Escape from The Tyranny of Longing
For the first couple of years after moving to Chico, CA in 2010, I felt out of place, although as Marc pointed out, Chico was only a few letters short of Chicago.
“But this is a place of relentless sun,” I wailed. “The weather reports are a joke. Sun, sun…I’m tired of it.” In my past career I’d maintained offices at my actual home in the Chicago area, and at the corporate home base in New Jersey. With the kids out of the nest, I was in a position to try new ways to make a living, new ways of being. Life beckoned westward, though I’d always hoped to return home. I even retained ownership of a condominium in the area I moved from, in a suburb of Chicago. I didn’t rent it out; it was home base and worth whatever it cost as a lifeline.
While in California, I wrote an online journal hoping my kids would use it to stay emotionally connected if they needed that as much as I did (doubtful). I thought by this ruse they could have access, if they wanted, to Essential Mom, in the way virtually every mom wants to be remembered: NOW and FOREVER.
Its darker reason for being was my fear of dying far away from my children. One can never know when the bell will toll. “Don’t scatter my ashes here,” I warned Marc. “It isn’t home. I’ll never rest.”
I still spin my tales on the interweb for just that reason. Always here for you, my children.
Here’s a little something from my cyber diary circa 2013.
Re-reading it myself, I see now what I was really doing with the whole “My Chico Life” journal project – escaping the tyranny of longing for offspring now grown, and a life that was no more.
Throughout the changes in life, even fish can teach us something.
~~~
From the archives…
While I was in Chicago last week, my husband introduced our fish to the new fancy tank. The photo he sent the day of the move revealed a disgruntled line-up of stationary, wide-eyed fish. Scumpster, the algae-eater, was usually hiding from the goldfish riffraff, Fish and Slimey, preferring to hide in his volcano between ghastly meals. This day, the three of them appeared as an iterant band of newly bonded travelers, staring at Marc’s camera with shining eyes.
By the time of my arrival, each had acclimated. There was a brave new and spacious world to be explored, complete with new hiding spots for each.
The shift to a radical new place had not killed anyone. Like the formerly transplanted me, they’d needed to sit awhile in stunned stillness before the clear living waters seeped into their gills, I guess. I imagined their new motto: dive, survive, thrive.
“Be water, my friend.” So says Bruce Lee in a video I clip I show to management students in hopes they too, can absorb the snippets of brilliance the Master shares as he moves through chaotic situations with a precision based on endless practice.
“Practice is the way,” I tell the class. “You can survive the assaults the job or the world throws at you, but you have to start with yourself, not as a manager – but as a leader, intent on your purpose.”
I often wish my own children listened as intently as my students do. Does my love for them show? Do they know they are proxies for those I let go of, and my desire for their wellness is real?
---
Practice trains our bodies to get through what our minds can’t fathom, preserving us until such a time mind and spirit can rejoin us from the center of the whirlwind.
Flipping back and forth between Chicago and Chico has taught me something about the power of places, including their characters, and just to be clear, I mean the character of places – those we carry within us, and those literal places to which we travel. Traveling back and forth has become rewarding as I cut new paths through places that are either new to me, or which I’ve known forever that I can see with my new pair of shining eyes and a mind that feels more alive, thanks to the challenge of the shifts.