On reality and reinvention
When is it time for something new?
We’re all living in the dawning reality that life as we know it has changed forever. We have to figure out what that means for us now, because there’s no going back to how it was.
“You should call your mother,” I say to my spouse Janyce while placing my hand on her knee. She’s sitting beside me in the passenger seat and we’re both drinking iced coffee as we drive down interstate 495 with the rain pelting the windshield.
“You okay if I do that now?” she says, “I thought you wanted to listen to the news?”
“No, go ahead,” I say, hitting the button on the radio to shut it off.
It’s a Thursday night and we’re returning from the Cape house, where we spent the past two work days cramped in separate small rooms with our laptops, hers on the kitchen table facing the wall, and mine propped on the tall bureau in the bedroom. We’ve recently welcomed our housekeeper back to clean our house every few weeks, grabbing our old dog and our work computers the night before and getting out of town.
“Hello Muut,” says Janyce. “I had some time and wanted to call you back. Yes, Kris is driving.”
She settles into listening on her cellphone. The hard rain outside has suddenly slowed to a soft mist and the sky is turning an eerie green, the sun diffused under a hazy cover of clouds.
It’s quiet in the car without the radio, with only the sound of the windshield wipers and Janyce saying, “uh huh” every so often. I try letting my mind wander. “What if everything was gone — my house, my job, the life I’m living right now? What would I do? What would be my very next move? What would I do after that? Where would I go?”
I read these creativity newsletters often and listen to podcasts about reinvention, about what it takes to turn a goal into a reality, and the trick they say is being able to let yourself daydream a little. First, you pretend. Then, you get some clarity. Then you act. The problem I’m having is that I haven’t yet made it past the pretend part.
One of my oldest and dearest artist friends from high school is an amazing amateur photographer and I follow his images on Instagram and Facebook. One night, in the middle of one of those early winter pandemic days, when I was wrapped in a blanket on the couch and unable to do more than scroll on my phone, I paused to stare at his most recent photo of a log cabin buried in snow. The house was set way back on a long expanse of land and bordered with majestic pine trees, surrounded by a sublime sky lit from within like a transcendentalist painting. He often talked about retiring in Maine, that was one of several dreams of his, and he would occasionally message me at night from his urban apartment in San Francisco and tell me about his plans. One day for sure he’d be there.
photo credit: gravitysf
“So what do you think about my new home?” he texted several nights later.
“What!!!! Is this yours? Where is this? Machias or Limestone?” I said.
“Signed last night. Up here. Westmanland Maine. How’s that for butch?” he said.
“So butch,” I said. “OMG you will have moose and bear in your yard. I’m coming to visit.”
I used to practice daydreaming with ease as a kid, back when it seemed so simple to follow the thread of my thoughts into a wilderness of the unknown. Now I have to actively try to push away the voice that stops me from playing with my imagination. “But what about the pain? it says. “You are a mother, and a daughter, you have a serious job, you have roots.” It’s a real challenge to imagine myself with a new persona, and pretend to be in some new surroundings living a different life, even just to see what it might feel like. I often give up right at the start and turn on the radio or pick up a book, or find something on Netflix as the laziest escape route.
Lately, I’ve been rewatching all four seasons of Transparent again on Amazon. I loved that series the first time around because of the brilliantly drawn characters. They were exaggerated and caricatured versions of the best and worst of human nature and they each had no problem reinventing themselves every year, although often with disastrous results. The series is packed with so many life issues; of transformation, of belonging, of memory, of family, of reinvention, of pain.
But see, that’s the problem I have about aging — you know too well what real pain is like because you’ve lived long enough now to have felt it acutely, and in many forms. The make-believe game of a reinvented life is sometimes too hard to play. That’s why I found it to be so surprising and inspiring seeing my friend’s new house. In the middle of a pandemic, there he was, sanding away at the knotty pine walls, even as the world was seemingly falling apart everywhere else. He had done it. Moved cross country, started a new job just like that, bought this house in the middle of a clearing at the very top of the state on the border of Canada.
We’re all living in the dawning reality that life as we know it has changed forever and we have to figure out what that means for us now because there’s no going back to how it was.
“The world is different,” said my friend that night while we were texting each other. “But it’s also a wonderful chance for me to be different, to sit here, the fire blazing and all distraction done away with.”
“The only positive I can find for me right now is your beautiful cabin,” I said.
“Just keep writing your blog,” he said. “I look forward to reading it in the morning.”
It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting up in bed typing away at my computer. Janyce walks in the room and hands me a small plate filled with scrambled eggs and two slices of buttered toast.
“Wait a minute,” she says. “Today is not your birthday, how is it that I’m delivering you breakfast in bed a day early?”
“See how that happens?” I say.
She’s right. Tomorrow is my birthday and I will turn 54. And although I’m itchy for some reinvention of my life in the very near future, I know one thing for sure. It won’t be changing partners. I’ve done the relationship reinvention trick for the very last time. What’s that thing they say? Three times a charm? The reality is, no matter how much I long for a change of scenery, of vocation, of the tediousness that is my life right now, I wouldn’t want it with anyone else. I’m definitely the lucky one.