letter #19
we're all making our own sense of things
I'm conscious that even though you only get this if you've signed up for it, this letter lands in your inbox at random times, and that life is really up and down maybe more than it has been before. I'm talking a bit in here about things that skate close to depression and also to alcohol use and I wanted to give you a chance to delete the email if you're not up for that right now. xx
When the mister and I took our reconnaissance trip to Abu Dhabi, it was at the end of the most tumultuous period of my life. I'd had a decade's worth of life's experiences squeezed into a couple of years. My emotional and physical attention was stretched across four generations. It was deeply rewarding, enriching, humbling, life-affirming and exhausting. I felt loss and absence keenly, having had to face it in a multitude of ways, death being only the most visible. So when we booked our tickets for Abu Dhabi, and people laughed at me for insisting that we--the mister and I--take different flights I didn't care. We were leaving our boys, five and seven at the time, with their grandparents and I wasn't taking the chance that if our plane disappeared they would be left without either of us. (It's a side note, but in this I was very much guided by A Prayer for Owen Meany, a book the mister and I had both loved in our twenties, and which, at that time, I thought was hilarious, but re-reading it a few years ago, I could hardly get past the first chapter. It's not Bridge to Terabithia level sad, but it's not the laugh it was).
This first trip to Abu Dhabi was back in the days when planes had not been squeezily reconfigured, were not overbooked as a matter of routine, and Etihad had only just started flying into Australia ... so all up the plane was not at all full, and I had a window seat with not only the seat next to me empty, but also the one behind, so I could fully recline. These were also the days when the cabin crew brought the drinks trolley around straight away meaning that just as the Captain was saying, 'Sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride,' I was enjoying that wonderful moment between the first and second sips of gin. You know, when your mind, your body and your soul are one and truly, how good is life.
Friends, more than ten years later, and this moment remains one of the most amazing of my life. It lasted only a few seconds, but it was profound, and it was rejuvenating. Because this was the moment I realised: there was nothing I could do.
My children would get hungry. Someone else would feed them. They would get sad. Someone else would comfort them. I didn't need to work out how to get my bone-weary body, two exuberant children and a bag of shopping out of the car, through the locked door, and all the way to bedtime. There were no papers I would need to try to understand then sign. There were no blood tests--mine or somebody else's--I could follow up. No beauraucracy to stare down. No minutes to write up, no meetings to chair, no weet bix to scrape off the floor, no lego to step on. Phones would ring, but I wouldn't hear them. Letters would arrive, but I wouldn't read them, wouldn't need to answer them. For twelve hours, I had no responsibility AND free gin.
The intensity of those last few years evaporated. It is the most weightless I have felt, the most in-the-moment I have been. I was face-to-face with my own irrelevance, and I liked it. Ring the bell, order another gin.
I've drawn heavily on this moment across the years. Whenever I'm overwhelmed with too much to do, I think back to that time. I remind myself that it doesn't matter. Whatever tasks are in front of me are meaningless...if I got on a plane, those tasks would still be there and if they needed to be done, someone would do them, and if nobody did them, then they didn't need to be done. I can almost, but not quite, recreate that sensation of weightlessness, and I can take a deep breath and keep on keeping on. I guess it's my way of doing 'this too shall pass.'
But since the freneticism of pre- and early days of isolation (has it only been one month?), it's my irrelevance that has left me feeling whatever is the opposite of motivated. Here I note the opposite of motivated is not 'unmotivated'. 'Unmotivated' suggests only an absence of motivation, whereas what I have been feeling is something far more active, a sensation that pushes against motivation and leaves me listless and debilitated.
As the world divided extremely quickly into people who would be working harder than they ever had before and people who had no work at all, it became clear that for many of us, our role would be simple: stay out of the way. It was not a request for invisibility entirely, but almost. And from feeling that you have no role, it's just a step to the left and you are left feeling purposeless. Well, you are if you're me anyway. It's a somewhat confronting realisation, and for the past few weeks I have felt my lack of purpose weighing far more heavily than too much responsibility ever did.
You must have lots of time to write, people say. And yes, that's true. But what's the point of creating work that won't be shared? The world is changed so suddenly, so deeply that I'm struggling to see how work that I've started makes any sense any more. For example, I had intended to be using these few months to finish off my next novel. It's called Blackout, and it's set in the Adelaide airport on the night of the statewide blackout, and it's premise is that it's the one thing in our modern life that we've all experienced. It was a good idea at the time.
Still, there's a fine line though between living an examined life and self-indulgent moping, and as I felt my mood descending, it became clear to me that I needed to make a few changes. The first thing I did was to tell myself to stop drinking for a couple of weeks. It wasn't so much the volume of what I was drinking (not all that much more than I usually do), it was the intention behind my drinking. If I wasn't living with purpose, I was certainly drinking with purpose and that purpose wasn't to make me a sizzling conversationalist and fabulous dancer. That purpose was to get me through the night. I'm about halfway through my two-week break and yes, that was an excellent decision.
The second thing I did was to go to my passion planner (I hate the name, but love the layout) and to make some appointments with myself. One of those appointments was 'Read Axiomatic'. That's the other thing you'd think you'd be doing in isolation, right? Reading. I've yearned to read, but I have been finding it impossible to focus. I was walking in circles too often (yes, literally and metaphorically) to be able to settle into anything except the ubiquitous and damaging scroll scroll scroll. Oh, that's not strictly true. I did manage to finish Petals on the Wind which, if you don't remember, is the second in the Flowers in the Attic series. I found it on my bookshelf when I was putting something away and thought, 'Why not?' I seem to have lost all of the others, but I doubt I would have read them anyway. I mean, woah! If Gen X has problems, I'd slate a lot of them back to those books which are waaaay worse thematically than what you remember.
Anyhoo ... micro-scheduling my life is something I taught myself to do when I first moved to Abu Dhabi and felt suddenly rudderless. I began searching desperately for rhythm and routine, knowing that once I found them, I would be able to do more than simply put one foot in front of the other and get from morning to night to morning again. I put things in my diary as if they were appointments: get up, school drop-off, gym, read, lunch. Persisting with this micro-management of time was one of the best things I did for myself, even if I felt ridiculous living this way. I mean surely an adult should be able to organise themselves into a task as simple as reading? But one day I read this passage in The Writing Life by Annie Dillard, and then I felt like I'd been a little bit wise as well. She writes:
I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning. How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labour with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order--willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.
...
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading--that is a good life.
Anyway, on Friday I spent the morning in our front yard (you'd have to stretch your imagination to call that disaster a garden), my back to the sun, reading Maria Tumarkin's Axiomatic. The forecast weather hadn't come yet, and the sky was deep autumn-blue. The leaves of our neighbour's palm tree scratched against each other, and the leaves of our plane trees fell in a constant, gentle rhythm. Our strange cat sat under my chair without once biting my ankles. Our strange dog sat next to me without barking at strangers. Reading, finishing this book gave me no particular social role to play. I made no difference. But it was a good day. And it kept me out of the way.
I hope you're going okay, whatever your isolation experience is bringing you, and I send you my love
Tracy xx