Beneath the Skyline

On the cusp of new beginnings

Deborah Good

For nearly all of the last two years, I have been immersed in graduate school, an endeavor that has been part vivification, part drudgery.¹ I will graduate in August, and as I march toward that end, I feel on the cusp of new beginnings. Having recently finished a statistics course that nearly burned me out every week, I am compelled to write this in mathematical terms:

Ends + Beginnings = Transitions.

Yes, transitions. The past seven years of my life have been full of them. How many times since college have I asked myself, What next?²

This question has often been accompanied by a daunting list of related questions, which have sometimes threatened to stall me out altogether: Who am I? What is good and important in the world? What are my strengths and weaknesses, and what does the world need? What is the right thing to do, the most conscientious way to live, the life decisions I should make now so that I will achieve perfection within twenty years? And—oh yeah—how am I going to pay the rent and grocery bills?

I have found that staring out car windows can nudge my thoughts down this pensive and somewhat treacherous path, as can large expanses of desert, red rocks, and sky. As it turned out, a few days after walking across the stage in a premature³ graduation ceremony, I sat in the passenger seat of a car driving through eastern Arizona. You guessed it: Car window + Red rocks + Desert + Sky = Pondering life direction.

Perhaps not everyone turns their year-to-year transitions into existential dilemmas as I do, but I have a hunch that I am not alone. This time around, I have decided to undertake an investigation of sorts. I am on the lookout for stories and pieces of wisdom on how we craft our ways of living and how we pay the bills and indeed whether and how the two are linked.

Mary Catherine Bateson, author of Composing a Life, believes all of us are artists, simply in the ways we put together our days. “As you get up in the morning, as you make decisions, as you spend money, make friends, make commitments, you are creating a piece of art called your life,” she writes.⁴

And if our lives are pieces of art, then the process of composing them is much more like sculpting a ball of clay or piecing together a patchwork quilt than choosing the correct answer on a multiple choice quiz. There is no one right way to do it.

As I gazed out the car window at the rocky valleys of eastern Arizona, I realized how easily I can limit myself by thinking that life should ultimately lead to a traditional middle-class adulthood, involving a full-time career, a spouse, a house, a tidy yard, and investment plans.⁵

 I have joked with my younger brother that he has already far surpassed me in “adult points”—he is married, has a dog, a steady job, and as of May, a house with two brand new couches.

I am not suggesting, of course, that no one should marry, own a house, or mow their lawn. I simply want to remind myself that this is not the only way to reach adulthood.

I turned to Julie, the driver, who has been a good friend since my junior year of college. I wondered out loud with her about people we know—many of them artists and activists—who have crafted alternative work lives and living arrangements. These are people who don’t quite follow the rules—maybe because a traditional middle-class lifestyle would cost more money than they make, or maybe because they dislike rules generally. I have at times counted myself among them, on both accounts.

We talked about Julie’s husband, Jeremy, who writes, teaches at the local university, and does some editing to supplement the downtimes teaching, while Julie works as a nurse at the hospital and considers massage school. They grow some of their own fruit and vegetables, eat an occasional rooster and the eggs their chickens lay in a backyard coop, and harvest free desert foods like cacti pads and jackrabbit!

We talked about a friend of theirs who spends part of the year working for a sculptor in New York and the rest of the year in Tucson doing his own artwork and taking on carpentry jobs for friends.⁶

I also learned of another friend of a friend who spent a year eating granola bars and sleeping in a janitor’s closet at the recreation center where he worked to save thousands of dollars in rent and grocery money. Today, he is traveling in South America, living on the savings he accumulated during his closet-and-granola-bar existence.

There’s also my cousin, who has sometimes spent months traveling the country with friends by catching rides on trains and in cars, playing music on street corners, and living on the coins and bills that drop into the fiddle case they lay open in front of them.

Finally, there are the folks who live at Rolling Ridge, a community and retreat center in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia, where I visited often growing up.⁷

 Community members live in homes that they do not own themselves. Instead, they pay “rent” into the community’s non-profit coffers.

The work they do at and for Rolling Ridge—from gardening to planning retreats to filing taxes—is volunteer, so many of them also piece together paid work outside of the community to pay for the things they need. One couple, for example, juggles their unpaid work (family caretaking, work at Rolling Ridge, and assorted other involvements outside the community) with the website design and counseling work they do in between, for income.

I could go on and on with stories of people’s unique life-compositions. I need these stories. They broaden my viewfinder as I imagine my own future life.

Life transitions are for me a lively and unpredictable landscape, stretched out between periods that are usually more certain and routinized. They are a good time to pull a favorite poem off my bookshelf. In “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Wendell Berry implores us to “every day do something / that won’t compute.” How to do this? “Love the world,” he writes. “Work for nothing. / Take all you have and be poor.”

This may sound like absurd advice, especially to those hunting for employment in a failing economy. I know that regardless of whether one lives with a salary and a pension or without, whether one owns a house and a dog or lives in a janitor’s closet, life is rarely easy and straightforward. I also know that the more alternative versions of “making a living” become even more challenging when children are involved. Still, I am grateful for Wendell Berry and the people in my life who remind me that there is no one right answer to the what-next question.

From what I hear, road trips through Arizona help too.

—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has been a very-full-time student at Temple University for two years and anticipates earning her Master’s degree in social work in August. She can be reached at deborahagood@gmail.com

Notes

1. My coming Master’s degree requires that I use a long and obscure word in this column’s first sentence. It also requires that I use notes.
2. Answer: At least nine times that I can count easily. I’ll list them for you if you ask.
3. Premature for me, that is, as I still had six credits to go before earning my degree.
4. The quote is from Bateson’s essay, “Composing a Life Story,” which appears in The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, ed. Paul Loeb (Basic Books, 2004), p. 209.
5. Middle-class Adulthood = Career(x2) + House + Landscaping + Car(x2) + Financial security + Spouse + Kids
6. The friend’s name is Ted Springer (see www.thelandwithnoname.net) and the New York artist he works for is Ursula Von Rydingsvard (worth googling).
7. www.rollingridge.net