Living with other people

After three years of living alone, I moved in with a family of five.  Living in their guesthouse was to be a temporary solution, until I slowly found myself falling in love. They were a fascinating cast of characters.  There was the father, a monosyllabic warm-hearted man, the wife, a Auntie-Mame style college professor, the teenage daughter, a giggling whirlwind, the teenaged son– the teasing younger brother I never had, and the ’surprise child’, a zoomy seven year old who fancied himself Harry Potter.  They came replete with warm house centered around the kitchen and lengthy dinners, a doe-eyed black lab, and a swimming pool.  And best of all, they seemed to love me back.  I was in heaven. 

Until I wasn’t. Somewhere around the three month mark… it changed. The kids went back to school, the wife got busy, and the husband had a family tragedy… and suddenly I was superfluous and perhaps even a touch…in the way. 

At first I was a little hurt.  I had had such a crush on my family.  They were intriguing; at times a whole huge personality woven together, at others wild, individual variations on the same theme.  Getting to know them– their social organization and cultural practices– was like watching a huge magnolia unfurling in front of my eyes, and then slowly closing up… tightening in to hunker down for the winter months. But, despite my hurt, I knew that it was fine.  I am a grown woman and need a grown woman’s apartment, and knew that quite simply, this is what it means to live with other people. 

We live with so many other people. Some of them are in our homes. Some of them waft by us on the street, some are memories, some are strangers.  Other people we take into the intricacies of our person.  Sometimes we don’t know that they are curling up in our hearts and we become startled by their presence.  Others, well, we work hard with them.  Others are like a great pair of shoes that pinch when we put them on, but we wear them.  We bought them afterall. 

Living with other people is a myriad of experiences.  On the one hand, the people in our lives are always distant to us.  The person I know best in this world is my mother.  I have known her for exactly 32 years and nine months and ten days.  Yet, she is still a mystery to me.  She had this whole other life before she brought me in to the world… a life in which she cried, and loved, and dreamed, and never knew that we would be unalterably each others.  On the other hand, the people in our lives can be closer than we want them to be.  They hold up magnifying glasses to our neuroses and idiosyncracies and push us to be different—when we just want to be left alone.  And so we vascillate on this continuum of intimacy and distance, sometimes drawing close to each other, sometimes pushing the people in our lives away. 

When I lived in New York I constantly marveled at the strange beast that was the city subway.  Of course it is a feat of technology and of course an incredible transport system. But more than that, the NYC subway system is the greatest multicultural democratic project in the entire world.  Forget Obama’s White House, this is the real deal. You see the whole world on the NYC subway. Drunks puking, Wall Street financiers, gaping tourist, Chinese schoolchildren, hip hop kids from the Bronx.  But even stranger than the visual and cultural array of such an assortment of people in one place was the issue of proximity.  I would sit on the subway for hours during my commute each day and think– all we are are just bodies in a moving tin box. Why don’t we talk about the questions at the bottoms of our hearts? Why can’t I just reach across the aisle and take your hand?

Look at us… look around at these people who we live with. What do we mean to one another?

And so, I have made peace with leaving my new family.  Like many romantic relationships, it didn’t survive the three month cut off mark. When the chips fell, we weren’t going to move across that continuum from distance to intimacy. And that is ok. Because it is a unwieldy continuum that we spend our lives trying to navigate. We move close and then away, and then close and then away– sometimes with the same one person over our entire lives. All of us, world roommates, trying to look at each other’s unfurled hearts… all of us, trying to figure out what that means.

Looking: How we respond to the suffering of others

I haven’t posted in a while, but have been getting amazing responses to this blog lately. Thank you so much, dear readers, for sharing your thoughts with me! Anyway, I have been feeling a little anxious about updating but am overwhelmed with writing my dissertation proposal. An amazing mentor and writing buddy of mine, Mike Rose, suggested excerpting some older material.  This is an excerpt from an article that I have recently submitted for publication on how we look at photographs of refugees and what our looking tells us about the nature of suffering.  

Transition

I am sitting in my little studio apartment with its barely there view of the Santa Monica mountains on my cheerful, yellow sofa for one of the last times. In a few days my meager possessions will be in storage and I’ll be renting a guest room from some dear friends in West LA for the summer. I am excited, looking forward to the move, feeling just dandy about not having my own things for a while; the move has been long awaited and is temporary until I sort out my life in L.A. and find a permanent home.  And yet, as I type these words, I trip over the word “permanent.” 

Permanence.  I have been looking for that for a while now. Each move is my “last move,”  I tell myself. “Just once more and then this wanderlust, this wandering eye will be calmed…”

I spent the last two weeks traveling.  I went up the coast of California to wine country, hung out at a Catholic mission in Santa Barbara, and flew to Brooklyn for five glorious, hard walked days.  I’ve been slightly depressed lately: finishing up my PhD coursework and taking my exams has taken its toll on me. Traveling was a welcome release, I lifted the stop valve and all the stress of the preceding months evaporated into the shifting winds of my journeying.  Yet, it was a welcome release in another, less expected way as well. 

Traveling was a release from permanence. These states of being– moving and staying– are like opposing magnetic poles that govern my heart and actions.  As much as I crave sitting still, being quiet, deepening relationships and my knowledge of the place where I am, I simultaneously yearn to be in perpetual motion, discovering the new, and seeking the unknown. 

Why?

Eating a slice of italian sausage pizza purchased at Two Boots in the West Village, I walked down the street pondering this question.  Why couldn’t I just stay put? Or– like my friend Sue– give up the stability and live a life of perpetual travel? Why am I constantly yearning for both, putting my emotions at the mercy of this impossible conundrum? I don’t have the fullest answer for this life question, but in the West Village that day I knew that there was something about that experience that helps certain parts of me unfold in ways that can only happen in that place. 

When I hit the streets of New York I feel alive, emboldened, tough, hot and smart. I love the person I become there.  Yet, in Los Angeles other parts of me emerge.  I become soft and sweet: wide open like the Pacific ocean on a grey morning and sunshiney  like the rose bushes punctuating the alleys of Venice Beach. Neither experience is replicable anywhere else and I need both to survive. On planes I am reflective and prayerful.  In Europe I am savvy. In the Middle East I am shy and wondorous. In India I am adventurous and sheisty.  Every place I go I tap into another layer of my chameleon-like self and I can’t imagine life without the richness, the surprise, the utter fulfillment of that experience.  Travel, then, is about myself. 

But permanence? Permanence is others. Permanence is getting to revel in my mother’s presence, in the mundane ins and outs of her daily routine, the way she lifts her fork to her mouth, the way she sighs at the dogs and laughs at my father.  Permanence is looking at a friend and realizing that she has three small wrinkles at the corner of her right eye that I have never noticed before.  Permanence is loving that point when your best friend is in a terrible mood and you can lie quietly together, without speaking, knowing that you’ll get up in an hour or two and make her a coffee with two sugars and a dash of cream, just the way she likes it. 

How do I give either up? How is it possible to live with out these poles, these tensions, these ways of moving towards myself and then back outwards towards others? 

And so, on this quiet morning of transition: On this morning that I drove my dear friend to the airport for his flight to Paris, unsure of whether I will see him in a year or in five; on this morning after a week in NYC that convinced me I have to leave California and move back to the east coast–but can’t for a least a few more years; on this morning after realizing my mother is in a tough spot and that I should spend as much time with her in North Carolina as possible; on this morning when I pack up my possessions to leave my very first Los Angeles apartment for a brand new life; on this morning….

On this morning, I realize that life is never solved, full of tensions and contradictions, and always, always, in transition.