On forcing the change
On forcing the change
do I get carried along or do I stem the tide?
Lots of things are changing in real time lately: the climate, the way we use an office at work (if we go in at all), the virus that keeps mutating—so much so, that now we have to negotiate every movement out the front door.
It’s a Friday night, just barely past five-o-clock, and I’m sitting in a restaurant alone. I lingered in the car in the parking lot for about ten minutes, only a few moments ago, trying to decide what to do. I was watching the trickle of white-haired older adults sporting light blue surgical masks entering the front door. “If I’m going to chance an indoor restaurant tonight,” I thought, “I better do it now, while there are only a handful of people in the place.”
I’m in Chatham tonight for barely 24 hours. The summer rental season is kicking off in a week and our vacation house is fully booked till mid September. While we have the house to ourselves, my spouse Janyce and I are taking turns staying here alone because we can’t yet get our dog to be okay in the car on the highway long enough to make the two-hour drive.
Now I’m in a mostly empty restaurant, sitting at a white tablecloth with my cellphone, while the fans are turning slowly high up in the airy vaulted ceiling, and the candles are barely flickering on the tables. It’s still the sunny part of the day. We’ve gotten used to eating dinner this crazy early, and we go to bed a lot earlier, too, nudged by our dog who would be perfectly happy if we were all sleeping by 7pm. We’re also up by 5am these days, usually with our laptops open, drinking coffee in bed and talking. It’s just one of the many changes of the past two years, this shifting of our daily schedule.
I take a sip of my water and look down at my blinking phone. Janyce is texting me after seeing my Instagram post. “Ha! Wild rice. I ended up with pizza,” she said.
Lots of things are changing in real time lately: the climate, the way we use an office at work (if we go in at all), the virus that keeps mutating—so much so, that now we have to negotiate every movement out the front door. Should I wear my mask for this? Should I get the second booster now or wait a little longer? How safe is my gym? But how safe is it for me to not go to my gym? I’ve had two full years of sitting on the couch and my body definitely needs a change.
My son in Nashville called me yesterday while I was driving. He has a decision to make with a job offer on the table from a cool new company promising to further his music career and dangling the lure of stability in the form of benefits, 40 hours a week in the shop, and industry connections. I know what I want him to choose. Don’t give up your 20s and early 30s to the man! Stay in the gig economy longer, go to the music festivals with your friends, ride your mountain bike through the woods as often as possible. Stability can wait. Of course, that’s the exact opposite of what I would have done at his age. I was married as soon as college was over. I had kids without thinking about it. I drifted into a career that I was good at, sure, but did I love it? Did I choose it?
I watched this excellent coaching video the other day. The two women are having a conversation and one is trying to understand why making the next exciting life change is causing her to come face-to-face with a debilitating resistance when it’s not like her to be stuck like this at all. Turns out that she has conflated her grief with her fear of the unknown, two completely separate things that each demand their own distinct attention. Her coach tells her that it’s healthy to grieve the loss of something that’s ending—like your kids leaving home and starting their own lives far away. Grief is not a sign that you are making a mistake when you decide to sell the family house and move on. It’s also healthy to fear the next thing. The fear is simply your ego’s way of trying to protect you. It doesn’t mean you stop, however, it just means you make a plan before you force the change.
As much as I can feel everything in the world around me changing, some parts of my own life are not changing at all and I have this urge to force the change. I’m getting older. I want to have some true autonomy in my own life. I don’t want it to just happen to me anymore.
The writer Suleika Jaouad said it took going back into the hospital to get her to resume doing her creative work. “Intensity can be useful, but it’s also untenable,” she said. Like the musicians who can’t compose a song unless they’re heartbroken, or the poets who can’t write a line unless they’re in existential despair. Why must things be in extremis in order to create?” This is an interesting idea. But I also think that sometimes when everything around you is intense and changing, when the tide of your life is whizzing by, you can easily get stuck, too. Snagged by a stick jutting out of the rushing water and you have this choice to make while you’re hanging there. Am I going to break myself free only to continue being swept along with the current, or am I going to jump off onto shore and walk in the opposite direction?
The waiter stops over and clears my plate, asks me about dessert, pours more water into my glass. The restaurant is filling up. Time for me to drive back to the little house in the scrub pines. It’s not even 7pm yet and I can’t wait to take a shower and get into bed. I’m more than happy to give in to the predictable rhythm of my not-quite-post pandemic life. Change is coming for sure, but tonight at least, I’m still getting carried along.