The Sunday Letter #31: The calm...before the norm

Today’s Sunday Letter will be a short one, I think. Mostly because I’ve spent the last two weeks in a solid state of perfect contentment and I feel like there’s only so long one can harp on about happiness before it gets…boring? Not really but maybe yes?

How funny, to be in a place and time in life where I’m actually typing these things out loud. How truly, mind-bogglingly odd it feels sometimes to look around at my life and think: yes, I love all of this, I love the joy and tenderness, I even love all of the pain that picked me up so many years ago and eventually deposited me here—because without it, would I be here at all? Who knows. I’d be different, that’s for sure.

I’d be different, and instead I am different in a different way, shaped by grief and struggle and letting go. And while I’m sure that there is more grief waiting around the corner—maybe close at hand, maybe not—right now it feels like a miracle just to look around a landscape that used to feel barren and hopeless and see all the green that is blooming.

My mother took this photo last night. Where there’s a will, there’s a way! she said. Thanks to all the birds who ate their sunflower seeds on the edges of this old, half-forgotten structure. The flowers have not forgotten it at all.

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In the months and years after Jess died I remember feeling the ground shift beneath my feet, slow but unmistakable. I had a growing sense that something had changed beyond the immediate devastation of life and therefore I had no choice but to change as well. I’ve written about it before. But it took me years to understand what this something was, and even longer to admit, out loud, that it felt scarily close to something like a loss of ambition. I wanted life to stop, which is not to say that I wanted to end so much as I wanted it to slow down so that I could process all of the grief and change that was rumbling underneath my toes. I no longer cared as much about climbing any kind of corporate ladder, even the decidedly-not-corporate nonprofit ladder I’d been lucky enough to find myself on for the previous few years.

Basically, I’d found myself face-to-face with my small Amanda self again, the young child who wanted to write stories, who’d been mildly perplexed in her teen years whenever she said I want to be a writer and was faced with encouragement but also the kind of practical approach that inevitably felt like a buzzkill.

You want to write? That’s great! But what will you do to survive?

[Long pause.] I’ll write, Small Amanda said to herself, confused. That’s what I’ll do.

I know, looking back, that all of those “but what will you do to survive” questions were practical and necessary. I know too that in order to get to this point, I had to put in all those decades of work. Building bridges, making connections, finding my way in the ecosystem the way that the sunflower above managed to poke up through the green.

(I also know that all of this could fall apart at any moment. This is what makes leaps of faith so powerful!—she says, to herself, while she’s trying not to hyperventilate at 3:30 in the morning.)

I also know that coming back full-circle to that dream of full-time writing is hardly a loss of ambition. (I think I equated “having it all” with “multitasking all of the time”, and so to choose a simpler life, with fewer points of focus, felt like a defeat even though the focus itself remained as high as ever.) But it’s funny, isn’t it, what society teaches us to see. I have lived and breathed the capitalist maxim of you can have it all for so long that I didn’t even recognize I was making choices that expressly flew in the face of all that having.

Years ago I read a quote from a young writer who’d just published their first novel to extraordinarily high acclaim. When asked what advice they would give others about writing, the writer very seriously noted that they’d made the decision not to have children because children got in the way of a creative life. I remember being so irritated by this, both because it felt preposterous—I had plenty of friends who’d had children and published multiple books by that point—but also because it suggested, deep down, that this idea of having it all was a fantasy. For this writer, it seemed as though having it all meant having a particular thing to the utmost—not having multiple things to varying degrees of wholeness.

Looking back now, I think it probably also irritated me because I already knew, on some deeper cellular level, that having one thing to the utmost was already a life I was choosing—even as I also knew, on another cellular level, that nothing is ever that black and white.

These choices were both conscious and not. I was choosing, consciously, to come back to the writing again and again—to put my money and time into expanding my skillset, into workshops and retreats and other professional development opportunities that often, oops, took up all my energy. (Spoonie energy FTW, forever.) And all the while I was walking through life and saying these other things, too, like how nice would it be to eventually work a high-powered, high-paying job and it would be so nice to meet someone and start a family and maybe even SHARE THE BILLS FOR ONCE IN MY GOSH-DARNED LIFE and I really want to own a house of my own one day and basically I want all of these things while also having all the time to write and on, and on, and on.

Several weeks ago I had a wonderful Zoom chat with Jess’s sister, and one of the things we talked about was the time when Jess traveled back to St. Andrews in 2015 for her graduation. She’d gone for a few days with her fiancé, and when her sister asked Jess, on her return, how it had gone, she’d been surprised to hear her say, “I’m just glad all of that’s over now. It’s time for the St. Andrews life to be behind me.”

She’d loved her time in St. Andrews so much, her sister said to me. I couldn’t believe it.

We don’t know why Jess said that, ultimately, but I can hazard a guess. I think she was happy to have her St. Andrews days behind her because she’d already moved into a new phase of life, and it was too much to keep all of those balls in the air all at once—studying for a PhD and teaching full-time and planning a wedding and then also dipping your toes back into the place where you once were a graduate student with nothing ahead of you in the day except hours to study and write. It would be hard for anyone to balance these things all at once. Harder still for those of us for whom multi-tasking is…a challenge.

I think of her always. But I think of her especially now, in these days where my own multi-tasking has come to a different kind of end, where time has expanded into something vast and soft, the universe alive with magic everywhere I turn my head.

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It was difficult, making that decision to leave my job, even as I also knew it was the right thing to do. (Isn’t it funny, how that happens? How you can know something on a body level and still be swayed by all the noise?) I cried a lot. It was hard not to see leaving as a potentially bad thing for my career. Even harder to hold was the sense that in choosing to let go of this thing I was somehow choosing failure—choosing I can’t instead of I don’t want to. It felt—and still sometimes feels this way, though every day is getting better—like turning away from the job was also a kind of turning away from all of the other wants (and, let’s be honest, shoulds) that I felt I needed to have and cultivate in order to be a Good Human on this swifly tilting planet of ours.

Give up on that march toward a home and a picket fence and a partner and 2.5 kids and a good steady job in order to—what, Leduc? Write and survive on gruel and maybe get flown to a few cities when your books come out? Don’t you realize that art is irresponsible under capitalism???

Who has the gall to be a bohemian in the 21st century?

Don’t you realize letting go means you’ll never be able to afford a good pair of shoes again?

And yet, and yet, and yet. Everything about where I stand right now feels so wonderful and perfect it makes me want to let go of everything else, too.

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If you do not have space within and around you, you cannot be a happy person.

— Thich Nhat Hanh, in Living Without Stress or Fear

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He doesn’t mean space as in the literal cosmos in the above quote, I know. Still, I’ve been feeling these words reverberate inside of me, over and over through all these last few weeks. And for whatever reason, the theme keeps popping up—in the podcasts I’m listening to (have you started The Way Out Is In yet? Highly recommend!), in the books that I’m reading, in conversations with friends.

Your horoscope for Saturday says ‘Do what you can to simplify your life!’ — my mother’s text to me a week or so ago.

How do you have space inside of you, exactly? I know that for me, space has only come in the wake of letting go of so many things. Letting go of expectation, letting go of (the rigid expectations of) love, letting go of certain dreams only to discover that maybe they were never really my dreams in the first place. Letting go of so much only to discover that so much more now waits as a result of this.

Sometimes this is what grief feels like too. Letting go of the life that you thought you would have with your person in order to recognize the life that you have with them now, even though they are gone from this world in all the ways that we can see.

When you let go of that, and open yourself up to the great space that awaits, what else can come in?

This is what I’m wondering now, in these long, hazy, bright warm days of summer before true financial precarity kicks into gear. I’m putting asks out into the universe and already feeling things slowly swirl into place. I know I’ll be okay, one way or another—even if I have to survive on gruel!—because letting go once felt like the most terrifying thing in the world and now I feel like it’s brought me some of life’s greatest gifts.

What waits in that space of letting go, and not-knowing? Jess knows. So does Thich Nhat Hanh.

And maybe, one day, so will I.

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Currently Reading: Who Do You Think You Are? by Michelle Brock

Currently Watching: The Acolyte

Currently Eating: Clean-out-the-fridge meals in preparation for a few days away at a cottage up north!

Currently Listening: E46 (“Healthy Boundaries”) of The Way Out is In, the wonderful Plum Village podcast which has been helping to save my life for months and months. <3

Currently Substacking: Shy Guy Meets the Buddha, by Don Boivin