Recalibrate

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Musical accompaniment (listen while you read): Jennifer Warnes, Bird on a Wire. This is an awesome cover of Leonard Cohen’s classic, from Warnes’ tribute album of Cohen covers, Famous Blue Raincoat. “I have tried in my way to be free.” And so should we all.

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I’ve been at the business of recalibration for over two years after watching my husband John die, closing our antiques business of 25 years, and moving myself to New York City full time. I picked up two elderly rescue cats along the way and quit my job a year after I moved. 

I joined the Great Resignation in the third year of the pandemic, abandoning the corporate life and identity in which I’d been immersed for eight years. When I left, I vowed to do only things I wanted to do, and only things that made me happy. A worthy ambition, no doubt (and one that earned me over 10,000 impressions on my LinkedIn announcement), but easier said than done. 

The Merry-Go-Round

My entire adult life feels like it’s been one extended merry-go-round ride. My first amusement park merry-go-round ride was somewhere on the Jersey shore — Seaside Heights? Asbury Park? — where I was introduced to the fabulously unattainable: the brass ring. Up and down, round and round, accompanied by weird music that, for some reason, I experienced as grotesque, maybe because it reminded me of clowns, who I do not like. Repetitive motion in a slightly disturbing ambiance, grasping at something that was always just out of reach. 

I don’t mean to suggest that I was miserable. I’ve led a rich and varied life with multiple successful (and some not-so-successful) careers. I’ve lived in wildly different places, ranging from rural Vermont to coastal New England to cities on both coasts. I’ve traveled quite a bit, both internationally and driving a truck across America to antiques shows for years. I have been fortunate, and I am privileged, no question about it.

As I began to face the reality of late middle age, I realized that riding the merry-go-round was eclipsing my ability to make intentional choices about how I was going to spend the rest of my life. And underlying that was the eerie sense that something wasn’t quite right.

One of the things about amusement park rides is that once they start, you are not supposed to get off until they’re over. Quit your highly compensated, highly regarded job, at which, by the way, you are pretty good? Sorry, you are not supposed to get off. Give up your beautiful home on the banks of a tidal river in coastal Massachusetts? Abandon the routines that have come to define and structure your life?

Without really thinking about it this way at first, I set out to get off the merry-go-round. 

Now What?

I was widowed, retired, and living in a new city. It was terrifying and exhilarating. I began to unwind my life, jettisoning things that once brought joy or satisfaction but no longer. More importantly, I stopped doing things I thought I was “supposed” to do, because that’s how I was brought up. Behaviors my mother ingrained in me from an early age and which I continued to do, despite the fact that they made me unhappy. I stopped worrying about whether I'd set the table correctly when I had dinner guests. I leave dirty dishes in the sink overnight on occasion. I eat when I feel hungry, not at mealtimes. Being honest with myself about what those things were was the hardest part. Small steps.

As I extracted myself from things I didn’t want to do, I found I had a lot of time and headspace to do other things. I embarked on a series of experiments – there was no grand plan, and I certainly did not (and still don’t) have a clear sense of where this would take me. I took up jazz piano (seriously) and am learning Spanish by fits and starts. I volunteer a few times a week. I got elected to my Coop board. As a result, my circle of friends is growing rapidly after a long period of grieving and loneliness and wandering through the wilderness of my mind, sorting through what went right and what went wrong during my first two acts.

And I’m actively practicing the previously unimaginable art of doing nothing.

Learning

I’m still in the process of figuring out what I want to do and who I want to be, but I have learned a few things along the way:

Not to be so hard on myself. I finally understand, at some level, the Buddhist concept of being kind to myself. I’m less judgmental and let things go that I would have obsessed over previously, going over and over mistakes and missteps in my mind trying to understand what went wrong. A fool’s errand. This is an incredibly hard habit to break, but it has created a lot of space in my brain for thinking about other things.

Things can be both one thing and something else. I am furiously smudging the black-and-white lines that used to define how I thought about life. My marriage was deeply flawed, and I loved my husband deeply. I was really good at my job, and it wasn’t the most important thing in my life. I can hold contradictory thoughts simultaneously without feeling compelled to reconcile them.

Practice is soothing and rewarding regardless of the outcome. Things have always come easily to me, so much so that I discarded anything I couldn’t immediately excel at. I’ve discovered that pushing myself outside the boundaries of ease and comfort is its own reward. Taking up the piano again after nearly 30 years has taught me so much about that.

Age really is a state of mind. I’m pretty good to my body, which has benefited from my Pilates practice; I cook for myself and eat well, not giving in to New Yorkers’ predilection for takeout and going out to eat as my default. I walk whenever I can and take public transit when I can’t; I buy better beauty products and can see the results. All of this leaves me fit and healthy and looking much better than I did when I was younger and so stressed out.

I’m not going to change the world. It’s not that I don’t care about politics or worry about the long-term consequences of Trumpism and global warming and food insecurity and racism. I still worry, but I’ve realized that staying rigidly attached to the hard-core left-wing political principles that guided most of my adult life isn’t serving me or anyone else very well. The world is different. Me and a bazillion late boomers and GenX-ers became complacent while the world went sideways. I’m no longer outraged or belligerent. I’m determined.

Small, everyday conversations are the heartbeat of humanity. Exchanges with the lovely young Korean kid who opened an espresso bar across the street in the late stages of the pandemic, with the doormen and porters who take care of me in my new single life, with my young Hispanic housekeeper who doesn’t speak a word of English, on the street, on the bus, at the checkout at Trader Joe’s – they are all more likely to put a smile on my face than accomplishing something or engaging in polemical debate. 

Recalibration, not reinvention, is the way forward. When I started down this path, I thought I was reinventing myself, but reinvention suggested I needed to make major, if not radical, changes. That was way too scary. And more to the point, it’s just not a realistic ambition. At best, I can only make incremental adjustments – I am who I am. Not to mention the fact that there is a lot in my life that I simply don’t have the power to change absent a fairy godmother.

This was not the first time I’d considered reinventing myself. I remember driving home from work every day over 20 years ago literally chanting under my breath, “I need to change my life.”

I now understand that you can’t change your life; you can only change yourself. 

And so I have landed on the concept of recalibration, the gradual adjustment of small parts, the sum of which is greater than the whole.

I realize it might look like I’ve blown up my life and started over. There is so much about my life today that is indeed very different from my Before Life – before the pandemic, before John died, before I decided to quit working. But I didn’t do it in one fell swoop; I did it piece by piece, with determination, and to the extent I could, without falling back on old habits and preconceptions. I have learned to lean into the process and not focus on outcomes or end games. 

Join Me

I’ve started this newsletter because I think there are a lot of us out there wondering what to do next. I’m not interested in writing only for myself. I still want to change the world. Tell me what you think. I am one lonely soul in a world that is changing so fast I can hardly breathe. Let’s talk.