It is early and I am in my office with Itsy, the rescue kitten, frolicking behind me. She is skittish, still wild. If I move too suddenly she scurries into a dark corner. So over the past week my movements have become thoughtful, more smooth, and a bit more unhurried as she watches me. Having her in my office has been a distraction, but I find myself watching her watching me while I work, and it has been fun.Over the past six months or so that thoughtful slowing down has been my overall pattern, though there has been no kitten to blame, or to thank. I am learning, to borrow and bend some words - a "disciplined practice of straying afield of myself" in order to create a possible opening toward self-transformation. I am learning to - not just simply discover who I am - but to shape who I may become, by questioning and moving away from who I am, why I am, and how I am, and even questioning the questions. Work, Life, Love, Identity. This year has challenged me deeply.
One night, very soon after I left my job, I was walking the dog and fighting my fear - those nights, on those walks, fear was a constant companion. With every step I talked myself though my panic and uncertainty. That night I was revisiting all our choices and the events that placed me on that spot, on that pavement, with that troubled dog. Walking, walking and talking, talking attempting to get us both unstuck from our particular anxieties.
I could barely see the thread of the plan through my fear, but it was there. We had a desire to live more lightly in order to create freedom for ourselves. We wanted to explore sustainability, leverage technology, to be active and engaged in the world in order to create a more meaningful life. We contemplated leaving the continental US to do it, but decided to stay here instead, because needing to leave a place to solve these kinds of problems doesn't ever seem to work. So we moved into the city and bought an old house to renovate, and then eventually another. My partner left her job, and we lived off my income while working on the houses. Then, suddenly, I left my company as well. The timing could have been better, but I remember thinking that survival doesn't always allow for perfect timing. Thus, I found myself walking hard pondering a life with no source of income, but some plans and a lot of dreams.
It was still warm that night. The moon was full, and I was walking past the manufacturing facilities and bars that make up that part of our neighborhood. It is a slightly gritty locale, especially at night. I remember stopping and staring at those silos or tanks or whatever they are. They glow when the sun rises and sets, and I love watching something so utilitarian become something more. They were beautiful that night, too, and in my anxious, magically thinking mind, became a touchstone for me, and a symbol for what I was trying to do with my life. I took this picture.
When I see the picture, or even walk or drive past the location, I remember that night. I think of my resolve - what I wanted. I don't even really know where I am going, completely. I have an idea, but it is fuzzy, and I know even that idea will probably become something else.
I am learning to live in between, to enjoy the spaces between the questions, to be whoever I am becoming, in the present. That takes a surprising amount of discipline and practice, and I am learning to embrace the uncertainty instead of assuming anything but one particular outcome is a failure. In a way, in another language, I see our choices as radical acts of self-transformative discipline that resist the pressures defining what is "normal" in the US. By resisting the expected, by living in comfort with less, and by doing slightly different things with intention, we continue to become someone else, someone more free from various constraints. That might be a bit grandiose.
But I do like the picture.
