Movement: Physical, Psychological, Emotional, etc
August 24, 2011admin No Comments »I realize that I tend to write about hard to pin down things. I also went back and read through a blog I kept in high school a few months ago and realize I completely fail to record what’s happening in my life when I write. I would apologize for both of these things, except that I write to process (and who needs to process obvious things?), and I get bored describing my day. Just to clear that up.
In the last three weeks, I’ve moved from Capitol Hill to Columbia Heights, spent a week at home with my family, drove to Indiana, and generally had a crazy time at work doing a big report (which we released today, and was somewhere on the NYT website, if you can find it…) All of this is to say, I’ve been doing a lot of moving around.
I’ve observed several things about myself over these last three weeks, which I would like to share.
1) I really like driving around in cars. This feels like an odd and stupid admission, in part because I pride myself on being without (in this case a car) and also sensitive to the materials I use.
The former is rather straightforward. I have positive associations with the knowledge that there are things that I want and could have which I deny myself. When I write it like that, it sounds painfully Catholic, but I don’t mean it in a way that denies myself happiness. I like being able to do without extraneous things which will not necessarily yield greater happiness. I’d love a flat screen TV, and if I wanted to drain my savings, I could probably afford one. But I gain satisfaction is instead having a TV handed down by a friend from college that works just fine and does not increase my waste or decrease my wallet. It’s an ascetic aesthetic.
The latter, being sensitive to the materials I use, would be perhaps less complicatedly described as awareness. While I have no love of the using the metro to get to work, it gives me satisfaction that I’m using public transportation and decreasing the amount of waste and pollution I am creating accordingly. This is sort of an environmental pleasure but not really. It’s the same feeling I get when I cook a big meal in the kitchen and then clean it up afterwards. I don’t particularly like cleaning the kitchen, but I do like the lack of trace I have left upon the world. Since I view dirty dishes and strewn food containers to be an evil, especially to my nice roommates, I enjoy doing things that make those realities exist for only a short period of time. In the same way, while I don’t like the metro, I like that my imprint is smaller and my inconvenience to the resources around me is closer to the ideal, which is negligible.
All of that said…I really like driving around in cars. Family friends lent me a car so they could move to Indiana in a single car (and I would bring their second one afterwards), and I really enjoyed the cross country drive through the mountains and towns I’d never visited. But what I enjoyed most was when I got to their town. They were off at dinner with some new friends, and I so drove around their small town, checked out the college campus they’re working at, looked for a local eatery to get dinner at, etc. I just self-propelled myself all over the place.
I never experienced this in college, this desire to move around more efficiently. Perhaps it was because college was a series of sprints between breaks and summers and so the feeling of commuting to work every day by foot or public transportation never had an opportunity to sink in. But now, after being in DC for a year, a small tic inside of me is looking to just move.
2) I’m seriously impressed with how much I identify as being from Wisconsin these days. In college, I was from Wisconsin, but it was more a fact of life rather than something I regarded as part of my heritage (largely because I didn’t spend a lot of time regarding my heritage). I think this was helped by the fact that college was full of people from all over who were equally fish out of water, and our respective places of origin were more guiding factors to our cultural experiences rather than indicative realities of who we were in college.
While it’s true that most of the people in DC I know are also from all the fuck over the place, it’s not quite the same. We are all here to live, to claim space, and to make anew our adult identities. And so, perhaps quite reasonably, I have reached for Wisconsin as my cultural home and identity.
What is more interesting than me adopting Wisconsin as my rhetorical Mecca though is how odd (in a good way) it felt to be in Wisconsin when I visited my family this month. I would like to believe that the positive experience was not merely one of nostalgia or familiarity. I certainly enjoyed doing things I’ve done before and draw comfort from familiarity, but it was, I think, somewhat different than that.
(This is the tricky part to describe.) Perhaps it’s the intangibles, like pace of life or the amount of personal body space allowed in public. Maybe it’s something to do with number one on my list, and in DC I just don’t have the freedom of movement that I do in Wisconsin. I’m inclined to think that those issues are involved, but that it’s more than that.
As I’ve adjusted to this new post college world where goals are not as obvious and outcomes are less explicit, I’ve identified two motivating goals which are in many cases, at least for me right now, at odds with each other. There is Success and there is Personal Happiness. I largely mean Success in the professional sense, but really just in the sense of overcoming a challenge, making an imprint upon the world, or positively affecting the lives of others. Doing something that has results which might make me happy in the long term but whose day to day effort is hard and challenging in all the best ways.
Personal Happiness, on the other hand, is the sort of thing that is fulfilled by drowning myself in the people I love and spending all my time and resources to maximize my exposure to those people (and finding new ones). Forming a commune with my best friends from college would be one extreme form of this. The two are intertwined in some way, but in fundamental ways are separated by location in my life.
Because my interest right now is largely in policy and politics, in understanding the laws and attitudes that govern my country, and in attempting to engage in what I consider to be an important national dialogue, my Success goal is fulfilled by being in DC. I am fortunate enough to be around friends here that I love and cherish, and am slowly working up the nerve to expand that social circle even further. However, my family that I love, my wonderful niece and nephew who are growing up and learning all about the world, my siblings that I would love to have dinner with every week so that they could know me better and I them, these people are all in Wisconsin and I believe them to be a significant part of my Personal Happiness.
A serious portion of me wants to make a life tomorrow in Wisconsin because I want to fulfill more of my Personal Happiness. I don’t think I would be entirely fulfilled by just my family and going to my niece and nephew’s swimming lessons every day (although it’d be a good start), since I have friends that I care deeply about that aren’t in Wisconsin and maintaining autonomy from my family is important to my emotional well-being. That said, I think it was a longing to focus on this Personal Happiness goal that left me feeling differently than I have about Wisconsin since high school. Because I’m perpetually feeling this tug between these two important and meaningful values, being so close to one that I feel far away from makes it all the more attractive.
So that’s that. My movement, between places, values, goals, and states of mind, has consumed me as of late. I think I have a long way to go before I’ll be able to reconcile the balance between Success and Personal Happiness, but I’m content to give myself the space to figure what Success means to me for the time being. It is entirely possible that Success could become as small a world as improving the Personal Happiness of those who improve my Personal Happiness. At the end of life, when you’re retired and slower to stand up, when you have a lot more to look back at over your shoulder than to look ahead to, I think Personal Happiness is what’s going to matter, and the people you cared about and cared for through life is what will be meaningful.
But I’m not old yet, and if you learn a lesson before that lesson is due, I think you’re liable to have missed the point entirely.
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