Hate To Break It To You is a recurring feature wherein we dispense succinct home truths that everyone could benefit from facing up to, unpleasant as they may be.
Time is going to keep passing no matter how you choose to spend it. I hear a lot of folks bemoaning the fact (and I’m guilty of it myself) that what they want or need will take sooo long to achieve that it really isn’t worth making the effort. But the thing is, even if it takes you two years to lose the weight or you’re on the adoption waiting list for three or steaming off all the wallpaper in the upstairs hallway isn’t going to be finished until next Christmas, that time is going to pass anyway. Intellectually, it’s uncomfortable to deliberately opt into delayed gratification over leaving the door open to some yet-to-be-identified Hail Mary pass that will give us what we want without demanding three calendars’ worth of effort. I get that. But the clock ain’t gonna stop just because you shun thinking about the long term.
Photo by Joe Lanman
Sure, some means of passing the time are more labor and commitment intensive than others (going back to school to become a vet vs. signing up for clinical trials of a new drug for MS), but think about how you’d be spending those weeks or months or years otherwise. How many of us would be spending them engaged in replacement activities and pursuits to rival the ones we’re putting off? If you weren’t training to make the Boston Marathon qualifying time, it’s far more likely that you’d just be dicking around as per usual (and thinking about how you’d love to get into distance running someday) vs. learning mixed martial arts or fostering kittens as a substitute.
And if you haven’t identified an abbreviated route to the satisfaction you’re seeking, it’s very likely that you’ll come to the end of the time you thought would take forever to pass with absolutely nothing to show for the period you deemed everlasting except for the cold comfort of not having “wasted” it on working your way closer to your end goal. Congrats on that shrewdness, by the way.
This week, I went through some old messages on a forum I used to frequent with the intent of scrapping them before the site itself closed up shop. But I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t hit delete and wipe ’em out permanently. There’s something to be said for a paper trail, ya know? Heck, I still have a Hotmail account dating back to 2001 that I don’t use any longer, but that you’d have to pry from my cold dead hands. If you’ve sent me a message in the last decade, I probably still have it somewhere. F’reals. I sorted through my old inbox recently and there was a whole lot of smincing (my newly-invented word to describe the smile + wince that accompanies bittersweet remembrances of times past) going on.
Photo by Sham Jolimie
Many of the emails predate moves, marriages, babies. There are emails from people I truly miss having in my life and from others with whom I can hardly remember ever having been friends. Exchanges from group projects in undergrad, every Martha Stewart recipe my mother has ever sent me, stories and anecdotes that I don’t remember being a party to, but that must have happened because I deemed them important enough to warrant a dramatic three-paragraph recounting.
And I’m not alone. I posed the question on Twitter as to whether folks held onto their correspondence or deleted them in a timely fashion and all of the respondents indicated that they too were email accumulators. Some went as far as archiving old messages, while others, like me, just never hit delete. Is it because these missives don’t take up any physical space? It’s not like collecting Beanie Babies or shelves full of Depression glass after all. Or is it something more? How else can you see at a glance who you were, where you were and what mattered to you at a given point in time with such ease? Pictures still make you do the legwork of trying to conjure up the emotions represented in the tableau, but words, words spell it all out for you, quite literally.
It’s not the kind of piling up and squirreling away that will land you on an episode of Hoarders, but it provides a certain psychic security in allowing us to surround/immerse ourselves in our stuff at a moment’s notice. The past isn’t underfoot and stacked all around us, but it’s still there waiting and we can sink into it and revisit the feelings of a particular place and time (from the breathlessly new and exciting to the quotidian) with only a few clicks. Call it time travel for the prose-minded packrat.
Given that allure, is it really any wonder that so many of us are loath (for better or worse) to part with such easily accessible historical lifelines to who we once were and how we once lived?
I’ve been thinking a lot about tenability, sustainability and the long term lately.There’s the idea that if you just keep on keeping on that you’ll eventually catch a break. Dues will be paid, you’ll figure out a system, things will get easier. But what if they don’t? What if the path you’re currently on is never going to level out, never going to get less rocky and will always force you to march uphill (both ways, natch)? And for a lot of people (chronic illness, systemic poverty, workers whose skills are of little value in the knowledge economy), that’s the reality.
Photo by scazon
What happens when you subtract future-focused hope from the equation is that you force yourself to confront the here and now on its own terms and not simply as a stepping stone to the notion of a better and brighter tomorrow that you may be clinging to. Maybe a glut of education grads means you’ll have to spend the next 10 years as a substitute teacher. Maybe your freelancing will never take off and you’ll always be living pay check to uncertain pay check until you trade it in for Social Security. Maybe you won’t ever get out of the mail room. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Your fortunes may skyrocket or they may not. Counting on the upswing keeps you from critically assessing whether you could live happily without that upswing or whether it’s the mental crutch that makes now tolerable. Time to see if you can stand up without it.
It’s not about frantic back-up plans and escape hatches and freakouts, it’s about deciding whether you’re willing to live your today as your tomorrow and what that would look like. In other words, is today tenable? Does it make you happy enough to be okay with repeating a version of it for the next 40 years? Hand on heart, answer honestly. And if it doesn’t? Well, right now (and not tomorrow) is the time to start thinking about what you’re willing to do about that in practical, concrete, non-panicky terms.
If your life on its current trajectory was never going to be any more fulfilling for you than it is right now, would you still live it the same way or would you make changes?
Maybe it’s because family has been on my mind this week. Or maybe it’s because my mother just celebrated a birthday a couple of days ago and my father will celebrate one in less than a month. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been reading about other people’s less than idyllic upbringings and feeling pretty flippin’ lucky by comparison. In any case, I’ve been thinking lately that I owe the people who brought me into this world a major debt of gratitude. I may occasionally disagree vociferously with their advice (they’re used to this), but that doesn’t dim my appreciation for the fact that they care enough to offer it. In no particular order, a handful of parental provisions for which I’m very grateful:
Photo by Darwin Bell
The belief that I could do and be any damn thing in the whole damn world
Maybe I’ve internalized this one a bit too much, because I still believe my own hype a little more than is ego-appropriate. In all my years on earth, however, I’ve never doubted my own merits and my (sometimes untapped) capacity for awesome. Props to the parents for teaching me that from Day 1.
A pressure-free space to find my own way
Did you know some people’s parents hector them about settling down, finding someone, getting married, having babies? If my parents ever raised these issues, it would be a sure sign that they’d both developed brain tumors. My mother has the uncanniest people-reading skills that you’ll ever come across and is on record (many times) as saying she’d much rather any of her offspring stay perpetually single than get hooked up with card-carrying douches.
The knowledge that I’ll always have a soft place to land
Sure, I’m not hankering to take up residence on the rec room couch in the near future, but I know that option is always there if I need it and that it will be given freely without shaming or recrimination. It’s nice to prove Thomas Wolfe at least a little bit wrong.
The understanding that you do it because it needs to get done
You might not want to, you might kvetch and kick up a fuss, but you will do it, because there really is no other option. Shirking responsibility doesn’t enter into the equation.
For better or worse, what have you learned from your folks?
Friday Philosophizing comes early this week! I ask open-ended questions. You answer. There will be tea, but not Earl Grey because that’s just wrong.
Photo by dragonflysky
What is a fresh start?
Does it involve beginning again or beginning something completely different? In my mind, there’s a definite difference between starting over in order to rebuild the life or circumstances you once had (after a divorce, natural disaster, serious illness, etc.) and deciding to take your life in a completely different direction from what you’ve been doing. Going off to college is a fresh start, while rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina is starting over. Dig?
How often do we long for a fresh start, but end up unwittingly recreating the same patterns and habits and lifestyle in a new city, at a new job, with a new partner? And then wonder only a few months down the road why everything seems so achingly familiar and why we’re battling the same issues and emotions that dogged us before we tried to wipe the slate clean? Really, we ask, how far do we have to get away and how much do we have to throw out for things to finally look and feel new?
Is a true fresh start possible? What sort of change does it entail?*
*Not rhetorical. Gimme your answers in the comments!
