what occurs in this life, our only life, will never occur again. And with that comes a lightness, which can become unbearable.
Milan Kundera, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, said, “the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.”
The opposite philosophy is eternal recurrence, the notion that events have already occurred and will occur again. Nietzsche believed that eternal recurrence could feel light or heavy, depending on one’s perspective. To some, it could feel like a burden that what is happening has already happened and will happen again (I’m raising my hand! Me! Me!), and to others, that recurrence could be seen as beneficial.
In the film, Tomas and his lover Sabina embrace the lightness. Tomas seeks sex through extramarital affairs, and Sabina chooses betrayal when her lovers ask commitment of her. Tomas’s wife Teresa, on the other hand, finds the lightness too unbearable, and wishes she could be more like Tomas.
For me, predictability feels heavy and stifling; the idea of eternal recurrence gives me a feeling of nihilism.
But I’ve also felt the unsettling lightness of being. When I taught internationally, I moved between the US, Turkey, Spain, Turkey, and back to the US all within the span of five years. I started to feel “lighter than air,” as if my choices and my existence were becoming increasingly “insignificant,” simply because I was free to make major life choices whenever I wanted. I began to feel unmoored and untethered to any sense of land, home, country, people, myself, my center. In hindsight, this was probably the reason I moved back to the states 10 years ago.
On the flip side, heaviness for me often comes in the form of society’s recurrences – living the life society or my parents wanted me to live, ie, settling down in one place with a mortgage, a steady job, chauffeuring my daughter to gymnastics, playdates, birthday parties. Being locked into choices by finance, situation, convenience. This all feels heavy to me.
When I bought my first home, I was 39 with a one-year-old daughter. When I walked into my new backyard and saw zinnias in the flowerbed, I was brought to my knees with heaviness. I felt like I had walked into my father’s life 30 years ago: the house, the garden, the daughter, the nostalgia for bygone days.
I explore the heaviness I felt upon seeing those zinnias in a poem due to be published this spring by Front Range Review:
I didn’t plant them here in the shady corner of my backyard,
excerpt from: “Zinnias Grow in My Adult Garden”
the only flowers left behind by the couple who sold me this house.
It’s late summer and they’re tired of suntracking.
Spindly stems lie across pavers like necks in a guillotine.
Heads rest outside the flower bed, petals paused mid explosion.
Petals as spokes lodged in my throat…
Straight from crazy adventures all over the world, I had walked into a recurrence of my dad’s life, one I’d witnessed and already experienced as a child in my own life.
Ironically, parenting has also provided a myriad of recurrences from my own childhood that often give me a (bearable) lightness. I explore this yin-yang of heaviness/lightness in an essay I wrote about my backyard published by Mothers Always Write (2020):
“I have many moments now when I look at the fence or the lawnmower in my urban backyard and can’t believe the places I’ve been have led me to this. I’ve successfully navigated wildernesses all over the world, and now I spend my leisure time in a small, enclosed, un-wild space. What kind of adventure is this? Won’t I suffocate without any surprises?”
excerpt from “My Little Patch of Wild”
By the end of the essay, however, I arrive at a lightness that comes from witnessing my daughter’s lightness (for none of this is recurrence for her!):
“She reminds me that nature’s surprises can be found in the smallest of places. And, our daily adventures feed me more than I imagined. Witnessing her first encounters with nature feels like Queen Anne’s lace stirring in a breeze I’d almost forgotten.”
excerpt from “My Little Patch of Wild”
So what did I glean from my date with The Unbearable Lightness of Being?
That each choice, each experience, bears this yin-yang of heaviness and lightness, of burden and freedom. (Lord knows parenting is in the top five!)
And as I find myself interviewing for international teaching jobs again, ten years after returning unmoored, that familiar (unbearable) lightness has reared its head.
I think about this one life we’re given, this empty slate upon which we write our path through countless choices, and I wonder where my next one will take me. Of course I worry that it won’t be the “right” choice. But I try to embrace Tomas’s surrender to the lightness: “There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there’s no basis of comparison.”
So here I go! Here we all go!
Caroline N. Simpson 