You have already arrived
Hello Reader,
Sometimes, whatever you think you are missing is not it, and what you are really missing is already there.
Last May, I went to Tillamook, Oregon, to pick up an eight-week-old puppy and take her home. The woman who raised Lucca told me I would be challenged by her, probably beyond what I could bear. Most importantly, taking the puppy out of the carrier to comfort her during the two-hour ride to the airport would make things worse for me, the puppy, and the rest of the long journey home to Harlem, New York City.
I had a strategy for handling driving and dog parenting simultaneously: When she whines, I will be silent. When she is quiet, I will talk to her. Two minutes into the ride, the wailing started. It was excruciating by evolutionary design.
I told her about her new home, describing the rooms, each family member, and the neighborhood. Then I went into my life's story and how I ended up in Oregon to take her. All the while, when she started crying, I stopped talking. She would stop crying and turn to sweet little noises, and I would caress her with my voice.
When I ran out of the stories, I started freely associating my childhood memories. I told Lucca how my sister and I were the happiest kids ever when my dad surprised us with Lola, a puppy very much like her. But then, due to our inability to train the puppy, my dad took her away one day without telling us. My sister stayed in her room for three days. I was sad, mad, and everything terrible. That is until now. Now I have you, I told her. Then I asked her if she would have me. She was silent, and I took it as a yes.
She lost her home, but without knowing, she already belonged to a new one. Do you ever feel like that? Like a puppy between two homes. Crying, wailing, sulking, overeating, eating too little, listening to any voice for any certainty, any story that explains, any chance to escape from the present moment.
We experience this all the time, right? You lose keys, a friend, a house, a spouse, a mountain or a river, a country, or even a planet. It happens. It will happen.
If you are over 50 years old, you will recognize what I'm about to describe. If you are under 40, take note of it.
When we hit our mid-40s (this can happen sooner or later, depending on our life circumstances), we all have to face the sobering reality that we are much more limited, inconsequential, and average than we've ever imagined.
We realize there's a difference between storybook ambitions and anticlimactic adult realities. We become aware of the irreparable loss of chance and opportunity—real regrets. We come to know that life as we know it, or, rather, as we made it up to be, is officially over.
It doesn't matter if everything is going well in your life. Despite all of your success, you feel this unhappy perplexity. You feel trapped in a made-up life, the life your culture has thought your life should be, and you learned to believe it should be. You feel disappointment and discontent, both real and imaginary. On top of that, you feel guilty about not feeling grateful for it all.
I want to tell you something I wish someone had told me when I was in that place years ago. Nothing is wrong with you, and you are not alone. You are just becoming more real, and reality has its way of healing and restoring you.
As we meet this narrowing of life honestly, we discover that we have nothing more than a tiny patch of ground on which we stand and can call our own. Then, if you go along with it, something happens, something you would never expect or even believe if you were told it would happen. From this honest spot, life expands as if for the first time again. This life shift is matched in impact only by birth, death, and maybe adolescence.
This is one of life's mystic turns. The moment we accept this shrinking of what we thought life needed, should, and must be, we begin to live a genuinely adult life. The expansion (this time very real) becomes unstoppable, like a river opening into an ocean. We are ready to relinquish expectations, double down on who we are becoming, and risk ourselves in the world.
I was telling this to my daughter Leta, who will hit her 40s in just over a decade. She said, "Hmm, I was thinking about that," and pointed me to two farmers philosophers in Canada who insisted that connections define humans in far more accurate and better ways than identity. How we are connected matters far more than who we are. That was a thrill to hear, so I dug further.
In their book Politics of Affect, philosophers Mary Zournazi and Brian Massumi discuss the present moment as a place of uncertainty. When you don't know where you might be able to go and what you might be able to do, you are experiencing your liberty. When everything around you doesn't hold the way it used to, when you don't feel a hand directing you or a signpost showing you the way, you are free.
That place of freedom often feels quite small, like a puppy carrier, 47th birthday party, or a tiny life's resume we can call our own. They call that place of freedom in the constrained space "wriggle room." From this real place, we can take action that is ours to take and do what is ours to do.
What is your wriggle room now? What micro-moves can you make with your body (walking is an excellent go-to way), mind (choosing what to pay attention to), and feelings (listening to what they have to tell you)?
In all the constraints, you and I still have maneuverability. This vague sense of potential we carry is this freedom to make small moves. These deceptively limited maneuvers are how leaders (known and unknown, people like you and me) have changed the world. That's the only thing that changes the world. Ever.
Poet David Whyte puts it this way, "Start close in. Don't take the second step or the third, start with the first thing close in ... start with the ground you know, the pale ground beneath your feet."
Being at home is rare. For most of our lives, we are homesick, as if living in exile, wanting to be outside of this present moment or with an alternate past or future. What would it be like to give yourself permission to arrive for once where you actually are, embrace the ground beneath your feet, and then step freely forward?
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