Back in Time (Part 5) 1982

From my journal, August 25, 1982:

…I feel ready in some ways for change after this year, but can’t imagine what that will be now.  It’s always  so much easier to stay in one place that has become a secure shelter and not bother to uproot yourself.  Here where I’ve lived for three years I feel that security, especially in summer when the cicadas are busy with their afternoon songs and the trees are thick and green and protect the rich life of the season.  While the sights, sounds and smells of summer occasionally trigger memories, it is the present I am concerned most with and the past has much less sway over me.  I see this perhaps as gaining some measure of independence from unreal sentimentality.  Retreating to the past in one’s thoughts offers only a limited amount of comfort.  It is the encouragement and hope we now experience from the love of others that can make each day beautiful.

Little did I know when I wrote that entry that in a year’s time my life would be completely unended and uprooted,  that I’d have departed that sheltering cocoon of an apartment I so enjoyed for four years with it’s surrounding hickory trees and nearby creek, and that I would have embarked on a new job opportunity in a city 100 miles and light years away from the place I had known for much of the time since graduation from college.  Not only did I need to make this move because I could not live on what I was making, but I knew I had to try to broaden the scope of the career that had opened up to me several years before — teaching.   I left my good friends and the familiarity of the past and started a job that from the very beginning was a disaster.   Everything about it felt wrong.  I dreaded going in day after day, and went off every weekend to escape when I could.  Nothing eased the feeling that I didn’t have a future in that job.  I can’t call it a miscalculation because it was a logical turning point.  It was the setting, the  total circumstances and time of life, the isolation I felt, and the sense of being overwhelmed.   

This was a huge failure, and that is the only way I can describe it because I could have stayed and and fought it out and overcome all the odds I had stacked up against myself.  But as with any other seemingly fateful turn of events in life, I left a career that had seemed so promising at the start for a full decade of uncertainly, change and basically starting over again from scratch.  I had done that twice before  — after my first semester of college and again in my late 20s.  

So, from late 1983 until roughly the end of 1994, I lived a mobile, almost vagabond life.  Fortunately, I had the opportunity to stay with my sister and her husband and both travel across the country several times and even live for a year and a half in Seattle.   This was in the early 90s and I worked a long-term temp job that also had no future but served its purpose and allowed me the great pleasure of getting to know well some very special and dear friends.   I had left a brief newspaper position before that, again having come to know people in the course of that stressful job who I will remember always.   Looking back on those years now one of the chief lessons learned was that almost any job situation could be made tolerable and even enjoyable when if you can develop strong and lasting bonds with co-workers. Not having my own family and being single, this was extremely important to me.

In the mid and late-80s I was in graduate school and teaching journalism;  again, this was extremely rewarding at times because of the students I was able to help and who really enjoyed my classes, and the co-workers who helped me along the way.   There was one at this time who seemed actively to dislike me for some reason, but that is another story in and of itself, a mystery I have never quite figured out.   Nearly identical situations  had occurred at two other workplaces as well.   Amidst the roses, there are always thorns.

In between semesters and graduate schools in the late spring and summers of several of those years, I loaded my car with what was necessary to begin a new life elsewhere, if necessary, and took off again and again for the Pacific Northwest where I had a place of safe anchorage.   I am forever grateful to my sister for providing that.    I had amazing and unforgettable experiences seeing this beautiful country as I traveled out West and across deserts and mountain ranges and back east through the Midwest and prairie states.  I wrote about those times in my journal and excerpted some of them here at OD.   I think about the places I visited often, as for example, this morning when I leafed through a book about the Anazazi Indian cultures in the Southwest during the 12th-14th centuries.  These were fascinating civilizations I had never known much about, dating to hundreds of years before the first Spanish explorers on the North American continent opened up the "New World," but destroyed much of the Old World that was there in the process.   Those travels were an education steeped in history that I never would have known otherwise.   From the setbacks and personal suffering and failures in life come new possibilities and adventures, if you are willing to seek them out.   Sometimes to keep your sanity, you have no choice, and yet the choice very much turns out in retrospect to have been the right one.

From my vantage point here in Charleston now, 25 years later, I am settled in a job that I was destined to have,  and which I truly believe God used as the vehicle for me to escape the pits of despair I found myself in after ten years of rootlessness.   Long years of vagabonding take a toll and at some point you begin to wonder if you will ever settle down and have anything resembling a secure life.   Thankfully, I was able to.

The ironic thing is this.   Security and stability paradoxically take away some of the necessary restraints we impose on our thoughts, actions and desires when we are focused on surviving emotionally, psychically and otherwise.   I found myself descending again into a self-contained and self-centered life, geared to the Internet.  It was a novel way for me to explore more deeply who I was, but was unhealthy in that it seemed to provide for my needs and the necessary social outlets, when in fact it became a long cascading series of disappointments, disillusionments, and self-destructive habits, at least inwardly.   It was a "virtual" existence.  I met few people.  I had many long and interesting conversations online.   I ceaselessly sought these diversions and distractions and, yes, companionship, and outwardly I was doing fine to all appearances.   But inwardly I was living what Thoreau described as a "life of quiet desperation."

So again, life has taken a sharp turn and I am fortunately away from all of that.   In part, life forces this on us, as with my becoming more and more consumed with caregiving for a parent.   There isn’t much time for anything else.   Also, we are jolted back on course by the mysterious upheavals that shake us to our core along crucial forks on the road of our spiritual and religious quest for fulfillment and a measure of peace in this life. .    More than anything else I am discovering, this is what matters:   That we get back on the right path and stay there no matter if things seem to be smoother and easier the other way.   It never is.   I find that I must fight complacency and the old ways of being and thinking.   I treasure the rare moments of insight and peace where for brief periods of time almost everything that has happened to me makes sense in the scheme of a larger plan for my life.

As Meg Mangan wrote, "On my walk one bleak morning, I stopped to enjoy the view from the hill I was climbing.  Below me stretched a broad river valley.  On the other side of the valley a wall of low clouds obscured the countryside; but rising above the clouds were the distant peaks of mountain, bright-purple and vivid against the pale sky…"   It’s similar in my late afternoon/early evening walks to Colonial Lake and then to the Battery along the Ashley River and Charleston Harbor.   The city and neighborhoods obscure the skies, but when I reach the lake and the harbor, the sky opens up and I can witness the sun setting and the vivid and glorious colors that paint the clouds that change from moment to moment.    "I can see clearly now,’" as Johnny Nash so memorably wrote in my favorite song.

Recent sunset and early evening photos:

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/camas/sets/72157626753741774/