A post to start the year.
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I was not always risk-averse.
So many of the biggest choices in my life were risky ones; the kinds of choices that you make, then immediately cover your ears and wince and run full speed ahead, thinking to yourself “What have I done?”
I have blog posts right here to that effect—say, when I moved to Chicago for grad school, or to New York for grad school again, or switched jobs, or started writing books, or…
There is a kind of talent—which I used to have—in being able to make a fairly good choice even though risk levels are high, then grit teeth and power through all the feelings of regret and uncertainty and “ohshitno” that follow it.
But there is that moment, that moment when you know you are going to regret it, but you flip the switch anyway, you push the button anyway, knowing there is no turning back, because you also know that you are likely going to not regret it long after you are done regretting it.
I seem incapable of doing this any longer. The ingredients of the fall are probably:
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Two parts parenthood
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Two parts divorce
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Two parts an impossible mountain of student debt
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One part a humongous, decades-long bet that ultimately wasn’t a clear victory (doctorate)
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One part age catching up to me along with the knowledge that I’m not as physically rock-solid as I once was
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One part not drinking any longer
But whatever the ingredients, the ultimate finished product is now different, day-to-day. And I’m not sure I like the change. But I’m not sure I can change the change any longer.
It may be that my days of decisiveness and exploration are over, which is tough, because underneath it all I have always been an explorer.
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There is a weird way in which some of this is tied up in the concept of certainty. When I was younger, certainty was often a synthetic product. I was certain about what was important because I had decided what was important, and that decision was made, so it was certain.
There is a rhythm in that sort of living that is like the weather; wind comes and goes and nobody can fight against it (or thinks to fight against it), it just is.
With that talent not just waned, but completely evaporated, I no longer really know what’s important, much less am I certain about it.
(It occurs to me that I ought to go back up to the previous bullet list and change the recipe so that it reads “four parts divorce” but for now I’ll let it ride just so I seem less ambivalent about at least something.)
Thing is, when you don’t know what the essential things are, your life tends to clutter up. This is because you don’t know what’s essential, so everything might be essential. And, as a result, you invest in—and hang on to—everything.
And, paradoxically, because there is so very, very much of everything, your person is spread incredibly thin and your environment is spread incredibly thick and as a result everything sort of grinds to a halt.
— § —
And so it seems to me today, first day of the year, that the first step in a plan to find a way out of this is to try to figure out what’s important, and to try to synthesize some certainty about it.
Of course, this is all just another way of saying “need to set some goals, yo” which I’ve gone on about before here. Dangerous because I don’t want to start the year out with “everything old is new again” yet again, as I have been doing for what seems like a number of years now.
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Meanwhile, age has a way of changing the meaning of “a number of years” in ways that aren’t entirely salutory.
Like, I know that I only have a few decades left, that quite literally most of my life is behind me, but I also have developed a temporal sensibility that I suspect is common to most people at this age according to which “years” is not all together very long at all.
You might think this would have the effect of imparting some sort of urgency to things, but in practice it’s often just the opposite.
Case(s) in point—everyone has “temporary things” scattered around their lives. I’ll fix this thing temporarily with some tape, the real repair to come later on. I’ll place this pile of documents on this countertop temporarily, until I can get a file folder to place them in. I’ll put this plant in this pot temporarily, until I can get a more decorative pot. And so on.
But because years and even decades are now so short, the temporary is currently running at about three to five years for me these days.
That is to say that if I set that stack of documents temporarily on the counter top until a file folder can be found, and they are still there two years later, I actually don’t feel much urgency because in fact it hasn’t been very long at all; we’re still within the legitimate realm of the temporary.
This now explains to me how some of the older people I knew growing up had temporaries scattered around their lives that were decades “temporary.”
I suppose they’d aged to the point where event a decade or two was simply not that long at all.
Is this a form of “procrastinaton” as the term is usually understood? I don’t even know.
— § —
Point being:
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I need to solve some problems this year (I begin every year recently saying that)
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In order to be solved, I must apply some decisiveness
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For this to happen in a timely fashion, I must find a way to accelerate… well… me—my being-in-the-world, to use a Heideggerian term
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I don’t know how to do this
Anyone have an idea for where to look? I don’t feel as though I’ve seen a lot of self-help books about “personal acceleration” or styles of therapy called “acceleration therapy” out there.
Maybe the term is “momentum.”
I’ve written about that, too, here, particularly in relation to all of the stuff that led to my divorce and that proceeded from it. And the fact that I am still sitting here musing on this topic eight years later is in fact a great moment to slap a big “QED” on everything I just wrote.
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So there we have it. Maybe I’ve worked it out?
The project of the year is: momentum.
But toward what? And what are the practical steps for achieving it?
TBD.
End New Year’s Day post.