Change — Still Surprising Me After All These Years

Surely all of us would know, after living life for a few decades, that change happens unbidden. But turns out, we don't embrace uncertainty, ever.

Sunset’s last flush of rose before night, a dependable scene. But what tomorrow brings is always unknown, Caroga Lake, August 2022.

So I have a job. Not a job that I applied for, but a job I was given when my original job went up in smoke when the parent company shut down the finance app I was working on. I like the job. I like my boss. I probably shouldn’t admit online that I don’t really think much of the company, but there it is. I’m not quite being paid enough and there isn’t really much growth opportunity for me in my current role, but as I wrote here a month or so ago, my ambition isn’t my driving force these days. Self-preservation is, most likely. A desire to just get to live my life without every single thing requiring absolutely Herculean efforts in order to keep apace.

(Is that so wrong? That’s a whole other article for me to write, and I’ll get to it, promise. Because it really pisses me off, what we have made of “life” in the name of “success.”)

So yeah. I had settled into this job, even with my ambition lazily scratching at the door, trying to get my attention. I’ve mostly been pouring my energy into my gardens, as any of you who may follow me on IG or Facebook surely know. That and the making of my new family, me and my partner (finally together after 6 years of the hourlong "love commute” to see each other) and his three children plus my one child (off to college). So in all the ways the job wasn’t enough, it was exactly right: my boss is kind and human and nice to work for, the job doesn’t have leaky boundaries that push into nights and weekends (a novel experience when you’ve been a journalist, a consultant, and working on 24/7 websites and social media), and there are enough interesting higher-order problems to noodle and take a stab at addressing that I’m not bored. I was low-profile, not on management’s radar, and — for quite literally the first time in my life — not interested in addressing the company’s and its products’ holistic weaknesses. (I still think about them, and solve them in my head, but didn’t have the compulsion to be seen and heard.)

But then.

Le sigh.

Things changed.

Somehow — likely because of my job history in web publishing, which is unlike the background of every other employee at the company — I was drafted to work on a pet project of the CEO. I won’t say much about the project (careful of protecting my job and not casting aspersions) but that it’s… complicated and most likely inherently doomed to fail. It’s also a lot of deeply uninteresting, tedious, time-sucking work making content of almost no literal importance (except for SEO). And so now I’m stuck in daily UGH — and am being forced to think about whether drifting is still working for me.

The spectre (so much more spectre-y with the British spelling) of a job search looms.

(And that is a cyclical topic, ever on the eternal return: the job search, being post-publishing and post-50 and decidedly not a male.)

I know I had a lot of wrong-headed ideas about what adult life would be when I was young, because: young. I know I thought life would be like a mountain: that I would bust my hiney and climb upward and achieve great things (done and done and done) and then settle into a predictable life that felt safe, as if I had arrived at the land of Adults and would be welcomed into a dome of security.

Ha.

I guess I don’t have to tell you, dear reader, that’s now how it turned out. (And for those who are new here, I wrote a book titled Falling Apart in One Piece that tells the story of when I learned that lesson for the first time, in a dramatic, allegorical fashion.)

But how is it that this lesson does not stay learned?

Wait, I need to be more specific and pointed here. I do know that there is no Safe Place in life; I do know there is no destination other than the being: being alive, being present, being in this moment in front of me right now. I do know that both wonderful things and terrifying things might be right.around.the.corner for me, and that they aren’t conjured by my inherent goodness or badness. The accident of my consciousness will not be carved on history’s walls, and that is all for the good.

But — but I keep being surprised that when I find myself in a nice, sweet little groove, where life doesn’t feel ultra hard, that I don’t get to stay there. Even there, in a humble little place of nothing-too-much.

Am I more sensitive to these shifts after the years, maybe decades, even of managing trauma and chaos? Possibly. Probably.

The vulnerability that life asks of us is both so precious and so unbearable.

And yet, we bear it.
- - -

I think about my parents, and their stability. Which is hilarious to say, because as people, and as a couple, they were not at all stable. But their life was stable. My father worked for a single company for 53 years, and retired with the golden watch and a fine pension. My mother had the interrupted employment that most women of her generation did, but she found good work and ended up being CEO of a company almost by accident. They lived in a grand total of three houses from marriage till death, a few months after their 50th wedding anniversary. (They were only 70 and 71.)

In the weeks that my mother was sick and dying of cancer — before my father became ill out of the blue with the freak brain infection that would take his life 4 weeks ahead of her death — my father said something that has always stayed with me. We were talking about the end of my brother’s marriage, and talking also about my sense that I was going to be fired from my job soon (I was correct). And he said, “I don’t understand all this change. Your mother and I just wish you and your brothers’ lives could be more settled.”

I laughed, and said, “Dad, those days are gone. That world is gone.”

- - -

I don’t try to live in the whole entire world these days, though. I try to live in my own universe, which I have made smaller quite intentionally. Partly because I have a grandiosity problem — I have to take over all the things and solve all the problems and give all my everything to almost anything I do (have you seen my first-year gardens?) — and partly because I have been trying to cultivate peace. Not quiet. Just: peace. A sense that I have enough and gratitude that life has been good to me (it has been).

I suppose it’s my new version of a Safe Place that I am seeking: instead of getting BIGGER to get all the things and control all the things and be on top of the mountain — Achievement! —  can I be smaller and feel safe by letting the wide world all around me outshine me so I can live in the shadow of a mountain and the forests and be merely human, with no goals other than being present and giving out love to those around me? (Acceptance!)

Clearly I don’t know the answer to that question. And I probably never will. In the meantime, though, life keeps on moving forward, and changing. And I will continue to try to make my peace with the inherent uncertainty of life, the peculiar burden of consciousness that each of us must learn to carry.

xo, friends. thanks for being here.