Living the future, Leaving the Past
Personal benchmarks and finding one's way
Indulge me, this raggety post as a revisitation, having just asked myself the question “What was life like a year ago today? what did we hope for? what did we expect? And then realizing I could compare past and present via my archives.
In moving into a retirement community, how well did we do in that whole process, health and sanity-wise; and was it worth it? Here is a small piece of All That.
The February 7, 2024 post was entitled Go West, Old Man. This Feb 7, 2025 post below is excerpted from final paragraphs.
My comments are the block quotes.
I may post this kind of rear-view-mirror rambles from time to time, with deeper insights than this, as we live out the possibilities here.
NOTE TO SELF: that there exists this kind of personal hindsight turns out to be at least one purpose of having written weekly over decades, back to May, 2002— for the breadcrumbs I can follow, forward and back, from any dated entry. Towards a continuity of self, maybe? Do you journal? I imagine that few are sorry that they have kept a journal or commonplace book.
Feb 07, 2024
AND NOW WHAT?
We are told to expect to take possession in nine months-- in November.
Due to a combination of good choices and dumb blind luck, we moved into a very small apartment on September 10--9 months from first inception of the possibility. The average wait time for the room we originally wanted (this one) is three years; for the newer apartments, 5 years. We were immensely fortunate.
The timing, the logistics, the physical and emotional challenges, and the confluence of countless moving parts that will bring us intact and in place on the ground in CoMo in nine months--this puzzle will only show a shape and pattern when we look back on it. Nine months. Long enough to give birth to a new chapter of unknowable duration in days, months or years of our lives. Empty pages yet to be written. A new chapter. I have to hold that thought.
I have to say that the time I spent imagining and Missouri digital map-wandering--the Walter Mitty moments projecting myself into a place with as much detail as I could gather—made the landing much easier, and I am (in space at least) pretty much where I saw myself being, a year ago today. Socially, not so much. That is slow. Until it’s not. I think I am near this nexus.
AMBIVALENCE AND CHALLENGE
That all of this will work out "as planned" is not a slam-dunk. All it will take is a little sand in the gears.
At 76, sand happens.
Meanwhile, the doors swing open for the Blue Light Special. Almost everything in the store here must go. Books, tools, gadgets, clothes, pictures, and boxes-of-contents in the house and the sheds must go: to the kids, to friends, to the local thrift store or the dumpsters. If you visit us here in the next few months, you will be asked to CHOOSE SOMETHING to take before we let you leave.
In hindsight, the last six months of building down, tearing apart, giving away and eating our way towards bare shelfs in the pantry--along with saying as many goodbyes as we had friends and neighbors: all that was hard. And by comparison, today I appreciate the freedom from that burden; while other hurdles have stepped in to take their spaces, life being like that.
Two thirds to three-fourths of this STUFF will NOT go with us. It is a time to hold possessions with a light grip, I keep telling her. This means sacrificing precious things because we will have precious little room for THINGS. We are basically moving into a dorm room after living in homes of up to 4000 square feet. We have acquired some STUFF.
And as if to say I told you so: I have space yet to be filled from what I chose to bring with us. Ann, OTOH… And yet, our 940 square feet is okay. My memory and expectation of vaulted ceilings or 80 acres and two creeks--all that is falling away as a "norm" and the new abnormal is feeling familiar. But letting go is hard.
And I wake up every morning with the dread and the promise of this unknown future on a distant and unfamiliar shore. (Having never owned a boat, many of my metaphors for this adventure, for some reason, are nautical.)
The fog lifts; the winds freshen and shift to the west. It is time to prepare the life boats for boarding, and we will be, for months yet, still very much at sea.
And a year after those fraught paragraphs and nautical metaphors were typed on this very keyboard, I am accepting my new givens, limits, blessings and deficits. It is what it is. We are where we are. We are grateful to have both survived the agony of the move, and to find that it was the right choice to have chosen this uncommonly well thought out facility in a university town whose nature, culture and cuisine where we have just barely started to know.
I remember that post! Your response to the last paragraph seems promising.
My own adjustment to Columbia is taking time, I think because we're also adjusting to retirement and don't have enough friends here yet. We have a great evening with a couple of people, and then there's this stretch afterwards where we tell ourselves, it takes time.
I'm glad for the picture of the creekside. I've loved your description of the outdoors in these familiar Blue Ridge Mountains of my home. You write and I SEE. You write and I taste, smell, hear, imagine. And I have hoped you'd do the same from where you are now. Expand my horizon with the words you find.