Anxious others

I don’t know if I was ever a planner of trips; I like to blame my aversion to it on my time in South Africa though. Rural South Africa at that. A place where the best laid plans yielded results not particularly different than no plans at all. Transportation failed, reservations were ignored, business hours deemed irrelevant. I learned to improvise. More importantly, I learned to laugh while improvising. The alternative was much less joyful. I think I began to associate joy with a lack of a cohesive plan, plus there was always an air of surprise to the things I did. Who doesn’t love a surprise?

My current narrative, crafted over the last 15, almost 20 years, is that I learned not to spend energy on something that probably wouldn’t come to fruition. Although, if I really think about it, I have a similar philosophy about deadlines. I could be smart and work on project well in advance of their due dates, but why. That philosophy was part of the reason journalism was a good (if fleeting) fit for me. You spend so much time waiting -hurry up and wait. It worked to my strengths. The flurry of activity when something new is about to happen, and then a lull of navel gazing, and then the slightly nauseating fatigue associated with worry as the deadline approached.

The thing is, I don’t know if I am built to work under deadline or if I simply trained myself into it, either way, I usually trade the turtle’s philosophy of slow and steady for the hare’s procrastination. I’m willing to suffer the consequences for the freedom it provides.

But for some reason my foot loose attitude disturbs other people. People who have nothing to do with the consequences I’ll face. I see it most when I am preparing for a trip. I don’t usually have much angst about preparing for a trip, even to a new country. It isn’t that I don’t worry at all, it isn’t that I don’t know things can go wrong. Actually I assume that something will happen. Something unplanned, some degree of unpleasantness. I just don’t think I can control whatever that unpleasant thing is with additional planning. I also recognize that whatever happens, however horrible in the moment, will probably yield an amazing story after the fact.

In search of the source of the Blue Nile

But I digress…

Other people insert their apprehension into my preparations. It is the oddest reality. 

Friends check up on my planning. Do I have a hotel room? Do I have an itinerary? Have I packed?

I’ve trained my mother over the years. She’s stopped asking me about packing until my trip is literally within a day or two. I don’t doubt that she wants to ask me a week before she actually does- but she already knows the answer. The answer is always “no”.

Peace Corps, 1999, was the last time I packed in advance. And truthfully, even that doesn’t really count. I spent several weeks piling things in the living room – ever higher. Finally, my best friend at the time, came over and looked me in the eyes and asked, “do you need help?”. I almost burst into tears, I was so grateful. I had no idea how to even begin.

She kneeled down beside the pile, held one thing up after the other to see if I wanted to include it and folded it all neatly into my suitcase. I doubt she remembers that. We aren’t friends anymore. But it was a kind and needed gesture. When she was finished I had a suitcase and my father’s Air Force duffle bag loaded with clothes. 

Of course, it was my first trip and I was only thinking about things fitting into a bag not how much the bag weighed. The night before I was actually departing, I had to repack the whole lot, a new pile of things that were discarded and left behind because the whole thing was too heavy to carry.

Ever since then I’ve been a last minute packer. The night before I left for Liberia I had all of my stuff strewn across my sister’s living room floor, her middle daughter asleep across my lap.

Packing at the last minute doesn’t make me anxious. I’ve learned over the years of living in resource poor areas, that although it is sometimes a pain, it is always possible to find what I have forgotten, or at least a reasonable replacement (as long as I have my passport, ticket, and cash/credit card/ATM card). And so I don’t have much angst. 

My calm doesn’t stop other people from having anxiety for me. Wanting me to plan when planning just isn’t my thing. And by thing, I mean it isn’t my preferred method of travel– not that I am unable to do it. When my dad and I went to Peru last year, he was very clear that the planning was on me. And I did. I created a spreadsheet with details about times and money and contact information. I had our days accounted for and possible activities. I handed him his copy and he summarily grinned, folded it, and I never saw it again. He would simply ask me what we were doing next. I guess I got the anti-planning thing honest.

Ultimately, not planning is what calms me down. I have friends and the plan is their balm. The plan is their assurance that things will be ok. But for me, planning is my every day. Planning is my work. Planning is real life. Vacation is a chance to get away from that. To deviate from my script and see what happens. Sometimes that means I spend all day eating a tajine with a shopkeeper in Casablanca after searching out an actual piece of Sandalwood, sometimes that means trudging shin deep through mud and then floating on a papyrus canoe in search of the source of the Blue Nile. And sometimes it means I am stuck, and a little panicked, looking for a way to the Guatemalan village where my language school is located. 

I have learned to take it as it comes…even if no one else seems to appreciate my approach.

Silken Road

Bear nuzzled up to my hand, a puppy face although probably an older dog. He’d growled through the gated door, the shade and light conspiring together to prevent me from seeing him- only allowing the sound to take me back to the German Shepard that terrorized me at work for two years...but I digress.

Once bear sniffed me he padded softly beside me, through the house and into the backyard. The late afternoon sun was pushing the house’s shade over the patio so we pulled chairs into the waning swath of sun and waited for Silk to join us.

She sat down, clad exclusively in white with silver cowrie shells dangling from her ears. She smiled warmly and I settled in to my seat unsure of the reason for our visit.

RhythmQuest (RQ) was intent on pulling me out of myself. Insistent that my view of her was expansive and my view of myself shadowed and stunted. It was a random assertion that sprang from a passing comment I'd made in the car.

On the way to Silk’s I'd said, "I'm a good writer, I just have no story to tell." It seemed harmless to me. It felt an honest assessment of both my strengths and my weaknesses. I started off as a journalist - by definition someone who tells other people's stories. It wasn't meant to disparage myself or my talents but RQ was on me immediately.

"What do you mean you don't have stories? The problem is you don't see your own talent - your own worth."

How did we get there?

“It isn’t that I don’t think I’m worthy...” RQ sighed and rolled her eyes as much as is possible while driving without careening us into an oncoming car. I tried again, “It’s just that your personality is expansive,” I faltered for a moment. “Things happen to me but you seem to seek them out...” It still wasn't right. In my head it made sense but on my tongue I could understand her cynicism. Even so, it was such a strange conversation. Such a strange train of thought that was out of context and ill placed after such a wonderful weekend.

She listed off a litany of experiences, my experiences, that were not of chance. “Volutneering for FEMA after Katrina, escaping to Guatemala after Katrina because you were so upset, any of the countries you lived in.” I listened and tried to be open. I could hear where she was coming from but somehow it made sense when she said it but melts away when she is finished. What would I say about FEMA- about Guatemala? Who would read it? Why?

Sitting in Silk’s backyard, a small oasis of raised beds housing kale and tomatoes, and California-climate appropriate succulents, I assumed the matter was dropped. I don’t know Silk and besides, I assumed RhythmQuest - or Silk - had a reason for the visit. 

They fell into conversation; I skimmed its surface, listening in for pieces that I understood or had context for. RQ, began to expanded the short-hand they had been using to invite me into their conversation, swivelling her chair to make eye contact and providing me details that gave me details and understanding..

Suddenly, Silk, soft spoken and deliberate said...

I can't remember what she said. She repeated it no less than four times but by the second I knew that as far as RQ was concerned it was for me. Silk had leaned forward to impart these words of positivity and assurance to RQ. “Repeat that,” RQ said with a smug smile. “Say it again,” she said when Silk complied. This time she placed her hand on my knee and smiled giddily behind her large brown sunglasses. “I don’t need you to repeat it for me, it’s for her,” she laughed as I flipped her the bird.  

Such irony that despite her repetition I can't recall exactly what she said. Specificity of words aside, it left me with the sentiment that I am meant to unfurl myself to the world-meant to declare myself without reservation.

And then the afternoon shifted and suddenly the spotlight- and not just the sun- was shining on my world.

Silk asked for my story, in her soft and inviting voice. Before I could answer, RQ jumped in and filled in the big spaces the way I usually do with her. She rattled off a close proximity of the list she’d just enumerated in the car. I fought back an urge to cry although I have no idea why.

Silk gently asked me questions about what I do now and my travels and my writing. She shared her ideas about healing people and through that healing of individuals, healing groups. Healing us- black people- with our generations of scars and suffering.

And then she quietly wove in her own story, the journey she is on to manifest her own greatness and the long journey she is still on to get there.

I was caught up. Caught up in her calm and sincerity. Caught up in the credibility a stranger strangely possesses that loved ones cannot.

In some ways Silk is still tainted by love. She loves RQ and and RQ loves me and so who wants to sit in the energy of a friend and tell them the person they love is ordinary. But something about Silk fights against my cynicscm about the biases of love. Something about the quite yet powerful way she seems to inhabit the space around her left me slightly lit – a pilot light of possiblity in charting my own story in less ordinary ways.

Now it is necessary to ride Silk’s wave of certainty about my potential to do something...to do something. To do and not just say that I will do...one day.

I sat down this evening and wrote for more than an hour. It is a step. Not the only step by far but a step none the less.

Mid-life "what next?"

I am decidedly mid-life and I am still uncertain of what I am doing…what I want to be doing.  It feels so much more abstract than any of my education forecasted. It would be different if I had a degree in philosophy. There isn’t a predetermined path for learning how (and different ways) to think. Of course thinking skills apply, or at least they should apply, to any and all jobs; but a philosophy degree is not expected to chart a clear path from graduation to employment.

Journalism and public health, on the other hand, are pretty prescriptive in the working world. Only for me, they aren’t. 

Instead I’ve dabbled in things and had a multitude of amazing experiences that leave me, in this middle section of my living, wondering where I go next and how I maneuver it all into something that is at least partially profitable as well as meaningful. 

In 2014 my focus is on money. It feels strange to write it. Hell, it feels strange to even think it. Money has never been at the forefront of any working decision I’ve made. I never took a gig that couldn’t at least feed me, but I’ve never really considered how a gig would impact my ability to retire before the age of 90, or even if my job had great (or any) insurance. 

Free of monetary focus/constrictions I’ve been employed in ways that have allowed me to grow (sometimes the hard way) and learn, and experience a world that following a prescriptive path from graduation to retirement might have made more challenging. I acknowledge and appreciate that I can’t but a monetary value on that.

While waiting for my placement for Peace Corps I had a temp job at a big marine and offshore classification company. I started out stuffing envelopes for them and that morphed into taking over a mid-management position in their marketing department that had been vacated abruptly. They liked my work enough to offer me a pretty comfortable salary for a new graduate with only journalism internships on her resume.

My parents were ecstatic. They urged me to consider it. It was “an amazing opportunity.” And it was. It just wasn’t one that I wanted. I had a plan and working at a job I barely tolerated in the short-term didn’t factor into that plan.

And so I worked there until Peace Corps sent my invitation to serve in South Africa and then I hastily said farewell and packed my bags for my first step into the life I was choosing for myself. 

 

Post-Peace Corps I bounced around a bit, trying to reconcile what I’d done and learned in rural South Africa.  There was transition work that reacquainted me with living in America, and then school, and then back overseas. Even then, in my flurry of life changes, I was working plans- short-term though they were: transition and more specialized training.

Each step helped me to know what I didn’t want to do but none of it cemented what I did want to do…not in any way that I could harness and hurl myself into. 

Friends often assume that my decisions are arbitrary. They aren’t. The problem isn’t that I don’t plan, only that my plans aren’t macro. Held alone they have a purpose; a beginning, middle, and end. But laid out as a map for my life and it reads more as maze than directions. 

And what do I do with that now?

Given the opportunity to go back and “do over” I can’t imagine choosing differently. Everything I’ve done has made me- good or bad – into who and where I am. But still I am left in mid-life limbo, wondering not what will happen next but what should happen next. 

Living (and loving the living) in the bay area, where rents are rising even beyond their usual obscenity, I can’t ignore money anymore. I can’t live solely in the experience of things without regard to the expense of them.

And so this year I’m in search of reconciliation between those points: experiential living, conscientious living, authentic living, profitable living. I know it is possible in more than the abstract or anecdotes published in self-help books. I have friends living their versions of that reality (here and here and here… just a few of the easily showcased examples).

The question (and quest) for this year, then, is not “if” but “how”. How do I piece together my micro plans into a macro one. One that builds on what I’ve learned and allows me to think about retirement without panic. How do I weave travel, and food, and diversified duties, and a love of the Bay, social responsibility into my mid-life plan?