reflections on changes, moving cities, and courage
Something’s moving in, I hear the weather in the wind, sense the tension of a sheep-field and the pilgrimage of fins. Something’s not the same, I taste the sap and feel the grain, hear the rolling of the rowan ringing, singing in a change. Something’s set to start, there’s meadow-music in the dark and the clouds that shroud the mountain slowly, softly start to part.
—Matt Goodfellow, “Poem for a New Year,” A Poem for Every Day of the Year, ed. Allie Esiri (Macmillan, 2017)
Leaving Home
Lately I’ve been leaning into the sandcastles. Sandcastles created in lines at the grocery store. While waiting at red lights on Yonge and Queen. Between boxes of what moving cities will unravel.
I decided to leave the people and place I call home and move further east. Montréal carries this balance of familiarity and strangeness that seems configured just right for this life season. The right amount of knowing to orient north, the right amount of unknowing to evoke creation. It feels good to not befriend a moving suitcase at the moment — to be planted firmly into new soil.
The first week alone in my apartment began as a slow fire wick. Sat in my guest room with the windows wide open, accompanied by the dense July morning air and French dialogue I could catch outside. There’s a few transient states I fluctuate between rooted in excitement, wonder, openness, and anticipation.
One thing I hadn’t quite planned for ahead of time was all the quiet. At night while brushing my teeth I catch myself sometimes missing being needed, known, and depended on back home. I reflect back to the conversation I had with A about family and changing cities before leaving Toronto, cooling off on the floor cushions of M’s party after hours of dancing.
“It’s strange, when I visit home and am around family again, I can become such a brat. The patterns revert back to when I was a child. And no matter how hard I consciously try to change, they somehow, someway, show up.”
He paused for a moment. “But there’s also a preciousness there. I don’t know if I necessarily want to fight it anymore.”
Is nostalgia an enemy or a friend? There’s a preciousness in that which feels familiar to us, a pulling for what once was. The movies of our lives playback in seemingly unprovoked and spontaneous ways. How the smile of a stranger triggers a memory in Ms. Ross’ kindergarden class. The smell of fresh baguettes at a local bakery reminds me of mama’s warm custard and bibinka. The memories are interwoven contextualized rope, structured like sandcastles.
Perhaps some of the greatest gifts are revealed to us once we leave home. The quest on how we will choose to love and accept the fossils of our past. In my own recent practice, observation of these patterns no longer fuels the reactions as an end themselves, but preludes beauty. Sometimes, a sadness. Behind it all, a deep awe for the moment.
We can’t plan for when or how a snapshot of our lives will imprint and come up again. For the repetitions or patterns that say hello, best to open the door warmly when such guests arrive. As Joan Didion puts it from her collection of essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem:
“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a dark night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
The Courage to Be
One aspect of uncertainty I’ve noticed is how loud the mind’s inner predictive loops spontaneously form in response. Our search spaces become fields to reach familiar equilibrium by planning. Chugging, periling, slicing permutations of what-might-happen scenarios ad nauseam. Driven by some innate desire to catch up to the rhythm, then surpass it entirely.
As an analytical type, change has the capacity to become the flint that sparks neurosis. The mind creates parallel stories, each with their own trajectories. To keep a fantasy going requires the belief in some projectile toward a presupposed speed and direction, which could eventually land. But at times the crossing of projectiles introduces complexities where upholding certain beliefs is contradictory.
Convergence here feels detrimental and heavy. It’s when I exhaust the exploration of potentialities for some final evolved state or become overly concerned with an outcome, that the process never fails to draw out anxiety.
“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going?
Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
If structures of the personality prone us into neurotic episodes, where the thin veneer of life represented as fantasies is where one tends to hide — extensive and relentless courage.
In his book The Courage To Be, Paul Tillich suggests the compulsive tendencies of personality or ego are to sink into its own ambitious ideals. We cope through creativity in ways unique to our fragmented selves, in an attempt to survive and uphold one’s identity.
What must be practiced in times of uncertainty is the courage to embody the acceptance of our non-acceptance. The paradox in consciously holding the opposites — a deeper “in spite of” continuation of not being through being.
How often we’re reminded the plan has it’s own plan. The figure it out-isms are ousted for the complete envelopment of loving acceptance despite the outbreak of a splintered personality. When observed, the emotions of fear and the defensive resolve must instead summon this profound innate and divine courage. The courage to be.
Suivant,
My Apollonian builder wants sound architecture with most decisions. She wants to measure each grain of sand. Map material density as a deep inner knowing. To think up moats for any uncertainty of floods and feeling. But this isn’t possible with most large life changes. You can’t conjure up ways to anticipate times you’ve never lived in.
The changes we undergo open up portals we didn’t know existed. We morph through crevices of our potentiality and our limitness all in the same response to, “How are you? How is the move?”
A return home is the anti-thesis to the Odyssean notion of anything heroic. We slip into the fallacies of childhood and revert back into the patterns. Albeit lovingly with the new lessons and perspectives integrated from being away. We follow what’s next based on the strings of context attained through our life choices and non-choices, leading up to the present moment of where we are.
I’ve been trained to disdain redundancies but recently find them comforting as imminent change continues to rumble. Routine, repetition, same-ness. Concentration on the task at hand to allow the entry of flow. Leaning lovingly into the mundane. Into the story wetted sands as they’re built — palmed open, patted down, then gone.
Thank you for reading — here are some pieces that are inspiring me these days:
- Neurosis described by James Hollis: https://www.jungfl.org/dr-james-hollis-living-more-fully-and-living-the-examined-life/
- Courage as a state of consciousness by David Hawkins: https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/03/courage-is-the-gateway/
- Joan Didion’s essay on “Home” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: http://meadmedia.net/prosews/On Going Home by Joan Didion.pdf