One Week, Two Thoughts

What a week. Toomuchness, to quote a very wise three year old of my acquaintance.

This one wickedly demanding week yielded two important insights:

#1: I need to make appointments for this transition. Just like all the meetings I’ve been booking around other priorities, I need to set aside chunks of time — both large and small — to do the work of the move. And not at night, when I’m braindead and bone tired, all executive-functioned-out. I need to do this work during business hours. In daylight. With deliverables. Pacing is everything.

#2: Less is more. A wise friend, a few months ahead of us on this transition curve, wrote, “The time pressure helped us make decisions about what to get rid of. And I’m finding I am ready to get rid of more.”

I don’t know that I’m there yet, but I’m trying. I can imagine that would feel pretty darn good…

 

 

Another New Beginning

Five years into this new normal, three weeks into owning a new condo that will eventually be home, I’m at the front edge of another, newer normal.

And so I return to these virtual pages to write my way through a transition. Again.

For 32 years we’ve lived in this quirky little hold-out house. The county has grown up around it. My kids have grown up in it. It’s indisputably, deeply, emotionally home.  And we’re getting ready to leave it. But not just leave it, we’re getting ready to bulldoze it. We’re combining forces with the housing group that owns the property on all three sides of us and going to replace this one quirky little hold-out house with seven spiffy market-rate townhouses. It makes economic sense. It makes zoning sense. It makes logistical sense. It all makes sense, but I will tell you I do this with very mixed emotions.

It feels like a bit of a betrayal to the past, although I know full well that what matters is the people, not the stuff — and certainly not the plaster.

It feels like I’m cutting off a piece of myself.

It also feels like shaking off a damn harness. Having a quirky little hold-out house is hard. Wily raccoons and squirrels feel entitled to share the space with us. The boards creak, the wind whistles through frames around windows and doors alike. Woe to the bare toes near baseboards in these winter months!

The stairs seem at perpetual risk of coming loose from the wall. We hope the appliances last. The woodwork is old and dinged. At 99 years, the window glass is ancient enough to be beautifully wobbly. We’ll take some light fixtures with us and hope the radiators find work elsewhere. We marvel at the concept of floors without cracks.

Every one of those cracks is filled with memories. I think: if memories, like fluids, fill gaps, then they will flow to the next space we give them. Those particular cracks won’t be there any more, but my memories will find another place to call home. That comforts me.

Last week, we celebrated our last Christmas in this quirky little hold-out house. Our grown and flown sons wandered the rooms, unsure how things would look when next they returned, suddenly nostalgic about finicky light switches and the poorly insulated oven. We made lists of what is coming, what is going, what needs a plan, another home.

Leaving a quirky little hold-out house is hard as well.

But, then: there was this →

This felt great.

Thank goodness for the county’s hazmat collection site. I loaded my car with 30+ years of accumulated toxins and felt virtuous, almost giddy, all the way there and back.

So the hard is softened by the satisfying. And while the move weighs on me, it also lightens me and I remember why this is what we want.

 

Scarcity Captures the Mind

It began with this idea of scarcity. That when something is scarce — food, money, time — it takes over our minds and clouds our decisions. That over-scheduled rich people have something fundamental in common with cash-strapped poor people, and that “something” finds expression in compromised, sometimes catastrophic, choices.

Taken as I was by the simple elegance of Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s work on the subject, I wanted to find a way to explore what becomes of curiosity in a world defined by scarcity.

But the subject brushes shoulders with taboo, with the unsayable in certain circles: that  some people make predictably bad decisions. And sometimes those people are poor, or find themselves in difficult circumstances, and sometimes they do stuff that gets them in trouble — literal, figurative, legal, or otherwise.

But then it begins to sound like poverty is the reason people end up in places like jail, which isn’t what anyone was saying. And so it was a delicate enterprise when I approached the local offender aid and restoration program to have a conversation about what happens to curiosity before, during and after incarceration.

Interestingly, talking about trauma was more comfortable, more on message.

I didn’t have an agenda other than to explore what becomes of curiosity when constraints are imposed — and where are constraints more real than in the criminal justice system? — so the conversation circled around trauma, not scarcity. And perhaps they not so different. Trauma, the indelible imprint of something terribly gone. Security denied, trust savaged. Scarcity imposed.

Listen to Choose to be Curious – Episode 11: Curiosity, Trauma and Incarceration – with Elizabeth Jones.