The Sunday Letter #10: Everything old is new again
The Sunday Letter #10: Everything old is new again
It feels almost impossible to believe, but here I am again, writing in Scotland. From a dream whispered to myself over a year ago, to a dream whispered to a few others, to a wish spoken out loud to the powers that be at work, to a flurry of grant applications and then the unbelievable, beautiful unfurling of all of these tightly held wishes, it has happened. I am here.
Everything feels both unreal and beyond real here. Like sliding into a glove you haven’t worn in years only to discover that it still fits perfectly. I haven’t been gone at all, I found myself thinking yesterday. All of those years in between—that was the illusion.
But that’s what happens, isn’t it, when you travel back in time. Like looking up at the night sky and seeing the light of millions of stars as it existed—at once now, for you, but millions of years ago for the stars themselves. Almost as though the light is now, through virtue of time, an illusion all its own.
I was mildly surprised to encounter some travel anxiety in the days leading up to my Scotland flight. It isn’t unusual for me to feel anxious before going away—there’s always a moment a day or so before I fly when a small voice inside says let’s give up on the whole thing and stay home—but this time around the anxiey felt particularly heavy. The nervousness around leaving everything at home felt somehow new and strange. Leaving Sitka, leaving my beloved little house. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was changing—that I was going to leave and return to a landscape somehow different.
What if this is the last time I’m in my house just like this, I thought. Not in a morbid, what-if-it’s-all-going-to-disappear way. But rather: what-if-it’s-all-about-to-change?
Have I been good to this house, to this life? Have I done what I wanted to do with it? Have I been the kind of good I’ve always aspired to be? Will I be this person in whatever comes next—a move, a new life, a new opportunity?
When I was in Scotland years before I remember talking with my friend Susan about exactly this. “I feel like you live so many contained, different lives within the span of one life,” I said. Even then I wasn’t sure if this was exactly what I meant, or if I was expressing it the way that I wanted to. “There are so many beginnings and endings.”
That day was a spring day on Portobello beach. The sand was cold beneath our clothes and even colder on our feet, but we sat and sunk into it anyway.
The days that led up to leaving for Scotland felt like an ending, I guess. This is what I’m trying to say.
In Buddhism, endings are everywhere. Just as beginnings are too. Sometimes this sounds mystical to me, but in truth it’s very scientific. We are always beginning anew in some way: our cells tipping over into new versions of themselves, our minds opening up into new ways of thinking. We might not always believe this, but learning from new experience is how we’ve survived as a species. Adapting and growing and changing, acknowledging where and when we’ve gone wrong and changing course as required. Life is always changing. Things are always coming to an end and starting again.
When I came to Scotland the first time I was hell-bent on believing exactly the opposite of this. Hadn’t the buildings around us endured for centuries? Didn’t my friendship with Jess feel so magical as to be something that had existed even before the buildings? When the year came to an end and I said goodbye to my classmates—both of whom had delighted and frustrated me in equal measure—I remember one classmate just shrugging and saying gently, “Well—we had a good year together. And now we part ways, and that’s how it goes.”
No, I wanted to yell at him. I want to keep this forever.
This, more or less, was how I had approached that first year in St. Andrews. It would go on to be a defining characteristic of my time in Edinburgh too. Once, when I was living along Edinburgh’s Portobello beach, I remember going for a long walk on the sand and feelng the beauty of the land around me so hard I wanted to cry. This isn’t going to last forever, I thought. Even though I want it to last forever.
It didn’t occur to me then that wanting things to last forever was precisely the problem. Instead, all I could think was I just need to work harder.
I just need to work harder, be better, do more. I just need to change more so that I can get to where I want to be and change can stop.
Never mind that the stars circling above me were changing themselves minute-by-minute. Change at a constant over billions of years.
St. Andrews has changed a lot, naturally. There are new-to-me shops in town, and other shops that disappeared years ago. The pandemic was hard, my B&B hosts say. As of course it was for everyone, everywhere. But still there are other things about the town that haven’t seemed to change at all. The quality of the light here, the sound of one’s shoes striking the cobblestones. The fact that I originally came here sixteen years ago wanting desperately to be a writer and have now returned sixteen years later…still wanting desperately to be a writer. That hasn’t changed even though I’ve published books! I brought copies of my books for my B&B hosts—another bit of family in a place far away—because they once joked about putting up a plaque with my name on it. Amanda Leduc used to work here.
And all the while the stars have twirled above us. So much has changed and so much is the same. I look around every corner on the streets here and I have to fight the urge to pull out my phone and text Jess. What was the name of the café in St. Andrews where we had that good Scotch broth? The one where we sat and talked after your grandfather died?
It’s so beautiful here, and yet sometimes it feels like a ghost town. Like I’m chasing a version of myself that has turned out to be an illusion all these years later. So many hopes and dreams evaporated into air.
It isn’t ghosts, though. It’s just time, bending the air. Bending what the world gives you. I am sitting in a sun-filled windowseat in a yellow-painted bedroom suite and I feel exactly like the Amanda who was here sixteen years ago, and also as far away from her as it is possible to be.
The truth is: we are the same and also different. In Zen and The Art of Saving the Planet, Thich Naht Hanh and his disciples share this truth over and over. Which is appropriate, because it’s a truth I keep having to learn over and over. The same, but different.
St. Andrews: the same, but different.
The stars: the same, but different. Carrying the light from solar systems already long dead.
How I’ll be when I return home in two months: the same, but different. Different how is what remains to be seen.
Yesterday I went for a walk back to my old residence hall, David Russell Apartments. I am here at the start of the academic year, so I arrived at a hall buzzing with new students, all of them excited and standing in line to get their keys—much like Jess and I stood in line those years ago. It was so lovely to look around and watch the excitement on their faces. Lovelier still to walk up to the front door of my old residence building and gaze up at our old windows and think about how many students—and how many of their hopes and dreams and joys—have been nurtured in these walls since we were here. It’s a kind of infinity-thinking, isn’t it. To consider how many people come through a space over the span of a few years and what it means to multiply dreams for all of them. Each person a universe, every dream a molecule that grows.
So much has happened in the years since I was here. So much has happened. So much of it terrible and awful and so much of it wonderful and good. I feel grateful for all of it, even as I look back at the Amanda-that-was and the Jess-that-was and want to shout: hold this year so close.
Because that was my issue, wasn’t it. Still is my issue, even though I think I’m getting a bit better at it. Holding things too close without knowing how to let them go when the time comes.
Spending time in a ghost town will do that to you, I suppose.
Next week I move into the cottage that I’ve rented for the rest of my time here. The week after that, I’m off to Waldbröl, Germany, for this meditation retreat. The description of the retreat feels apt, given that I’ve been traveling through times (and ghost towns) already. After that comes a trip to Cardiff to visit friends (“Seems like only yesterday we were hatching plans to get you a sham marriage and a visa,” she said to me), and then later in October there’s a trip to the dark sky park on the Isle of Coll to gaze at the stars for a weekend.
It’s a bit overwhelming if I think about it too much. Today I went for an early afternoon walk along the East Sands. Walking barefoot along the shore is one of my favourite things to do, and I’ve had multiple opportunities to do it this summer, in several lakes and oceans. (What luck and gift is this?) I walked and watched the students of St. Andrews do a Pier Walk off in the distance, and I thought about returning Jess to the ocean in a different part of the world just a little under one year ago. How much changes in the span of even one year—and how much stays the same. How zooming out for a kind of cosmic perspective has given me so much hope over these past few years, the way that every action we take is at once so small in the grand scheme of things and yet so very important. The way that thinking about returning to a place—such a small thought in 2022!—can turn into something that sets a whole life on a different path.
Whether the change that comes is monumental or tiny, this time I’m standing before it wide open.
Currently Reading: Wherever You Go There You Are, by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Currently Watching: The Lincoln Lawyer, Season Two
Currently Eating: The greatest shortbread ever, courtesy of Old Fishergate House in St. Andrews. Heart eyes emoji times ten.