Empty days hold limitless potential or are hollow from depressing lack, depending on my mood. Lately, each day stretches out like a blank canvas illuminated in the dawn's light, hungry to be filled, yet evening yields only a few meager sketches in one corner with my own dirty footprints smudged across the remaining white space. It's a post-college conundrum worsened by our drooping, dragging economy. We are high on enthusiasm, idealism, and dreams, but low on opportunities. I know too many insanely intelligent and gifted people who are out of work or who have settled for jobs that neither challenge them nor meet their financial needs. My husband, a photojournalist, has taken to tracking the decline of the nation's newspapers with the fervor and distress of World Wildlife Fund worker clutching the endangered species list. Instead of frivolous posts, Facebook features SOS signals begging the vast online community to toss out a job. My brother, a senior in high school, can't even find a part-time job busing tables or blending smoothies. Things certainly do look bleak.
Yet, I am not easily afflicted by pessimism. I have continued to plan, search, think creatively, network, research, and do all the other good stuff which makes up the mantras of career counselors everywhere. Being a self-help junkie, I also enjoy the occasional indulgence in those addictive find-your-true-self exercises. While completing one, a collage meant to represent my desired future, I uncovered another problem implicit in keeping post-college students stuck.
My future collage appeared to be done by five very different people. In one corner, a glossy magazine cut-out of a yurt peaked over an illustration of a city loft further layered over by a beach cottage with fuchsia bougainvillea blossoms crawling up its wall. Next to this impossible neighborhood of dream dwellings, a cut-out of a teacher in a yellow cardigan smiling over a forest of raised hands was glued to a photograph of a delicate bird tattoo flying across a woman's back. A train thundered across images of India and well-worn backpacks. The whole continent of Africa made it into the kaleidescope of dreams as well as a computer graphic of a guitar. There was a theater stage, a bicycle, a veggie garden, an underground art scene, an image of interlinking hands, and words like inner peace, change, love, activism, and authentic scrawled over the pictures in glittery gel pen ink. In between a newspaper clipping of the New York Times Bestseller list (dream on) and an advertisement for a pottery wheel, cartoon children beamed up from the page asking not to be forgotten. How could these be the wishes of just one person?
I decided to attack my out-of-control collage with a healthy dose of realistic thinking. I couldn't possibly want all of these lives equally, some must have been whims implanted by the idealization of alternative lifestyles. Yet, I couldn't bring myself to rip up any pictures. They became an interconnecting web of paper and glue, no longer separable. Besides, each picture contained a feeling, a facet of myself, a whole imagined life that I was not ready to rule out. I thought maybe the tattoo could go; I hate needles. Or the guitar, I don't know the first thing about playing and will probably be horrible considering I have no rhythm. But no, they had come to stay, whispering that I am still the wild little girl who insisted on wearing flimsy, spaghetti-strapped undershirts as tank tops with white cowgirl boots and a hot pink boa. Okay then, I thought, maybe the mommy or the teacher pictures can go. No, they wouldn't budge. I sometimes feel as if those children are already here, hiding behind the corner or smiling in my review mirror, waiting with eager minds and open hearts. Like reversed phantom limb pain, they are already a part of me that has yet to materialize. So, there I was, not at a cross roads, but in a clearing with ten different roads branching out in different directions and I was not sure how to start my journey down one, much less, how to walk all of them at once.
When driving on the freeway, I always marvel at the fact that each car contains a person with a life and a network of relationships. It seems impossible, mind-baffling, that there are more of these freeways all over the world with millions of cars and even more people connected to them. It is unfathomable that each and every one of those humans is orbited by their own invisible galaxies of potential lives. It makes the idea of reincarnation appealing, a chance for each of us to live out all those different preferences. But I am pretty sure I only have this one little body, broken and needy, and this one life from which to explore the vastness of experience. Sometimes it feels like trying to see all of China from my brother's old red wagon. Although, it occurs to me that seeing China in a child's wagon might be a far more amazing experience than seeing it by car or train. Imagine all the people you would meet as you hauled your wagon into mountain villages for repair after days on bumpy dirt roads. You would feel everything in a wagon from the warm sunshine to the torrents of rain. There would be no barrier between you and the world.
In the end, I found guidance – not in the glossy self-help section – on the art shelves in an out-of-the-way corner. There I found Frida, an old love, who spoke to me from out of her many self portraits, saying that it is not so much the what of our lives that matters, but how we process it and share it with others. It is the chronicling, honest and raw, that transcends the details to arrive in a realm of universality. Her cracked-column spine and nail-pierced skin reminded me that the most barren times are often fallow fields about to yield the most abundant crops.
As I jump up and down in my bedroom, frustrated at a lack of forward progress, I realize that perhaps I am diver bouncing on the tip of the board about to take the plunge. Perhaps, life is not a series of roads or even a two-dimensional canvas but a body of water mixing and flowing with the water of many rivers. We must become comfortable immersing ourselves in our vast waters without even the meager protection of a red wagon, knowing there will be storms and stillness, depths and shallows. My empty days are immeasurable oceans waiting to be swum.
0 comments:
Post a Comment