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The Worst Advice I Ever Got

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IMG_3847Twenty six years ago when I was 26, my father died unexpectedly. It happened to coincide with a time in my life when I was already depressed, unhappy at work, and feeling anxious about my future. Sitting on the rose-patterned corduroy sofa inside my new therapist’s office, I confessed that I felt lost, stuck, uncertain about what was to come. I wanted to leave the job, but had only been there two years. I didn’t want to leave the boyfriend, but I wasn’t ready to settle down either. I missed my family, and wondered if I should live closer to them.

“Well,” said the therapist, “You could just upset the apple cart completely.”

As I recall I stared at her in disbelief. Did people really do that? Decide that so little in their life was working that the only recourse was to chuck it all and start over?  It was the emotional equivalent of yanking the plug on some misbehaving, little-understood piece of technology and then plugging it back in with great expectations.

It was a terrible idea. But as a depressed, anxious, recently de-fathered 26 year-old, I couldn’t see this.  At that time, I believed PhDs didn’t have terrible ideas, or if they did, they used them for making hideous sofa choices. And so, three months after my father’s death, I said goodbye to my boyfriend, my best friend, my job, and the horse farm I lived on and adored, and moved to what was then the middle of nowhere.

Do I have to tell you the plan stunk? That I missed the boyfriend, the best friend, my coworkers, and the horses intensely? That what I had done, far from hitting the reset button on my life, was to heap sorrow, loneliness, and unemployment on top of grief, anxiety and confusion? I have to wonder: what did the therapist think might come of this apple-cart overthrow? Had she thought it through at all? If so, what did she think was possible?

Which brings me to one of my all-time favorite questions to ask or be asked: What’s possible?  It’s a great question to ask yourself (or someone else) in times of  stuckness or uncertainty. I often wonder what would have come of my young self and my supposedly dispensable “apples” had the therapist taken the time to ask me, What’s possible if you upset the apple cart? What’s possible if you don’t? She could have even followed it with the deliciously abstract, often maddening, but almost always revealing, What else?  I might have still tossed the apples, but maybe I’d have at least salvaged the cart.

Thinking Inside the Box

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IMG_3703I have a fantasy about a house. It’s a tiny house my husband and I pass every afternoon on our walk. It sits over a one-car garage, and couldn’t possibly contain anything larger than a twin bed, a dormroom-sized refrigerator, and a minuscule bathroom. On the front porch–which is just large enough for a chair and a hanging plant–there sits a tiny long-haired terrier who surveys us quietly as we go by. The house is barely bigger than a self.

My husband and I live a half mile away in a house that is nearly 3000 square feet. We have an acre yard that until two months ago was the province of my two very elderly cocker spaniels, Shark and Bella. On our generous deck is a table the size of a small boat, which we bought because we have 10 friends we see every month, and we wanted to be able to seat everyone comfortably. It’s a lovely house and we got it for a steal when the market was soft. My favorite room is an upstairs garret where I do my writing and life coaching.

And yet my heart aches every time we pass the little house with the little chair and the little dog. I tell my husband I just want to see inside. That I’m  curious about how it’s laid out, whether the stove is a 2-burner or 4, how the living room chairs are configured, if theres a tub or a stand-up shower (my bet’s on the shower). I  wonder if there’s a sofa.

The truth is I don’t want to just see inside the house, I want to move in. But not MOVE IN move in. No, what I want is something infinitely more abstract (and somehow literal at the same time). Here I think of Annie Dillard’s passage about waking into adulthood: “Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.” What I want is to live a life that fits me skin to skin: no wrinkles, no sagging parts, no excess. “Manageability” is the word I come up with for my husband, which is pretty good I think. There’s a great life coaching question, which is, “What if you were to think large?” So here’s a question: “What is the size of  your life, and what’s the size you want it to be?” Sometimes the urge to downsize might be a wish not to think small, but to trim excess, so that what needs to blossom can reach the light.