This one is about regret, and learning to live with it, and all the ways you trade out one set for another one entirely when you imagine going backward and making different choices. I read a book several months back—you may have read it too: The Midnight Library—about all those choices we make and the infinite outcomes borne from them. Spoiler alert for this post (not for the book!): as far as I know, no such library exists. We have what we have in front of us, and what we make it into. There is so much good and loss all spun up together; I hope the life I make and the words that fill in the fractures honor both.
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One of the things I most miss about living in North Carolina, in Europe even, and can’t seem to stop writing about, is a living sky. A wet and breathing sky. I remember descending into Los Angeles one week after getting married, into a bowl of thick and yellowish smog, and feeling a sense of dread and regret that has not lifted in nearly a decade. You make peace with things as best you can and try to focus on the lit-up details at the edges, the filaments of beauty snaking their way through a thing. And you change what you can, if and when you can.
Moving to Northern Californian helped, and especially coming in an El Nino year. Our first week we were met with heavy dark clouds, lightning and a whipping wind, weather that turned out to be unusual. One thing I’ve come to look forward to every year is a wet winter, when we get them, atmospheric rivers rushing in from the ocean. We are in sight, literally, of the pines—on a clear day, I can climb to the top of Diablo and see the Sierras. Another thing to love: among many things that have stayed with me since first visiting Romania is a longing for the mountain. It’s not the same, but the Marin Headlands are a new good, Mt. Diablo a way to remember in my body what might have been.
I think about this a lot these days, and there’s not much way around it except to orient toward what might still be. To realize the agency I didn’t before. You have to understand, because it’s easy to misunderstand, bound culturally to a sort of soothsaying way of finding the right way, not a right way. There are many who understood it differently, that we have choices, that there is more than one good way to honor what you believe to be true and right. I wish I had.
I learned this past week that a friend from high school, just a year older than I am, died. Twenty years ago, we—our high school band and the wider school and church communities—heard the news of his cancer, and in some very small way, shared in his fight, and his recovery. At least in the sense that it was significant to us, and the outcome mattered. And for over twenty years, from whatever distance, we’ve watched the tide of it fling itself at him, then pull out again, the rhythms of it perhaps less regular than our own seas. I watch old high school friends react to the loss. I say this of someone I haven’t known well for a very long time: his legacy is a real example of making good of what you get. Of honoring God with whatever comes to you, and in every thing giving thanks.
There are so many ways life can go, could have gone, and all I can think about this week is the hundreds of possible futures created every minute, every day. All the ways life can shake out. We have what we have, what we choose or don’t choose or wish differently, and I pray to keep my eyes open to the good of this particular iteration of life, as it has been given to me. There is so much good in it.
There’s this: in Craters of the Moon, I chose for our tent a spot surrounded by volcanic rock, sharp and craggy. The day was sweltering and as the sun went down and the air cooled, ambient heat held by the black rocks kept us warm through the night. The sky was something else. It’s a high desert plain, mostly sagebrush where there isn’t lava flow. There was some sort of high pressure system above us when we visited, which made it hotter than usual and made the sky a little hazier than I imagine it to be in the fall, none of the crisp and crystalline lines I associate with a cold, clear day. I climbed onto the rocks surrounding our tent, watching with my little ones as the sun went down. There is not much fanfare in a dry sky like that.
But the edges. That glow, like a slow burn along the edges of the hills. This weekend my children and I traced the shadows in chalk on our patio and watched as the light moved before our eyes. I am reminded that the planet flings itself forward and, so far, hasn’t stopped. That the light rushes forward and then the dark and then it does it all again, the transitions preceded by glow. We are lucky to be here to witness it.
I watch as my children rush toward their own future, their one single future, whatever it will be among the many millions of futures that could be. And I hope that they are able to find and choose the good, over and over again, whatever the circumstances, and that my own choices make theirs better. And that we can lean into the wild goodness of this world, gleaning every bit of it we can get.
Oh, Sara. This one makes me ache with all the iterations I hold inside--the futures I long for, the pasts I grieve. You lay it out so well. What a sweet reminder to treasure the life we’ve chosen, or perhaps, the one that’s chosen us.