the Village Knittiot

Blogs are interesting creatures. They seem to require a carefully weighted balance between divulging the intimate details of your life without getting “too personal.” I find that I am not always keen on sharing the details of everyday life, but sometimes it becomes (or at least feels) necessary. So how do you maintain that space between the mundane and the extraordinary with at least a modicum of anonymity before a mostly silent audience that could be 10 people or 100 on any given day? And how do you write without the “audience” in mind? I’m not sure you can — at least not all the time.

The last several weeks have been a mad dash. I have been to more cities on the Eastern seaboard in the past month than in the entire two years since we moved here. In the end one city captured our heart and that was Philadelphia. This past week, one of these went up in front of our house.

You know how it is when you want something very badly and you don’t dare say it out loud for fear of the intensity of your own hopes and wishes and dreams? How saying it out loud sort of makes it real and final and you can never put it back into that quiet place of longing in your heart? How when you finally say, this is what I want, that it makes it really real and nearly impossible to continue to exist as you are? This is how I feel about moving. This is how I feel about being in a real city again.

When we moved here, this town was intended to be a springboard for other things. It was a temporary move with affordable housing and a chance to start over again. It was 5 hours from anywhere so we could take our time and figure out where and what next. It was the place that got us moving. And in ways it has turned out to be those things, but I will admit we got a little sidetracked. We bought a house. We lost a little bit of our intensity. I tried to believe I was happier here than I was. I tried to feel more optimistic than I could.

What was going to be a one or two year stay turned into a potential for 5 years when we bought the house. I’d always wanted a house, and here we could actually afford one. I think we were eager to solidify our commitment to each other with an action. A home was a strong symbol. When I finally managed to find myself in the arms of this wonderful human being, I felt home. Still, my heart wilted silently when I thought of being here that long. So I didn’t. I just continued to put one foot in front of the other every day and figured that life was what it is and it didn’t promise to be anything spectacular, in every arena, did it? And that made me angry, because what was life for if it wasn’t going to be spectacular! Why did I want something spectacular but was continually served up nothing more than a huge plate full of disappointment?

Then there was the unexpected unemployment for Mr. Knittiot and the impossible and defeating task of finding a job here when there are no jobs. And much, much more than that. Things that I am not ready or even able to go into right now. I’ve been through my fair share of dark periods in life, but this past seven months has been one of the most soul-wrenching of them all. I started seeing a counselor at the University to deal with what I thought was a little anxiety, but turned out to be a bigger can of worms than I had anticipated. This past week my counselor asked me if I felt I could see a light at the end of the tunnel now. And I said, “Not exactly, but I’m starting to feel that I’m in the tunnel and it’s okay.”

Despite the fact that we have our house on the market and Mr. Knittiot in the frenzy of a job search that has already yielded more opportunities in the last two weeks than we saw in six months here, it does still feel like we are in the tunnel. I want out of this place with a fierce desperation, but there are so many little details that all need to fall in place in just the right way for this to all come together. And I don’t want to be so focused on “escaping” that I am not able to live here right now. I live so much in the past and the future and it never occurs to me to enjoy this moment and appreciate it for what it is worth until much later.

I’m also starting to see that the plate full of disappointment that I often seem to be eating from is one that I am serving myself. This isn’t to paint over every detail of my life with a brilliant purple crayon and pretend that there aren’t a few piles of garbage sitting around, it is just to say that everyone has compost heaps lying around at various stages of decomposition and sometimes the stinking rotted garbage phase is just where something is at, but this is the stuff of a rich and nourishing soil later on. And besides, look at those beautiful roses and zinneas and bean plants and cabbages growing over here. Wow. That’s the stuff that comes from composting your garbage and as Voltaire reminds us, all that is left for us in the end is to tend our gardens.

It is all about perspective. It is all about what I am willing to see and learn and do. It is all in the approach. And mostly, it is about being a human being, which I am reminded again and again and again is all about taking responsibility for the levels of apparant spectacularness you see each day in your own life. Glorious. Truly glorious world.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 7th, 2005 at 11:13 am and is filed under this Random Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.