39

Check out the whole series, including 38 (and 37, 36, 35, 34, 33, 32, 31, and 30 of course).

During the long-rambly-correspondence phase of our friendship, Tami and I would fashion envelopes from Vogue perfume ads and trade letters, photographs, fortunes from cookies and anything else that might delight the other for the price of one postage stamp. Text messages were 10 cents apiece, internet bandwidth was slow, and it was the cheapest and easiest way to connect the 500 miles between us.

We often swapped quotes, and it was in one of her letters I first read, And there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people (Eggers). I liked the sentiment—that to continually change yourself, to try to create change around you, and to hold space for all people were signs of a life well lived—since it jived with my way of being. I chased life in a mad sprint away from, while knowing I’d ultimately run right into, death. And why wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t anyone?

Enter the pandemic, and the ensuing slower pace of life it demanded. And I found…I rather liked it. The longer sleep times, the softer mornings, the fact that thinking more than 24 hours in advance was asinine. Stasis felt far less criminal than it did freeing. I was responsible for so little beyond myself and my dog. Surprised at how good it felt, I inhaled the question is how I’ve lived up until now how I want to continue living going forward? like a drug, wildly curious about where answering no could take me.

Of course, even considering no was terrifying. Changing myself meant looking at my familiar, comfortable way of existing and saying, “I fundamentally believe that better is on the other side of a change.”

In other words, change requires optimism.

Which, weirdly, made me the perfect candidate for change, and for the stasis is criminal disposition in general. See, people have frequently called me an optimist. Yes, me. The person panickedly wondering if the man walking by eating an apple is also frothing at the mouth a little and might have rabies and if that building will fall on me if I run into it to get away from the potentially rabid dude. An optimist. (I KNOW.) But…maybe  optimism isn’t about imagining best case scenarios first, or always having a sunny disposition. What if, instead, it’s about believing, despite everything, that better exists in the first place?

And I do believe that. I believe that despite how cruel some people can be, despite the sociopaths and sycophants, despite a world where it’s so much easier to be selfish than it is to give a shit about as many people as possible, and despite living in a place where nothing is within our control because that’s how nature designed it…better exists.

Funny enough, a change I’ve always been pretty pessimistic about is my birthday. I never seem to think getting numerically older is going to turn out better. Yet, here I am, year over year, doing it; and year over year, finding a lot of positives in continuing on. Something for me and Tami to unpack during the current phase of our friendship: efficient-updates-and/or-shower-thoughts via text.

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