cycles

As I begin this blog is it is a grey morning here at the beach, clouds gathering over the hills which have faded this summer from emerald green to olive to a tawny brown. Yesterday was the first day of school. The kids are in new classes with old friends now, the pattern of life in a tiny village school. This is a new year, a new cycle, and new and unexpected things are going to happen. There are ways that our life here feels more familiar than it ever has before. We walk into a house we know well, we come home to sugar-sweet grape tomatoes dotting the garden, we putter with Rob in the kitchen and drink tea with Melissa in the lounge.

And while things are familiar, it is a strange new world. We have come home from Sydney, a magnificent city which is half American in its self-conscious display of wealth and power, its traffic and endless suburbs, and half tropical paradise with its teal water and golden sand beaches, its parrots in the eucalypts (pictures today are from the Botanic Gardens at sunset at the end of our trip—those cockatoos are wild and fly in flocks through the garden, shrieking indignantly). We are back to home, where the rhythms of life mean that the days begin to get shorter here in February and the new calendar year brings a new school year in its wake. The sound of sirens and truck brakes of Sydney (and our life in the US) is replace by the changing but constant roll of the sea. Where were we again?

Now, though, as I come to terms with my own private adjustments, as I live out my own private changes, the world rumbles and blows around. As I recover from writing my letter of resignation to GMU last night, I have friends who are reeling from job layoffs, from rapidly changing financial circumstances. As I look at my kids, so big as they walk to school on their first day of school, I have friends who are beginning their first days of work in the Obama administration or are searching for the next big thing they’ll do now that the PhD is finished. As I worry about paying the mortgage for not one but two houses in New Zealand (?!), I hear news reports predicting a dire future—total environmental and economic meltdown. Obama offers a new kind of hope—I have had the new experience of having my president quoted as an example of a GOOD leader again and again this week; the financial and climate news is dire.

There are some rhythms to life that are predictable and known. The school year comes and goes. In the pattern of growing girls in the modern era, Naomi gets taller and more willowy; spends more time in her room, door closed, listening to music; tosses her head and goes to school without a backwards glance at her waiting mom. The dog begins to go grey in his muzzle. The mom, watching growing children, holds babies with a new kind of melancholy, frowns at the coming wrinkles (thus making them worse), wonders whether it’s really a good idea to hang the new full-length mirror in the closet. The tide changes, the moon waxes and wanes, the days lengthen and then shorten and then lengthen again.

Now, in a world of acknowledged uncertainty (because really the world was always uncertain, wasn’t it?), we can hold on to those familiar patterns as questions swirl around us. When does this global slowdown crash on these shores? What will happen in Michael’s job when his secondment is over? How do we decide how to allocate time in an era when future earnings are in question?

I keep wondering whether all this uncertainty is just that we’ve lost our way, lost our confidence in ourselves to be uncertain and also patterned, to predict some things about the future and not others. I wonder whether our lack of comfort with ambiguity is the real crisis here, and not the particulars of any one life story. We were once more certain than we should have been—that created unsustainable growth that damaged our economic systems and our planet. We are now less certain than perhaps we should be—and this is creating a financial gridlock and psychological peril, damaging our ability to live and to thrive. Perhaps what we need is to understand ourselves in the rhythms of the tides and the stock markets, to hold on to the ways the future has always been inside our control, and has always been outside of it. Today I will work, I will pick up the children from school and hear about new teachers and old fights, I will make dinner with lettuces fresh from the garden. The world will turn, the waves will come, and inside the regular patterns of our lives will be heaps of variation, inside the variation of our lives will be heaps of patterns. I wish for us all some peace in the tumult.