FLYING SOLO
December 3, 2014
Whoa! New York City! A helluva town!
We’ve gone from profound culture shock, to urban frenzy, to “hey we can do this and isn’t it great to see the kids?” to “Let’s cram a whole bunch more stuff onto the calendar,” to looking at each other and seeing the boy in Home Alone, only with way more wrinkles, to, “When do we go back to Tuscany?” We have run the gamut of emoticons and are gearing up for primal scream.
New Yuck City, here we are…and grateful for every minute of it. The only regret is that we have disappointed most of our NY friends for not spending time with them. It’s uncomfortably impossible: there are only 2 of us, and 30 of them. We tried it when we were here in January, scheduling 23 separate lunches and dinners in 30 days and learned the hard truth: it is impossible to be all things to all people. And so, as with much else as we age, we learn to make the difficult decisions in order to prioritize in a way that doesn’t jeopardize our physical and/or mental health. Our priority this time was family, and family showed up for us.
We’ve also learned a lot on this trip. Perhaps the biggest lesson being that we’re still capable of pulling the wool over our eyes. Every time we return to NY – even in the old, summer-on-Cape Cod days – we always say the same thing: “This time it will be different. This time we’ll play in the city and soak up all its cultural goodies.” But we never do. The tug of Joel’s studio gets him every time and every time I watch him get sucked into the vortex while I stand on the rim fearing for his safety.
It’s hard to gauge how much to blame on the city energy, which surely is relentless and can be felt clawing at every edifice to gain entry; as opposed to accepting that Joel’s life as a photographer has created a many-tentacled beast that he feels compelled to feed and train. It is not for me to hack at the tentacles until they free him.
So, in the future we’ve decided we will try coming here separately; Joel for work and family and me for family and culture. He for 2 weeks, me for 1. Why growing up is so hard to do I don’t know. Well, that’s not true…of course I know. All of us keep some spirit of the child in us; the spirit that is boundless in the belief that we can do and have everything. None of us want the ice cream cone to end.
For me, another lesson learned in the past week, which I could only have learned by finally having accepted who I am and what I have, turned out to be a real gift.
Joel and I had been invited to collaborate, as equals we thought, in someone else’s creative project, a project that really interested us. Then I got an email the day after Thanksgiving, informing me that I would be cast in the role of supportive wife. I let a few expletives rip through the interior of the car. Then I felt disappointed, as this is someone I much admire both as an artist and a human.
But the interesting discovery was that I didn’t feel rejected or diminished…which I certainly would have until a couple of weeks ago. It was as though the universe was testing me to see how well my recent self-acceptance would hold up in such a situation.
To make it brief, I respectfully declined the offer to participate. I felt immediate relief. I felt the freedom of choosing not to scratch at crumbs and not to hope that, via Joel, I might gain recognition. And bravo to the artist, who had the courage not to be defensive, but instead took the opportunity to learn her own lesson with grace and humility. In so doing, she created the space for me to participate in the project, in my own right: a mere human being who knows a bit about the creative process and mortality.
So, dear ones, I leave you with these words from Lewis Lapham, with the hope that any of you who might be questioning the meaning of success will take the time to redefine it in a way which reflects the true worth of who you are.
Failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what’s at stake isn’t a reflection in the mirror of fame, but the escape from the prison of the self.
Photo by Maggie
