It was while reading a poem that begins with drinking white wine from jade cups in Szechuan China that I tried to imagine different lives, more exotic lives, lives I haven’t lived, lives I may never live. I started to write my own version of it – late-night dinner parties with interesting friends; stars and mason jars in backwoods cabins; wandering foreign streets in the predawn hours where unsavory things sometimes go down. The images were more desire than memory, more fantasy than reality.
Playing like this, I had a slight epiphany. Because in my head these scenes usually involve some “we” activity in a distant hazy future or from some co-opted past escapade, I realized that I’m still trying to pick up where previous versions of “we” left off. I realized that I still imagine most of my adventures to be part of someone else’s adventures too. Despite evidence to the contrary, I still desire the life/lives I thought past partners and I might one day inhabit and explore. And when I imagine that type of a future, it’s based on some amalgam of people from my past and the experiences we had or I imagined we would have had.
The epiphany seems like an obvious one: our preferences in life (measured by both desire and avoidance) are often rooted in memory and personal experience. What we want and what we dismiss both have a way of keeping fresh in our mind what we’ve already had, enjoyed, lost, or despised. Frequently, we live and strive in response to, and sometimes in step with, past versions of our self.
It’s not much of an epiphany, yet it felt strangely revelatory to consider this tie between memory and desire. I have to assume I’m not alone in doing this cobbling together of a future using the leathery scraps of the past. I read enough dating profiles – they often list what they seek: looking for an adventure buddy, looking to share travel and meals and all the good things, looking for blah blah blah. It stands to reason that these grocery lists of desires are built from familiar and kitchen stained recipes. How many people, like me, are hoping to improve upon a past version of themself. or trying to return to a place they had been, or looking for the path to where they thought they were going? How many people are pushing up against the limits of what they can do for themselves? People who say they want to cook meals together haven’t lost the ability to cook for themself. They might even enjoy it. But they can probably recall the fun of cooking meals together. People who say they want to travel together must, in some way, however faint, remember the joys of past travel adventures shared with other people.
This brought me back to a different realization – one that I had in the summer of 2017 after a long, slow, solo-climb in the Smokey Mountains: life’s grand vistas and arduous climbs along with its mossy valleys are meant to be shared.
Conversely, the other thing I realized during this Sunday contemplation is how limited my shared experiences have been. My friends have always been on the periphery and, as such, they don’t play much of a role in my visions of the future. I’ve seldom had the type of friendships where we had interesting dinner parties or traveled together. I’ve seldom had the kinds of friendships where we pushed each other out of our comfort zones, or supported each other, or did much together other than hike, drink, go to shows, or shoot the shit. I can only think of two trips that I’ve taken with friends – both of them weekend hiking trips and both were over twenty years ago. One friend of those friends and I drifted apart, and the other friend passed away. Aside from those two trips, I’ve only ever taken trips alone or with family or with a partner. I’ve never done a guys weekend. I’ve never done a neighbors or couples/friends trip with the kids. I’d be surprised if I’ve hosted or attended more than a dozen dinner parties in my life, and I’ve seldom done “couples” dinners with other couples. Therefore, when I read about those kinds of experiences, I find myself missing something I’ve never fully known. The imagined experiences become approximations. Sometimes, it sounds nice or fun… and yet a little difficult to envision. And suddenly, I’m asking myself, how did I get to this age having never done these things or established these types of relationships? How could my life’s experiences be so wildly different from those of others? What’s the likelihood of those things changing without some external push or stimulus?
This is where relationships seem necessary. They have a way of expanding our field of vision, showing us different possibilities, and pushing us to experience the world in different ways. They give us nudges and sometimes show us entirely different ways of being. They also, if we let them, have a way of shrinking us, boxing us in, building complacency with the familiar.
What I felt when I read about the white wine in jade cups was a type of longing coupled with a type of discomfort. I wanted to have that type of a story to tell, or to promise myself that such stories are still on my horizon. It made me feel a little too settled, a little too complacent in my current routines. As though I’ve shrunk from some of my aspirations. I feel this shrinking most when I feel the nervousness of doing something new or going somewhere unfamiliar on my own. In those moments, I begin to wonder what happened to the person who spent two to three months driving across the country visiting cities and parks and doing things (camping) that he had never done before. In that shrinking I begin to fear that there’s a use it or lose it aspect to doing new things, and sometimes, I feel myself growing out of practice and losing it (insert self-effacing joke here).
Through reading and writing, I’m finding that it’s much easier to envision other ways of living than it is to enact change or pursue those alternatives on my own. It’s easier to read or write about it than to try to live it. At times, I feel as though I’ve lost my sense of adventure – cooking the same meals, going to the same bars, walking the same walks. Weekends are often spent in the neighborhood with neighborhood friends. That’s when I have to remind myself that doing things on my own (travel, exploring, and going to events, museums, concerts, etc.) has never really been my default setting and has not been my experience for most of my adult life. Even in the last seven or eight years (my single years), I’ve had significant chunks of time in which I found people with whom I would do and share things.
What I’m really trying to reconcile… what all of this word salad amounts to is a slight state of confusion. I’ve spent the better part of my adult life as part of a couple. Despite doing lots of things on my own and trying to be for me what I sought in others, I still think of life as a team sport. I still think of my best future moments as being shared moments. And because that team has, for me, always been a small and mostly cohesive unit of two, I struggle to imagine other configurations. Moreover, I’m realizing that while I’m comfortable with, and often enjoy, doing things on my own, doing the bigger things like taking a trip, require more gumption and psychological heft. I have to work to not only envision the trip, but also to make it happen. I find it more difficult to do a day-trip to Napa or Point Reyes or a vacation to another state/country on my own than I would were I going with someone else. And so instead, lately, I’ve chosen to read and write about it and dream of something else.