The Sunday Letter #11: Touchstones
In May of 2008, I moved to Edinburgh from St. Andrews. I had worked as a housekeeper at a B&B for the duration of my time in St. Andrews—I’d spent the year prior to school working as many hours at Chapters as I could, and came away from that year with a grand total of $2000 CDN to spend in Scotland, all of which got swiftly used up within my first few months. (Gotta love that CDN-GBP exchange rate. A thousand sad faces.) The B&B gig was easy cash money, and the B&B itself was wonderful. The hosts were more wonderful still, and when the time came to move and they let me know about an apartment that they had in Edinburgh, it all felt like fate. Meant to be.
But, luck with housing notwithstanding, it didn’t make those first few months in Edinburgh any easier. The apartment had four bedrooms and I was the only tenant for the first few months, bouncing around in the house, talking to nobody. Sometimes I was so anxious I spent hours ironing the sheets. The weather was terrible—I wore my winter coat in June and often walked bent over, head into the wind and the horizontal rain. I couldn’t leave the house for longer than an hour or so at a time, because you had to pay to use the public toilets and I never had any change. I’d get dressed, put my resumes into a folder in a waterproof bag (or as waterproof as a plastic bag folded over can be), and walk the lonely stone streets of Edinburgh, dropping into whatever business had a sign out front to say they were hiring. I signed on at temp agencies and waited desperately for news. Once, in a Skype call to a friend back home, I burst into tears in the middle of an unrelated conversation.
What, he said, stricken. What’s wrong?
I have no money, I said. And I mean—I have no money. No credit cards to fall back on, no overdraft to tide me over into the next month. Where would food come from? The panic was all-consuming and constant, a low-grade bubbling in my stomach that never went away.
And yet Edinburgh was beautiful, so beautiful it made me cry on the daily. I would walk the cobblestoned streets in my winter coat, head bent to the wind, and I’d listen to Simon & Garfunkel’s "The Boxer” on repeat, feeling lonely and sad and exquisitely miserable. It was awful but it was my awful—I was there, doing it, trying to wrest a life for myself from the rain and wind and cold.
“You were ironing sheets for fun,” another friend reminded me, years later.
Did it surprise me, earlier last week, to check into my new little temporary apartment in St. Andrews and find a record player, complete with Bridge Over Troubled Water, waiting for me as I walked in the door?
Not really. Your orbit brings you back to all of these touchstones eventually.
It feels strange and also normal, being here. Or maybe it’s strange that everything feels so normal! Last week I talked about how it felt like slipping back into a glove, as though the years that have passed between then and now collapsed into an illusion. On Instagram I said it like this: why did I have to leave? And the answer came quick as quick: you left because there were lessons to be learned elsewhere.
I’ve signed up for a community gym membership at the university sports centre, and have gone several times over the last few days to use the treadmill. (Running on the uneven stones and paths here is basically a giant invitation for me to constantly fall flat on my face.) I also went to the first outreach meeting of the university’s Astro Society last week—hoping to get some stargazing sessions in on their fancy telescopes before I make my way to Coll next month. (The skies were cloudy the night that I went, so no stargazing on offer that day.) The town is, of course, overrun with university students. I keep looking at all of them and thinking, you’re all so beautiful. All of that youth, that excitement, that joy. That brimming sense of the world having just opened for you, filled with adventure and light.
I’d been nervous about seeing my twenty-five year old self around every corner, in the same way that I’d been nervous about seeing glimpses of Jess and grief everywhere I looked. Younger Amanda’s insecurities, her anxieties, the low thrum of that constant worry. Instead, everywhere I turn is tinged with beauty and warmth. As though the perspective of a decade and a half has infused even the most shaky, insecure memories of the Amanda-that-was with a kind of hope and expansiveness I longed for but didn’t have at the time. As though the grief itself has softened everything with the knowledge that love was here before anything else.
They’re all so beautiful, I keep thinking as I pass the students. Which means—I was beautiful too, when I was here. Just as bright and alive.
Yesterday I had a wonderful phone conversation (phone calls! Remember those?) with the woman who was my instructor when I was here as a student sixteen years ago. I would have gone to Edinburgh to meet with her in person but she’s on the cusp of her own adventure—she and her partner are permanently relocating to Greece, where they have a house on the island of Naxos. We had a wonderful time reminiscing about life in St. Andrews, a time that was magical and also hard and fraught for both of us.
I have to say, I told her, I’m glad to see my 20s and 30s in the rearview. And I am. I like the perspective that comes with being a little older, not to mention the comparative financial security (finally!) that has made this second-time-around in Scotland all the more enjoyable. Because, let’s face it, things are a lot easier when you don’t have to slink around in the rain handing out résumés, worrying about how you’re going to eat and whether you’ll make enough money to pay for the next month’s rent. (Food for all! Housing for all! And QUICKLY!)
But there’s something to be said for passing by your younger self, locked in the orbit that she needs to be in in order to learn these lessons about love and life and making one’s way, and feeling nothing but tenderness. Feeling nothing but love and admiration for her, but also for the magical nature of life—the lessons we are put on here to learn, and the way that our lives will keep cycling back to these points until the lessons are learned in earnest.
You’ll be okay, I want to reach out and tell her. It will be hard—so hard, at times—but you’ll be okay. Trust that I love you and I’m reaching for you even now, pulling you forward.
The medium Laura Lynne Jackson often talks about what she calls teams of light—the ancestors, spiritual guides and loved ones who have gone before us—that exist around us, pushing us to our highest purpose and highest selves. More often than not these I am convinced that we are part of our own teams of light—that our future selves exist somewhere out there in the giant cosmic miasma that is time and space, reaching for us and cheering us on. When I think about the Amanda of sixteen years ago I feel like my heart might explode with love for her. What a gift, to be in Scotland for that year of school—to know Jess, to know that love, to know that joy and excitement. And what a gift in the years after—to know that struggle, and that sadness, and those interminable days of ironing bedsheets and slogging through the horizontal Edinburgh rain! All of it has taught me so much. All of this has brought me exactly here, to this moment, typing a new Sunday Letter in a beautiful little apartment that gets to be mine for the next two months.
Last week my host at the B&B, Jennifer, took me out for lunch. We reminisced about the days when I worked for her and her husband and then got to talking about a million other things, among them how she and her husband met.
“Well,” she started, to my absolute and utter delight. “When I was twenty, I went to see a psychic.”
A psychic, she said! Totally matter-of-factly, as though it was a normal thing to do. And I felt my heart expand again, in a way that rang just as familiar and true as the feeling of stepping back on St. Andrews soil. This reminder that yes, this world is so much larger than what we can see, and that there are lessons to be learned and touchstones along the way if we are open to reaching for them.
A touchstone like, say, finding Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water waiting for you in your apartment, so that you can play “The Boxer” and feel the ghost of yourself circle by and say to her, it’s okay. You’ll find your way out, eventually.
I still have many a moment of hesitation when I go to talk to people about this adventure year—what brought it on, what brought it about. That mystical sense of waking up in January and knowing that Scotland was waiting in my future, that even-more mystical sense of reaching forward into the future and asking the universe for this year away from work. (Because, on the most basic of levels, that is exactly what I did.)
At the very base of it: I went to see a medium and connected with my best friend, and that experience has completely re-oriented how I see the world.
I’m always on the lookout for eyes glazing over when I say this, for polite smiles and nods. I don’t talk about it all that much—certainly not with the general public, and when I talk about it here I try to have it wedged in between other talk of space and the cosmos and other, “real” things that make me sound like I still at least have some grasp on reality. (Reality, she says—whatever that means.) But this one short week in Scotland alone has brought me into the path of so much magic that it feels hard to imagine the world could be anything but magical. That this was meant to happen; that I was meant to be here, to learn and uncover these things.
It really is like Einstein once said, isn’t it. There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
A miracle that you got to be in Scotland at all the first time. A miracle that you got to meet Jess on your first day, and have those twelve years of friendship—and these years of friendship after her death which have shown you so many unexpected, wondrous things even in the midst of the grief.
Life doesn’t happen to you, the poet andrea gibson once said. Life happens for you.
Well, here I am, letting life happen for me. In all of its magical wonder.
Later this week I’m off to a mindfulness retreat at the European Institute for Applied Buddhism, one of Plum Village’s European centres. I’m excited for and a little nervous about this too, never having done a retreat before. There is no WiFi at the EIAB so my Sunday letter will come a little later—probably from the train as I make my way back north. Until then, I hope life is unfolding in magical wonder for you too, even—perhaps especially—in the midst of what is hard.
Currently Reading: Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity, by Gary Barwin
Currently (Hate/Love)watching: Virgin River, Season 5
Currently Eating: a perfectly ripe avocado.