Wendell Berry’s Antidote to Second Guessing

Sending our oldest daughter to college and retiring from homeschooling this fall have elicited more sadness from my husband and me than we expected–even though this is a natural change and taking steps to become more independent is truly a good thing for our kids. Still we are grieving the passing of the stage in our lives when all our children were home, a stage I never really imagined could end while my kids were little.

There’s a poem from Wendell Berry’s collection of Sabbath poems that has been oddly comforting to me. In the poem, Berry describes sitting on the porch in the evening with his dad:

When my father was an old man

past eighty years, we sat together

on the porch in silence 

in the dark. Finally he said, 

“Well, I have had a wonderful life,”

adding after a long pause, 

“and I have had nothing

to do with it!” We were silent

for a while again. And then I asked, 

“Well, do you believe in the

‘informed decision’?” He thought

some more, and at last said

out of the darkness: “Naw!”

I love imagining these two old men sitting in rocking chairs on the front porch of Berry’s Kentucky farmhouse, watching the sky grow dark, and I love that Berry’s dad sums up his life as wonderful and that he gives himself no credit for it. Berry’s dad was a lawyer and a farmer and the father of four children. Considering that Wendell Berry was born in 1934, his father must have lived through WWI, the Great Depression, and WWII. He certainly faced struggle and heartache. As my grandma would have said, “That’s a lot of water under the bridge.”

When I am eighty years old, I hope I feel like Wendell Berry’s elderly dad. When I’m eighty, I want to look at my family and my home with a heart full of gratitude. I hope I remember my forty-something self the way I look back at my teenaged and twenty-something self—like I was trying hard, but there was so much I didn’t know, and yet God was so kind to me in my ignorance. I hope that I am sitting on the porch with my daughters when I am eighty!

In Jayber Crow, Berry’s novel about a small-town barber, the main character eventually leaves his barber shop and retires to a small cabin on a river. Recalling his life and the choices he made, he muses, “And so when I have thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have been only on the edge of it, carried along. Is this because we are in an eternal story that is happening partly in time?” (322). Like Berry’s dad, Jayber Crow takes no credit for his life. Life is like rowing a boat on a foggy river—it’s beautiful and a little scary, and most of the time, you can only see what is right in front of you. You are being carried along in the mist by the current, and sometimes when you catch a fish, you have to plunge your hand into the total darkness to pull it up out of the water. 

In this time of transition, with one child newly in college and all my kids in school now, I’ve been tempted both to cling to past seasons and to second guess my choices when challenges have inevitably arisen, but second guessing only steals my joy and keeps me from meeting those challenges with courage and reliance on God. I want to have the trusting and grateful perspective of Wendell Berry’s dad, like Jayber Crow’s sense that we are really living in an eternal story that is only partly happening in time. We are a tiny piece of God’s big story, and we make our choices in faith, knowing that we can only see the tiny piece of river right in front of us. 

In the Sabbath poem, Berry says that his dad really did make a choice that influenced his life, but only one. 

He chose, imperfectly as we must, 

the rule of love, and learned

through years of light what darkly

he had chosen: his life, his place, 

our place, our lives. 

As a young man, the elder Mr. Berry chose “the rule of love,” and “to be true to the heart’s one choice / is the long labor of the mind.” We choose darkly and then the years that follow reveal joys and sorrows, challenges both foreseen and unforeseen. This is a good way to live, to faithfully give oneself without second guessing to “the rule of love” and “the long labor of the mind.”