Landing Back in Your Life
The extent of my work-based-travel is usually to the fridge from the couch, but this month I was required to pack a suitcase, get on a plane, and base myself out of another city entirely. I didn’t even pack my tracksuit pants, that’s how worky this trip was.
Public Service Announcement: sometimes you can find yourself right up inside the middle of your own life, and good for you, that’s what life is for. Also though? Sometimes? Wandering slightly from the main plot line can give you a better view of yourself.
There’s this singer I read about once who slowly got rid of all her belongings. It started when she was touring internationally. All that travel with no home base made her realise she shouldn’t be clinging to the things that were filling her empty house back home. She didn’t need any of it, she decided. She remembered the memories. She’d read the books. What else does anybody need? So she began the process of slowly jettisoning all the ‘things’ from her life one by one until all she had left was a passport and some legal documents. My personal responses to this story oscillate wildly between fantasising that I too could live a life unencumbered by the trappings of contemporary capitalism, to becoming unreasonably annoyed at the privileged wonkiness of this unhinged princess floating through the universe with nought but a song and a dream. But there is something in it, isn’t there, that makes you examine your own life a bit. What am clinging onto? What am I failing to notice, because it’s there, right in front of me, day after day?
When you’re inside your own life, you don’t notice the time between 5pm and 11pm slipping into itself. When you’re away for work, pretending you’re comprised merely of yourself, rather than all the people and things and routines and pets and houseplants and moments that frame your home life, time becomes a slightly more formal affair.
When you’re inside your own life, you don’t notice how lovely it is to feel a cat move past your leg while you’re making a cup of tea. You don’t notice how the tea tastes just the way you like it. Maybe you notice the way the evening light casts a shadow, but maybe even that bores or irritates you, reminding you of the dust that dances in the shards of light.
Sometimes, the opposite applies. When you’re inside the life, you perhaps can’t see as clearly which elements of life aren’t quite working because they’ve just been that way for so long. As soon as I got home from my work trip, I moved a lamp that had been in the hallway over behind the couch where I do a lot of my tracksuit-work. Why? Because the place I had been staying in had a lamp near the couch. I had looked at it one night, uninterrupted by the things in my own lounge room or the thoughts that clatter around me at home, and I thought, ‘hey! I should put a big lamp like this behind my own couch!’
Joan Didion described something called ‘magical thinking’ that happens in grief. Your brain changes the way it makes sense of things because, let’s face it, nobody can make any sense of mortality. Our logic shifts. A half-remembered conversation takes on a prescience or a significance we wouldn’t otherwise have given it. It’s sad and small, this idea, when applied to death. It shows us not only our mortality but our incapacity to deal with it in an adult way.
But what about applying magical thinking to our actual lives? You’re in the middle of something that feels like any stupid Monday? Any lame Thursday? A perfectly fine Sunday arvo? What if became instantly significant? Apply magical thinking to it. Imagine showing a film of today to yourself at the age of a hundred and ten. What would you lean in to catch? What would you miss the most?
It’s hard to apply magical thinking to a messy bedroom and an unpacked suitcase, both of which feature in the backdrop as I write these words today. I can hear, though, someone I love a great deal singing quietly in another room. Doesn’t take much magical thinking to realise that’s the kind of thing I shouldn’t be taking for granted. Life: you’re in it. Sneak outside to peek through a window. Maybe move a lampshade.
This was printed in Ed 746 of The Big Issue. Please buy from your local vendor!