hi,
we are still here, somewhere.
Revamping and constantly in transition, the summer has settled us in separate parts of the world with many miles, people, and moments in between, save a quick venture on Caitlin’s part up to the PNW back in June.
Its been a summer of shifting for me and many people that I hold closely in my circle. Specifically, I have been noticing the trending shift in distance and time between friends, lovers, and families. Friends graduate and move away, partners take jobs and separate to different sides of the country, parents face the impending “empty nest” after graduating their beloved senior babies. For some reason this summer has seemed to act as the last moments before such separations, or brought about a diverse and frequent array of them. I keep hearing phrases like “the end of an era,” and its almost as if people are using it as a coping mechanism to justify the pain or uncertainty that they experience by identifying the previous chunk of time as a grand “era,” something worthy of all the emotional stuff that comes as a package deal with it’s close.
It all seems to come down to the idea that we, as humans, sometimes nurture the tendency to fear that the future could not possibly be as rewarding as the present or past, when we know how wonderful something or someone is right now. When we are threatened by the idea of not seeing a certain person or place as often as we’ve grown accustomed to, or even by just the knowledge that we couldn’t see that person or place easily if we wanted to, the emotions that arise are basically those of loss, and with loss comes grief. That grief is a real one and our internal programming often disallows us from feeling beyond our current state, regardless of our capability to see possibility in the future. Its a trap of a physical and emotional nature.
Recently, my dad reminded me of a moment of mine after graduating high school when I had some girlfriends over and we all sat in my living room talking about how the bond that we had created was eternal and that we could always call upon one another regardless of where our futures took us, and that we would. Although those things are basically true in a spirit, they were said with a complete naivety towards the reality of just how endless the world becomes when you truly start to enter it on your own feet. A process that I still feel at the start of, and that I have a hunch may never go away. The trap that we were in was a beautifully warm and fuzzy one, one that my dad says he didn’t have the heart to release us from at the time because it would have meant forcing us out of a state of resounding love, accomplishment, and a belief in something being infinitely concrete. We were not focussed on the oncoming distance and time that would threaten such notions, so in that specific moment, the fear wasn’t setting in. But what happens when it does?
How do we knowingly move forward into a future that requires us to grow accustomed to not seeing our best friends each day? Or growing accustomed to our loved ones living on the opposite coasts or our families not residing in the places we remember as home? How do we process these deviations and find ways to sit here, in the present, with a desire to step into that future rather than hold onto the grand past, knowing that we will suffer bouts of nostalgia? These are simple versions of the really hard and uniquely individual questions that come with change and the donning of a “new era” — with growth. We have to trust in ourselves, that as humans we are somewhat rational creatures that can discern the difference between true loss and simple change, no matter how significantly the distance + time equation computes. There is a difference between the amount of time in a space or the frequency of contact with a person and the translation into care and meaning, because as people and places shift and grow, there are inherent distances built, though they in no way diminish the meaning of what already existed.
I choose to believe that those pasts are held to be sweet by others as well as myself and that the comfort in that knowledge alone might be enough to propelle me into an uncertain future, one that looks a little different than the last time I glanced ahead. After a summer spent at home, with people that I love, with families that I continue to grow with and into, with young friends that I see excitedly taking new steps, with helping old friends through heartbreak and watching my dad support a dear college friend through a move that will take him much farther away that the comfortable 3 hour drive that its been for years, and with many of my friends having recently graduated and moved onto their next endeavors, I gear up to step into my last year at university (talk about feeling time moving). In two weeks I will enter back into my school world for the last time and I’ll feel all of these shifting relationships around me as I do now, but be rooted in some knowledge that while I am moving into the uncertainty, I am simultaneously building the pieces of many different perpetual eras that will eventually come to pass and that wouldn’t have happened if some others weren’t already released.
Its just a matter of being in the present. Of rooting in the knowledge that we are here.
(that maybe I’ll manage to write a little more about the future present, and that right now, here for Caitlin is up in an airplane somewhere between Italy and the U.S., I think, and I’m in this kitchen that I’m house sitting)
Also, its a matter of remembering that as I enter this fall, I get to remember those sweet, tender moments that I’ve gotten this summer that gave me a twang of welcomed nostalgia. Moments like getting drinks with Carlie-Sue, my best friend all through middle school and high school. After being in the same class in fourth grade, the teachers made sure to keep us together — it was clearly magic. We grew together, up and out, and she knows best of all the ways in which I will never grow up. So despite the craziness that this is a valid form of socializing for us now and the fact that those sorts of moments together are much more rare than they once were, the fact that it could still happen, and that it did happen at all… that will keep me going through any fear of an era truly “ending.”
more soon. love you cs.
cz
at the threshold 