Road to nowhere

Anneli Rufus discusses society’s stagnation
in Stuck: Why We Can’t (or Won’t) Move On

by JULIET WATERS

The dancer Twyla Tharp wrote a book about creativity a few years back that will always have a permanent spot in my bookcase. Here she explains the difference between a rut and a groove: “A rut is when you’re spinning your wheels and staying in place; the only progress you make is in digging yourself a deeper rut. A groove is different: The wheels turn and you move forward effortlessly.”

Anneli Rufus also wrote a book I may always keep, Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto. I still agree with her point, that in its rush to make sure that everybody is part of the community, society still doesn’t appreciate the gifts that loners bring to the world. No matter how often loners become the great scientists and great artists, we continue to pathologize the introverted personality. But mostly I like Rufus’s style. She’s a cranky polemicist of the best kind.

So when I came across Stuck: Why We Can’t (or Won’t) Move On at Indigo, I couldn’t wait for a review copy. Had to have it. Now.

But The Now, according to Rufus, is one of the many things in which we can get stuck, in our plan to live a vital, productive life. That may sound like heresy these days as everyone trots off to the nearest yoga centre with his or her Jon Kabat-Zinn and Eckhart Tolle bestsellers. But can Zen become a rut?

Rufus recalls how, even while going to college in the good old punk rock days, everyone, including her, was still stuck on Kerouac and the other Buddhist cult writers. Some of us learn that we may be using these “revolutionary ideas” to rationalize our impulsivity. And some of us don’t. At the time Rufus was writing this book, society still wasn’t feeling the full consequences of living in a culture of impulsivity.

“We’re going nowhere fast” writes Rufus in the first line of Stuck. Like Tharp, she’s mostly writing about the feeling of being stuck. But Rufus is not afraid to make this a general point about contemporary society.

“We call our stuckness by a thousand words, exquisite metaphors. I’m frozen, Paralyzed. Marooned. Trapped. Enchanted. Enslaved. According to her, we’re in a rut where we pathologize every habit and use the disease model to cure every perceived addiction. Adults are not leaving their parents’ homes. People have stopped behaving responsibly.

This isn’t to say that Rufus has no sympathy for people who are stuck. She writes eloquently about being stuck in the past, in trauma. She writes acerbically, but empathetically about “people who need people,” about our most pathetic relationships and tendencies toward dependence. And she writes honestly and well about her own struggle with being stuck. In one of her most arresting confessions, she tells of a recurring cycle where she simply disappears from friendships gone bad, without an explanation, or a word of warning.

But the fundamental theme running through Stuck is that we’ve lost our cultural sense of character, of stick-with-it-ness. This isn’t so much a call for willpower as an argument that we’ve lost sense of reality, the understanding that there is no growth or evolution without suffering. No one can be in a groove from birth on. At some point, someone has to get out and push.

To be that someone is obviously Rufus’s mission. But the book as a whole is a mixed success. While you can’t help appreciating that it isn’t a self-help book full of one size fits all solutions, there’s an implicit solution running through this. Get some backbone and start moving. And, yes that’s often the best solution. Until it isn’t. Take the global economy for example. Is the solution really for everyone to just buck up and start working hard? Or does the system need some serious innovation. We’ll probably only know when—or if—we get our groove back.

STUCK: WHY WE CAN’T (OR WON’T)
MOVE ON BY ANWNELI RUFUS,
TARCHER, HC, 328 PP, $26.50