A Decade Is Both Long and Short
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: This is our last weekend in Ljubljana, and we’re very much enjoying a visit with Lee’s mother, brother, and sister-in-law.
A Decade Is Both Long and Short
Our wedding anniversary is this coming Monday. We’ve been married 35 years.
On our 25th anniversary, we said good-bye to the US and got on a plane to Berlin.
We’ve never regretted that decision, and after ten years of constant togetherness (I’m talking 24/7/365 togetherness, usually living in one small hotel room), we’ve neither killed each other nor gotten bored. #airpods4evah
This peripatetic life is not for everyone—we’ve had to get comfortable with minimalism, rootlessness, unpredictability, constant change, and all kinds of really, really bad pillows. Some days I wake up with a crick in my neck. Some days I wake up and can’t immediately remember where I am. Some days I wake up and wonder how I missed the revolution in home automation. Did you know that people don’t carry keys now, or that treadmills have Solitaire built into the control panel? Mind. Blown.
Would I like to own more stuff? Sure. Sometimes I think I’d like to have another pair of shoes, or some new earrings, but I hardly wear the two pairs of earrings I already have, so I’ll probably give them to one of my nieces, and have fun buying two more pairs somewhere down the road. My shoes are boring, but they enable me to walk—and walk, and walk, and walk, and isn’t that the point of shoes anyway?
When people ask what we miss (a common question, actually), I usually say I miss grits, and my Vitamix. And I do, in theory—once upon a time I had a great kitchen, with all kinds of bells and whistles, and I loved to cook. I still do. Nowadays, when we have an apartment with a kitchen, and we’re in a place where produce is familiar and plentiful and easy to come by, I enjoy indulging that part of my identity. Is it the same as baking all our bread and making all our jam myself? No. Is it worth letting go of some parts of my old identity, in order to blow open the walls that once contained my entire experience of life? Absolutely.
What I really miss is our people—family, friends, having a consistent barista/pharmacist/hair stylist/dental hygienist. That’s the hard part, but I’ll tell you the truth: it’s the only hard part.
People sometimes tell us we’re brave, and we usually laugh, and say there’s no bravery required in a life of hotel breakfast buffets and daily housekeeping.
But maybe I get what they mean: we’ve stepped off the path we were on. We’ve turned our backs on the white-picket-fence-house-in-the-burbs American Dream.
I have no doubt that if we wanted to step back onto that path, into that dream, we could, and it would be easy and predictable and comfortable, and we’d enjoy it, because we tend to enjoy everything. Life is what you make it. But neither of us have any desire to do that at this point, even as we’re getting older and gradually realizing that age will require us to adapt even more.
Perhaps the most valuable lesson we’ve learned in the last ten years is this: ultimately, we’re all going to wind up in the same place, at the end of our days. How we get there is the point.
Happy anniversary, my love. Here’s to the next decade.
Take care,
Lisa
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