The exit for Ann Arbor is ten miles away, and then my mother tells me that Jackson road is under construction and so I might as well get off at the next exit. I speed up to any limit I can afford; excitement has been mounting over three days. Such prolonged anticipation isn’t healthy.
It was a comparatively graceful first evening back at home - no outburst or quarrel, no qualms about where to eat, sufficient cat cuddles - and my giddiness is undeniable. However, there is an unease and surreal quality, a factor of culture shock, that I had not ever anticipated.
It is strange to be in a world of such abundance. Sure, I had spent the past week and a half cruising all shapes and sizes of towns, perusing city streets and stores decked out with more people and product than the sum of Packwood’s like offerings. Yet, I had been a guest. I hadn’t needed to view my role in that world, to see myself integrated into a culture so far from the one I’d been calling home for the past year. It sufficed to simply flit in and out of each experience, superficially adapting to the glitz and glam of Seattle or the bare bones of camping.
And now I am back in a place that is also called home, seeing it through changed eyes. The first thing I noticed as I drove down my street, was how I could look out the window and see people that bore no familiarity. Where I’d once considered Ann Arbor have such an intimate community, I now saw it relatively segmented and distant, compared to the intertwined lives of Packwood. A face could be anyone; I felt spite when I glanced at young unrecognizable faces and imagined their infatuated perspective as a University student.
Inside my own home emerged another shock. From my room to unloading groceries in our kitchen, there is just so much. Everything squeezes into place just to turn and find something you’d not considered, something that beacons for you to give it a purpose and vexes you when you wonder what its purpose was to begin with. Some things were pleasant reminders of luxuries I’d gone without: a dishwasher, a kettle instead of a pot for water, a bathroom that wasn’t smudged and falling apart on every wall and that you could enjoy taking a nice long squat in. Some things were just overwhelming: so many spaces for food you forgot what food you had, so much space in general. But most overwhelming of all, was the upstairs. I found myself nervous to even climb the staircase at first, knowing that all sorts of unfinished pieces of life lay awaiting at the top. In the hallways, I felt oddly overcome by being confronted with the plethora of my artwork I’d buried in my memory. But then came my room. Closets and drawers of clothes upon clothes that I’d forgotten, piles in every corner which had been sorted by various projects of the crafty, artsy, writerly and decorative variety. I felt a combination of calm determination and frantic panic as I looked around at the possibilities of the next three weeks, wishing I could covet every minute in freeze frame as I used my characteristically slow processing to approach each moment for the optimum enrichment and reward of my time.
Grace is something so often and so tangibly envisioned in my mind and yet such a rare gem for me to actualize. Over trial and error, I have learned where my faults lie with prioritizing and taking on more than I can fairly expect of myself. I’ve not yet learned a fool-proof way to bypass this personal mousetrap of mine, but I’d like to think that I have gotten better at recognizing when I am approaching a fault line and how to brace myself better or slow down and accept a pace more conducive to my soul’s speed.
Coming back and seeing this world - this home - with such a wave of shock and awe, has begged for more conscious intention and recognition of these next few weeks. I’ve been a good wanderer, a good taster, a good wanderlust, taking in the big bright worlds that I skip through. But when I have to stay and stop and settle, the big picture is not what feeds me. I must choose what makes home home in each moment.
As Ana Forrest says, do the smallest thing you can do for yourself, right now in this moment, that brings you closer to the way you want to be. For me, in each moment, I will do what feels at home in my soul.
This will probably include a lot of seeing friends and cat cuddles. But hopefully some projects I’ve always shirked as well.
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