Be Where you Are
You don’t know what you have until it’s gone
A bathroom barely feels complete without some sort of straggler bug.
It’s funny how the saying goes “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.”
It’s true, it really is.
I sat outside a library in Livermore, CA, this weekend and I listened to the bugs and the birds. It marked the first time in the past month where I couldn’t hear the din of the skyscrapers made audible through ambulances and firetrucks. The city (San Francisco) is a beautiful place. A noisy, jumbled, beautiful place. It feels like an anomaly to want to move slow and intentionally in such a city. A city focused on the speed of AI and new technology. Paying with cash and coins feels like a burden. Walking across the street feels suddenly slow and antiquated.
I’ve welcomed and embraced this change as much as I can. There’s something wonderful about being able to walk or bike to anything I could possibly need. That’s a blessing I’ve never experienced in my life before now.
However, sitting outside that library—the sense of peace and calm I had was something that I had forgotten on those dark nights listening to police sirens wail past with their new low-tone calls to penetrate traffic better. Sitting outside that library, I started to realize how I missed the peace and calm of the countryside. I am starting to miss the way crickets sing at night what it feels like to live right up against nature. To have access to woods and forests, fields and farms.
A fox chanced to appear while I was watching the solar fields and ground squirrels play. The fox reminded me of the fields we need to play in—to express our humanity, the grass we need under our toes to remember who we are and where we come from. The earth we need to run and play on—to connect with our childhood.
So there I sat, breathing in the fresh country air, longing again to return to those spaces I had so recently left, as my partner and I came to live here in San Francisco in the past few months. I feel a new longing growing inside me, that hides beneath the joy that I have in walking two blocks to a grocery store to get my groceries. A new longing grows inside me that sits beneath my joy at public parks and riding my bike to work.
It was so recent that I had left—how can I already miss it? I wondered.
Then, a deeper truth began to reveal itself to me. It doesn’t really matter what I’ve lost—I’m going to miss it when it’s gone.
When or if I return to a more rural lifestyle, I’m certainly going to miss the hustle and the bustle of the city. I’m going to miss the energy and excitement that people have when they gather around one another. The feeling that anything could happen because things are always happening. Events are constantly taking place, festivals happening, conferences, meetups, groups, meetings, there’s always new ways of engaging with people who are like you—who like things that you do.
I’ll miss all of these things just as I missed the countryside in that moment. So, I began to remind myself—that I need to appreciate what I have now, because I will look back on it and think: man, how could I have overlooked how wonderful my life was here.
I think that’s a tendency I often have (and I am willing to bet that you have it too), this tendency to believe that life would be better someplace else, that I would be happier someplace else. This is a dangerous fallacy—that only serves to compare our lives to others, and make us less happy in the doing.
Instead, I urged myself to think, what can I do with my life now—to appreciate and embrace the beauty that is currently around me.
As we drove back into the city—surrounded by thousands of cars of traffic, I let my mind wander on the idea.
How can I better appreciate the life I have?
Does that mean investing more in the things that I care about?
Does that mean doubling down on my friendships, my relationships?
For me, it means quite a few things, it means trying to embrace a workplace that I don’t thrive in. It means investing in my writing without placing so much emphasis success in the eyes of others. It means nourishing my soul by taking care of myself and my body. It means getting back into running and a regular gym habit. It means making meal plans to give my body the chance it needs to succeed at all of those things above. It means investing in my relationship with my partner. It means creating windows of time that have little purpose other than to let go and have fun.
I’ve spent a lot of time in my life gritting my teeth at my environment, and where I’m at in my life—grinding to get to the next place. While I don’t want to let go of the work required to get to where we want to be, there’s no use in losing teeth for the sake of progress. Like I mentioned in my previous post, there’s no point in getting there if you’re going to be miserable along the way.
So, here’s to learning some tunes to whistle, approaching each day with a sense of grace and gratitude, and working hard to make your dreams come true.
How’s that sound to you?
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
[…]
Wild Geese - Mary Oliver
Thanks for reading.
The best way to support me is always to share my work. But, if you enjoy my writing you can always Buy Me A Coffee here <3