Finding furniture for the neutral zone

Friday 5 January 2007

I think my mood flows with the weather, which is a shame, because the weather here is the worst in years. Yesterday, on the first day that felt like summer with its vivid blue skies and warm temperature, all seemed possible. Today, grey and windy again, I’m pensive and moody. (An aside: Raima, who is glorious and who has come today to help clean the house, said that yesterday was “shockingly hot” and apologized for it (kiwis are constantly apologizing for the weather). Mind you, I was in a fleece and light sweater all day, and was sometimes chilly, so “shockingly hot” scares me.)

I am in what is called by the writer William Bridges the “neutral zone.” This is the space after the endings have happened but before the new beginning has taken shape. It's a fertile, but uncomfortable, ground for growth. And that’s the space where I live: 3 Ocean Road, The Neutral Zone. I know what my old life was like, and know that it’s behind me—house sold, all things on a ship, job on hold, the four of us here in a new country and in a new season. And I have some sense of what the new life will be like: kids in school here, me working in Wellington a little and writing my book more, living in this house by the sea. But most of that hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t know what it’ll be like.

The house itself is a perfect metaphor for this time. I see what it looks like, but it’s got none of our furniture in it, has other people’s chairs and tables and beds. That makes it both strange (it’s not our stuff) and also tentative (you have to be careful because it’s not our stuff). The kids have to be gentle with the furniture, we agonize over a broken cereal bowl, and we try to be vigilant about holding pens while sitting on other people’s upholstery. We can’t get used to this because it’s not permanent, and we can’t replace it with things that are permanent because we have things coming on a slow boat from Baltimore. So the drafty floor won’t get its rugs yet, the dining room chairs won’t match, and we’ll have to try to remember what colors our actual furniture is so that we can match the walls to a sofa still on the sea.

My life is like that, too. I have work to do but I can’t quite get to it yet with the kids home on summer vacation. I assume I’ll be able to get connected and make friends—both through work and also through activities at school or in the village, but school, work, and yoga won’t start until February. And so I live inside a life that’s furnished with temporary things, things that don’t quite belong to me, things that I need to get used to, but not attached to. And just like I can’t quite imagine what this house will look like once it’s filled with our things, I can’t imagine what my life will be like once I settle in some. This is the time for unsettled-ness.

And I don’t quite know who I’ll be at the end of it, either. How will I make sense of myself in this new land? Right now, Michael takes the train to work each day, and I stay home with the kids. Right now, when people ask me what I do, I stumble and stammer. What do I do? I came here to write a book—but I’m not even sure which book I’m talking about when I say that (the book on my own that’s half finished with a long overdue contract or the book with Keith that I’m more excited about?). And I came here to do some work, but I don’t have any idea what I’ll actually do at NZCER. I know who I am when I’m the college professor who lives in the middle of Adams Morgan and takes her kids to bilingual school each day—or JCC summer camp in the summer. I’m a workaholic, someone who travels the country to do my Kenning consulting, someone who loves the work she does at George Mason University (fantastic new website, Mark!), someone who gets up too early to write and stays up too late working. There, I’m someone who feels guilty for not spending enough time with the children. But that’s not who I am here. Here my kids and I bake together each day, walk on the beach each day, grow frustrated with each other each day. My Kenning and Mason Colleagues hardly know what to do with me in this new phase. And I don’t know what to do with myself. Here I am the new American woman in town. I am the wife of the guy who is in charge of leadership development at DoC. I’m the one who walks with the two blonde kids in the wetsuits, picking up shells. There is no knowing yet what is possible for me inside this context. There is no knowing who I’ll come to be. There is no furniture to borrow to make the neutral zone of my psyche more lovely or comfortable. When do you think that ship will come in?

In nature, I love liminal zones, the spaces in between one form and the next. My favourite parts are often the wetlands where the land meets the water, the tidepools that are neither part of the shore nor part of the sea. I love the richness of those spaces, love to watch the hawks soar or the crabs scurry for cover. I live in that space now, neither here nor there, but somehow in between here and there. I haven’t given lots of thought to how dependent those spaces are on the weather, though. Too-high tides, and the tidepool shellfish will drown; too low and they’ll be seagull food. Now I’m like that, too, so much in the liminal space that tea with a new friend has me feeling like we’ll settle in to this new home with ease and delight, and a grey day at home makes me feel bereft and alone. And so I try to be like the tidal creatures and just flow with the tide, to notice the shifts in the weather and not believe that any of them are forever. This is all temporary, all just what life feels like in this space, and eventually the pattern will emerge and I’ll find my way to a more stable place. And until then, I (and you, Gentle Reader) will have to find the liminal space beautiful and fertile, if somewhat unfurnished.