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.
