A friend wrote me an email about architecture and the art (curse?) of feeling so foreign right at home. And he closed with a summary of our recent political conversation: In retrospect, he said, I was pretty pragmatic. He unveiled it like a resigned, grownup lesson for himself. And even in writing, it had this gonging echo of disappointment around it; This echo I can’t unhear. And it bothers me. I feel like most of my life has been pretty idealistic. There are whole armies of people who have known me, who would laugh at the description of me as Pragmatic. But I think of the term and how hard I’ve actually worked to make ground toward it. So why does it feel like such a sad arrival?

I started in politics when I was just a kid. Not quite 22 and I believed everything anyone in the party told me. I thought Democrats were faceless devils; And for years I worked at that pace, to that tempo. I lost - fortunately, only temporarily - friendships for my fervor and mostly sacrificed my personal life in its pursuit. And the thing is, you can’t do this as a pragmatist. If you’re not an idealist, if you can’t Truly believe that So Much rides on the next election and that you CAN Truly win (And believe me, you’ve no idea the faith and hope that takes as a Republican in a state blue to its core), you can’t do this. You’re sunk. You can’t wager everything you have on potential as a pragmatist. That would only allow moderation, incrementalism…and even Democrats can’t win here on that fuel.

Almost a decade in, I started to understand this. I gave up a little faith in some of the commanders I had followed in to battle and started to see the humanity of the generals on the other side. I started to decipher the good in both and the bad in both and maybe most importantly how closely we actually aligned on most issues; How equally admirable the motivation was on both sides, usually. Unless it was Machiavellian. Was it the worthy in both parties that made me want to quit or the fallible? The manipulative efforts and constant opportunism? Or the purity tests and maligning of the reasonable?

I sum it up like this sometimes: The cost of idealism, at least in my experience, was that the ends always justified the means. And I’ll tell you this, It became a very depressing way to live to wake up and head straight for every news source praying that overnight your enemy had made a misstep you could exploit (to good end, you justified) OR a situation had arose that might set your team up for benefit. Every day it was this: Waiting and waiting and waiting for them to make a mistake - nefarious or truly accidental - that might give you a foothold. Maybe just as importantly, praying that you didn’t miss it when they did. It’s hard to explain the pressure of keeping this watch. There’s a line in an old West Wing episode. Josh or Toby, I think, says something to the effect of: “We talk about enemies a lot more than we used to.” That’s about it.

Yesterday morning I went for a long walk, as fast as I could in this rink of a city. Past the houses that leave their holiday displays up too long and disappoint me, past the apartments and seasonally abandoned cars and lotto corner stores. To the grey lake without any sounds at all and back up the hill. People don’t know what that means here; How purposefully each foot must be planted. Firmly enough to stick, not aggressively enough to provoke the ice that is winning this winter. Every street is a stubborn luge; Every sidewalk the frozen moon. There are no flat surfaces anymore - it’s all slickness, all craters and peaks. By now, you’ve learned to navigate.

And somewhere on this walk, it obviously becomes a metaphor and I start thinking again on pragmatism. Not your political variety. Personal pragmatism. I hold up Now and Twelve Months Ago. Think of how the past year has delivered a graduate course on what is practical, what is illusion. I am content now with less; Let’s put it a different way - I am contented now by more of the right things. I very seldom initiate a word to you. I’ll hear from you when I do and you’ll wade in as deep as you want to. These truths are truths are truths no matter my campaign, I finally understand. And there is peace in that, in not needing to convince you to do anything. Time was, I wanted to catch men by the tail, eat them live. One bite. And after I consumed you, it was all that old waiting for missteps, wasn’t it? When did they become the enemy?

Now, I don’t see what I should expect beyond what you already are. I lose my footing on a iced trench three steps from the corner of Emerson and think: Would that old idealist say you are winning the war or giving up the fight? It feels so much like the former, but what do I know about fact from feeling. Let’s look at my hardline years and marvel at my unarguable list of right and unnacceptable. Let’s wonder why I expected so so so much in everyone. Somewhere in there, a conversion took place, is still taking place - one currency to another and I believe this one is more valuable but maybe that is just the pragmatist in me talking. What I still don’t understand is how much of the idealist to keep alive. Do you drown him within an inch of his life? A foot? A mile?

Maybe pragmatism is the inevitable result of experience, of paying attention. Have the years worn us down or built us up? That’s what I always cannot determine. Some days, I do troll a boatload of illegal words around slowly. There’s no place to dock these thoughts that climb my walls and write themselves across the milkyway and out on to my arms. But I don’t know if that is a bad thing. Was there ever land for them, really? Mostly, I say nothing all, until the time is right. Tread water until I learn to float silently. I’ve rarely understood that that was an option in life. And yet, sometimes, I just ride beside you and lie beside you and walk bare foot through your house and say no words. And my mind is blown at the fact that somehow, in time, most of what needs to still gets known.

Maybe that’s the point – maybe it’s not pragmatism so much as a realistic sense of place, of power. For all our yelling, did we ever really convince anyone of anything?  I’ll take this quiet.

In the latest and earliest hours, I’ve begun to notice a noise against the windows that flank my bed, which is still empty for now. Tiny and tinny. Like audible shadows of the frozen branches that toss their arms up and sway nearby but don’t quite touch. Maybe they do when no one is watching. When we’re supposed to be sleeping.  I think, if it wasn’t this quiet, I’d never hear them at all.