The Art of Giving Up
In my university days I was very much into the band The Postal Service and their only album Give Up. An emotional rollercoaster of heartfelt, heartbroken lyrics and cool quirky electronica beats. You’ve probably heard their song “Such Great Heights” or the acoustic cover of it which was all over the place in the early 2000s.
When I was at uni, I was passionate about poetry, writing all day long, reading all day long and going on walks in the woods. At one point at uni, I was in a very brief relationship with a totally useless boy. I remember once talking to him about the future after uni and he said he wanted to be a lecturer in History. I had already been thinking about becoming a lecturer in English, especially Creative Writing which was my main passion. We talked, with some extreme naivety, about becoming lecturers together, that would be a path into adulthood. I remember the conversation clearer than many details of our relationship. We were in a Pizza Hut having just been to the cinema to see one of the Matrix sequels.
The boy, utterly useless at everything, did help me think about being a lecturer as a career and to dream of one day doing a Masters, then a PhD then being a lecturer and poet. I did the Masters straight after my undergrad degree and then over the years I’ve held on to this ideal plan, in the face of a lot of change, in the face of new relationships and moving to new places. In a way, it has led me to working in the world of Higher Education (behind the scenes, not as a lecturer) which I’ve been doing for a long time now. I’ve often thought, well I’m already within the world of University work, I could easily hop over and be a lecturer. It’s just that easy…!
Even as recently as a few months ago I was once again looking into PhDs. Each time I have, I am comforted with lots of warnings from people, lots of questions about whether I truly want to do it. I speak to people who have done then, people who have quit them, people who are academics who tell me to enjoy my life as it is. The cost, the time, the fact there’s no guarantee of it getting me a job afterwards. These things shut me down each time and my scatterbrain goes off to find something else to think about for a bit.
It’s funny, isn’t it? Some things are hard to give up, some things just drift away on the next tide without you really realising.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
“One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop
There is losing something, and there is giving it up. Elizabeth Bishop in her most famous poem One Art is telling us to not just to give things up, but to get used to losing things. For me, the poem is an extension of that album title, Give Up, not just give up what you can control, give up on trying to control anything.
This life plan I had, this idea from decades ago has steered me in a certain direction, brought me to where I am today. That doesn’t mean I need to keep at it, keep trying to make it happen when I’m not sure it would fit in with my current life very well, if at all.
When you start trying to make things work and things just become multitudinously ever more complex, the root cause is the thing itself, the thing itself probably isn’t the right decision. Not just because of how complex it is, but also because of how you feel about it. Everything is complicated to a certain extent, but things often only feel complicated when there’s other stuff going on, for example when you know, deep down, you don’t actually want to do the thing.
Giving something up, losing something, almost anything will not bring disaster.
The One Big Thing
When you sit back and think about the troubles this one big thing is causing and what is going on behind the scenes, you realise things. With me and the PhD, initially it was about getting more status, it was about achieving something big, switching my title to Dr on the online forms. It was about having concentrated time to write, about working with people to share my passion about writing, having a steady job afterwards, it was about having a place for me where I was accepted.
In a way, if all of this had been about becoming a doctor in biochemistry, no doubt I would have been given a grant to do my research and I would have ended up lecturing somewhere. However, because governments and multinational pharmaceutical companies rarely fund grants for poets, I’m not in that position.
All of those things I mentioned above are very possible to have without doing a PhD, cheaper as well with less stress and less risk. I think I need to gently question this need I have to seek status, and achieve something big, haven’t I done lots of big things already? Maybe I could do more, big exciting creative things without having to pay 5 grand a year to a university to do it. Aren’t I free to explore the creative paths I want to without having to have supervision meetings justifying what I’m doing, without this one subject that I need to dig within, I can explore anything that takes my fancy.
One of the warnings I kept receiving over and over was that there was no guarantee I would get a job as a lecturer even when I had finished the PhD, no guarantee I could teach as I was studying. I asked myself what did it look like to just let that idea of doing the PhD go? And how did I feel about the potential of doing that? Is it upsetting or is it a relief? Though initially a bit crestfallen, I think I’m feeling a bit relieved about it. Maybe it’ll come back again down the line, and maybe at that time I will be in a different position and it’ll make more sense. But right now, it’s not quite.
The Hot Air Balloon
There’s a metaphor around giving up that I think about often. The idea of holding onto a rope attached to a hot air balloon. Picture it, you’re standing on the ground like normal, and you’re holding onto the rope as someone in the hot air balloon told you to. Soon enough the balloon starts to bob around, then a wind catches it and it starts to rise up into the air. The people in the balloon aren’t in danger, in fact they’re having a great time and they’ve forgotten all about you standing there holding the rope, aware that at some point you’ll be lifted off the ground. At what point do you let go of the rope? Do you ever let go? At some point in your mind it becomes safer for you to just hold on and see what happens. You’ve gone too far now, you’re high in the air and you have to hold on or you’ll fall. That’s certainly how it feels when you commit to something for a long time, when you try and try to make it work and yet it just doesn’t end up being the right thing. You overcommit to convince yourself it’s the right thing, even though you sort of know it isn’t.
Just to let you know, if you let go of the rope, you won’t fall. There are rarely such catastrophic consequences for deciding to stop doing something. Maybe someone else will be a bit disappointed, maybe you’ll feel guilty about letting someone down. Maybe you’ll lose a deposit on something you’ve paid for. None of that is really the end of the world. It’s just how life is. You’ll also, ultimately, have more time. Not just because you’re not doing the thing any more, but because you’re not spending time worrying about the thing or whether you should stop doing the thing. All of that goes out the window!
Of course if this is your actual real life and you’re stuck holding a rope being pulled by a hot air balloon and you’re high up in the air in a sort of Action Movie scenario, you might need to consider what I’m saying a bit differently.
Giving up then, is a more evocative, judgement-filled way of saying moving on. On the surface they are the same thing. If you don’t move on from something, if you’re a painter and you keep painting the same picture over and over, repainting the same lines, surely you should move on for the benefit of the painting? And your own sanity. Don’t you want to paint something else? This isn’t giving up… you’ve given enough and you’re moving on.
I gave up playing the piano when I was 16, I’d been having lessons for a few years and I enjoyed it but I didn’t practise enough and eventually I gave up when I was a moody teenager. Now, decades later I love the idea of playing the piano and I would love to start up again. I’m a different person now, instead of the person who gives it up, I can become the person who goes back to it.
Nothing will stop you from going back, in the short term or even decades later if it’s the right thing for you again. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You’re acknowledging change in yourself and your situation. That’s the best course of action for yourself and your wellbeing.
You don’t want to be holding onto the rope when the hot air balloon takes off, but even if you are, you can let go, you’ll be safe, you’ll probably just feel lighter, no longer being attached to something so burdensome.
So will I give up on the PhD? I think I already have because I’m not thinking about it right now, I’m not planning to do it any time soon. Is that giving up? Not really. It’ll be there if I ever want to come back to it. Like the piano.
