For once, there are a great many things in my life I’d rather not discuss. I don’t know how to describe the vast relational distance between my heart and anyone else’s. I can say it’s been a convergence of deluges from the past, present, and future. Again and again, I tire of explaining the same disappointments. I love people whose behavior I cannot reconcile with the stories they tell about themselves. And I’m tired of turning things I’ve survived into material. I have made a career, or something resembling one, out of telling the truth. Lately, I’ve been wondering how much of it I owe anyone if they can’t meet me with their own truth.
Avoidance, since we are on the topic, seems to be the most purchased of all the little black dresses. It’s also a peculiar kind of artistic constraint. Artists are accustomed to working within limitations. But avoiding so much else has left me thinking about one particular conversation, held downtown over port, well past nine, an hour when I’m rarely out anymore.
Someone recently told me that, after nearly a decade, they had finally acquired more humility. I believed them in that somehow still-naive, heart-on-my-sleeve way that the kids call “cringe.” Only later did I begin to suspect that this person still had miles to go.
The word humility comes from the Latin humilitas, meaning lowliness, itself derived from humus, the earth or ground. To be humble, then, is quite literally to be brought down to earth. My mom always said this phrase when she talked about someone she liked “they are very down to earth.” But when did being brought down from the clouds become a virtue?
In ancient Greece, the answer was complicated. Aristotle praised megalopsychia, or greatness of soul, the capacity to recognize one’s own worth without exaggerating it. He considered vanity, the overestimation of one’s merits, a vice, but also cautioned against underestimating one’s worth. Modesty had its place, though excessive self-abasement was hardly an ideal. The Romans similarly prized dignity, honor, and proper recognition, while humility could be associated with low social standing. Yet neither civilization was without traditions of restraint or skepticism toward pride.
Jewish scripture had long praised humility, and Christianity later made it central to its moral vision. The last would be first. The meek would inherit the earth. Greatness might be found not in rising above others, but in declining to do so.
But perhaps humility is not only a matter of knowing our own worth. Perhaps it is also the willingness to admit how little we know about anyone else’s. We are so quick to label people, to turn a handful of experiences into a verdict on their character. Difficult. Selfish. Arrogant. Unkind. We collect evidence, build our cases, and eventually mistake our conclusions for the people themselves.
There is a peculiar arrogance in believing that we have finished understanding another human being. Even when their behavior has disappointed us, even when the evidence seems overwhelming, there may still be something we haven’t seen. Humility doesn’t require us to deny what happened or excuse what hurt us. But it might ask us to leave room for the possibility that a person is more than the worst thing we know about them.
In art, humility has its own visual language. Small figures beneath enormous skies suggest the individual’s insignificance against creation’s vastness. But twentieth-century artists also began asking how little a painting could contain before it stopped being a painting at all.
Agnes Martin made delicate grids and pale fields of color, paintings that appear almost empty until we approach them. In On a Clear Day, the repetition of lines becomes something closer to meditation than decoration. She described painting as accepting “the necessity of the simple.” Robert Ryman spent decades exploring white paint, its texture, its relationship to light, and the surface beneath it. His Standard series reduces painting’s vocabulary so dramatically that we are forced to notice what remains.
And then there is Donald Judd, whose repeated geometric forms seem to refuse the artist’s hand altogether. His work asks us to consider an object without the familiar comforts of narrative or representation.
Yet this simplicity does not necessarily prove humility. Restraint can express discipline, but it can also become its own form of authority. Look how little I require. Look how much I have learned to do without. I see something similar in friends who never ask for help or admit weakness, year after year.
There is a difference between appearing humble and being humble. A person might speak softly while holding themselves above everyone in the room. Modesty can be performed as convincingly as arrogance. Perhaps humility has less to do with how small we make ourselves than with how much room we leave for another person’s experience.
The hours of my life have been running thin lately. I can almost see them curling inward like the roly-polies that kept me company as a child, drawing themselves into little armored balls at the slightest disturbance. I wonder whether I’ve learned to do the same.
What is the line between humility and an absence of growth? Between accepting that we may be wrong and refusing to become anything different? I think humility asks us to entertain the possibility that the person we believe ourselves to be could disappear. Not through death, necessarily, but through the slow surrender of the labels we’ve attached to ourselves. Good. Generous. Misunderstood. Right.
Over and over, the hours roll forward, and we are asked to reconsider what we thought we knew. What if I am not as I am, or seem, or was?
The rain keeps coming. The ground takes on more water than it can hold, and what once seemed solid begins to shift. I think of the deluges I’ve been avoiding describing, how quickly a few days can overturn years of certainty.
Perhaps humility is knowing that our most tightly held convictions can be swept away. That a few good days, a few good emotions, or a few good decisions to trust life and the whole process just for the hell of it might challenge everything we thought we understood. That all the evidence we have collected about the world, and all the conclusions we have drawn from it, might not be the whole story.
I have spent much of my life trying to make myself understood. As a writer, a mother, and a woman in relationships that have sometimes demanded far more explanation than understanding, I have developed an almost professional fluency in defending my intentions.
I wonder how much more of my life I want to spend explaining myself to people who have already decided who I am. And I wonder how often I’ve done the same to them, mistaking a judgment for an understanding, a pattern for a permanent identity.
Humility asks us to revisit the conclusions we have reached, not only about ourselves but about one another. Perhaps it is knowing when to put down the argument, even the one we are certain we could win.
And go outside while it’s still raining.
