dream(s) deferred

In another lifetime, I am teaching kids about tidepools. We scavenge the shallow waters for crabs and urchins and the occasional elusive octopus. In this lifetime, it is late April and kids are still arriving. Every day is full of sun.

In a lifetime different than that, I am backpacking in Yosemite. I’d long dreamed about returning to the land of granite cliffs and illuminated valleys, and it feels weirdly poetic to come back to the place that was the culmination of my long, solo road trip. This time, however, I am not alone.

And in yet another lifetime, I am working in the Adirondacks this summer. I have a cadre of returning friends and the woods that I’ve been missing are there to welcome me back. The sunbutter is plentiful.

It is May, and none of this will happen.

It is OK. It is fine. (How are you? / Silence again. / Fine, fine, I mumble, fine, / unraveling like string…—Sandra Cisneros). This is the way life goes. Sometimes you get the luxury of making choices, but sometimes you don’t, sometimes circumstances rear their head and the future you carefully crafted becomes dust in a heartbeat. You can only plan so much. For much of life, you just have to ride it out.

Life has changed for everybody lately, but among my own circles of friends, some feel it more acutely. When you work seasonally, your job and housing and food are often intertwined. To lose a job means to become mapless, it means to sit in your car and look out the bug-splattered window and wonder where to go next. It means to uproot yourself, once again, and toss your fragile body into the wind and see where you land.

Vast swaths of summer programs have been cancelled, and I’ve been thinking of all my seasonal-life friends, wishing I could hold them a little closer and promise them a safe and ripening future.

In a letter I received the other month, there was this one incredible line that lodged itself in my brain and I’ve been thinking about ever since: “. . . if I’m not careful, twenty years of these paychecks will go by and I’ll have done nothing but work for it. I think that is even more frightening, to know your future rather than to not know it.”

I think that is even more frightening, to know your future rather than to not know it.

…to know your future rather than to not know it.

I very much do not know my future. Not in any grand sense. Sometimes I wish I was one of those people who knew exactly what they wanted. But that’s not me. Sometimes I think I want something and then I get it and realize that’s not what I want at all, and then I have to start all over again. How do people do it? How do people know who they’re going to become?

This is all just to say that sometimes life sucks and you don’t get a choice. Things happen, and the only choice you have is how to react, what to do next. It’s OK to be disappointed. To be scared. To feel alone. It’s OK to look at your life and wish it was a little more sturdy, a little less susceptible to raging ocean currents.

I’ll be heading back east in a couple of weeks, and it feels strange to start over again in the midst of all this uncertainty. I have a place to go. I have stuff to do. But leaving this time feels different. Leaving this place. These people. The tattered dreams for what I hoped and longed for.

Onward & Outward

(I write about leaving allll the time. My all-time fav is this one, but this one is a solid more recent one, too.)