Shift

I like to shift gears when driving, and insist on a manual transmission for my car.  It keeps the drive interesting, it requires some (not a lot, but some) skill, and it helps me pay attention to what I’m doing, which is such a useful attribute in a driver.  As a general rule, I am not good at shifting – myself out of bed in the morning, for example.  Or, sometimes, back up to fifth gear when I’ve dropped from 70 to 35 in four or five stages, and then moved gradually back to 70 again.  Whoops.  Shifting piles of junque off my to-do pile and into the trash is an issue, too.

An awareness of the need to shift mentally has never been my strongest suit, either.  (What is my strongest suit, you ask?  I think it may be paying the check before anyone else at the table knows what I’m up to.  I only know one person who’s ever beaten me at this.)  When I was a girl, maybe 40 years ago, I read a book in which an English boy tries to imitate the accent of his new, American neighbors.  I was thunderstruck by the idea – it’s English people who have accents, I thought.  Americans (except Southerners) talk normally.  Or do they?  Shift.

When I started taking photos of wildflowers, I didn't take
one of white clover.  It's just a thing you walk on, not,
to me, a flower.  But it is a flower, however common.  Shift.

Big deal, though.  Nine-year old kid has never thought about accents in a global context.  So flash forward 15 years; I’m reading Calvin Trillin.  In one of his food essays, he discusses his wife’s inability to believe he doesn’t particularly like asparagus.  To her, asparagus is so delicious no one could fail to love it.  My thought?  “Is he saying he doesn’t love asparagus?  How could he not love asparagus?!  Asparagus is delicious.”  I totally, entirely understand that some people don’t like fettucine alfredo, though I do, or dislike Joni Mitchell, whom I love, or hate Boston, one of my all-time favorite cities.  But I just could not absorb this asparagus idea into my conscious brain.  I have kept trying since then, and I’ve largely succeeded – but I suspect my subconscious still doesn’t buy the whole asparagus thing.  Also the song ‘Walkin’ on Sunshine.’  How could anyone not like this song?  It is so happy.

Hopping along another ten years or so.  My brother-in-law’s best friend from college, Stephen, is an Englishman, an artist and godfather to my goddaughter.  Stephen’s art is primarily collages made from found objects, some manufactured and some natural, and mostly tiny.  He notices tiny things, like seeds and the differences between two apple blossoms.  Never mind forest and trees; while I am ooh’ing over a distant vista of lakeside hill with sunset, Stephen is awestruck by a particular twig, or three leaves here and two just under those.  Incidentally, he seems to shift easily from small picture to big.  I’ve gotten better at shifting from big to small after a few nature walks with him (“Hold out your hand; I need to collect some of these pods.”), but I still have to think about it.

My instinct is to look up and out.

 

And this is the 'trees' perspective.

But sometimes I'll focus in closer

and see curling bits of leaf-peel, or whatever this is.
Thanks, Stephen.

I have loved the moments of shift on this journey.  A lake big enough to have waves that matter?  An unending view of grass enrapturing me?  Seeing the world, behind me, narrowed to a small mirror, and noticing how different it looks.  Remembering pears in the desert are different than pears in the small farms of New England.  Sleeping on a couch, in a car, in a king-size bed high above Chicago, under a future-heirloom quilt in the guest room by the indoor pool, in dodgy sheets at a crap motel, in a four-poster in an elegant city.  Eating a dried-up crust in an ‘Alaska-luxury’ hotel bed, overpriced mushrooms in Pia Zadora’s Las Vegas restaurant, roasted-squash soup in a friend’s kitchen in Kansas City.  Driving farther than I thought I would ever want to in a day, giving myself permission to stop before I planned.  A main point of a trip, for me, is seeing something new.  Seeing something new should create some sort of shift.

Becoming a career woman, twenty or so years ago, required a shift in thinking, or perspective, or world view.  I stumbled into investment management through a temporary assignment as a receptionist, when I was earning the money for graduate school.  After I got my Master’s in literature, I went back to the gleaming skyscraper where the rich people worked, and gradually, and not without angst, made my way to vice president over the course of ten years.  My field was financial services, and I had always thought of myself as a word person.  That shift – to the belief I could be both – was gradual.  I didn’t really notice it happening, but when, occasionally, I would smile with joy and satisfaction at having successfully analyzed a financial, I could recognize that it had.

I was really, really good at my work.  And yet... my career stalled.  I wasn’t working for the caliber of company I wanted.  I was in it for the money, but wasn’t making the big bucks some of my colleagues were, and I surely to goodness wasn’t getting rich on stock options.  My peers respected and liked me, but I got much more liking than respect from my bosses.  I was out of work for almost two years in the recession.  My compensation and titles were moving sideways or down.  One colleague, who has done very well in our profession, tells me it’s largely the luck of the draw, but when the company that needed me desperately, for which I’d done excellent work, decided it could do without me – for budget reasons – I was convinced there had to be more than luck in play.

For several years, the moments of frustration, irritation and boredom had usually outweighed those of joy and satisfaction.  That, and the depth of the too-frequent frustration, often had me yearning to quit.  Without another job to go to (and it’s hard to find a new job when you’re working 50 hours a week, especially when the universe has other plans for you), I didn’t dare quit.  When that last company terminated my contract, I was flabbergasted, liberated, frightened and elated.  I worked my last four months, and when I was done, I quit my career.  It felt great.  It felt like achieving an ambition.

Big shift.

The one with the ex is harder to describe, and out of respect for his privacy I think I’ll refrain from doing so in detail.  In fact, I’ve been trying for an hour now, and I just wiped out everything I’d written for the fourth time and decided it’s too nuanced, too intricate and too subjective to record.  And it would take a long time, probably bore you, and inevitably misrepresent something.  So.  It was good a lot, and lousy sometimes, and there was lots of laughing and shouting and crying and sitting together on the couch, my feet on his lap or his head on my shoulder, newspapers spread about or a movie on the laptop.  He was too often mean to me, and I thought about leaving, but there was so much good, and I was really comfortable, and we both loved to throw parties.  I stayed.

He did not.  When he terminated our relationship, I was flabbergasted, liberated, devastated and – just a little bit – pleased.  I had been with him for ten years; I’d been defined as someone’s girlfriend; I’d considered his needs and preferences and desires before making decisions; I’d had someone to talk to whenever I wanted and a hand with moving furniture if needed.  When we actually ended, I sobbed and begged, but he was unmoved so I tried to sleep.  By morning I was resigned.

Huge shift.

That I quit my career and lost my primary love relationship, and in consequence of those two events had to leave my warm, elegant little home, and everything determined in less than two weeks, was more than a shift.  It was a cataclysm.  ‘Cataclysm’ usually connotes something disastrous, but my dictionary says I can also define it as “a violent upheaval that... brings about a fundamental change.”  I thought it might have the same root as ‘catalyst, but it doesn’t.  (‘Cataclysm’ is from the Greek for ‘inundate;’ ‘catalyst’ is also from Greek, but for ‘dissolve.’)  Nonetheless, my cataclysm was also a catalyst.  I am changed.

I know people often like to say that people don’t change.  It is obviously not true.  The alcoholic who stops drinking (and hundreds do every day) changes profoundly.  People who have been alienated from their families reunite; people in abusive relationships find the courage to walk away; well-paid computer programmers move to Namibia and become unpaid rhinoceros guardians.  I have changed.  I may change back, or change in some other direction, sometime in the future, but for now I am trusting my instincts, believing in my gifts, and trying to live my authentic life, in right relationship with myself, my family, my friends.

Marvelous, wonderful, joyful shift.

Finding joy in unexpected places.