What's Happening?

I am approaching two months out of my job of 10 years.  Two months of standing outside a career and a regular decent paycheck and the ability to buy a lot of things or expensive dinners.  It's disconcerting and sometimes it makes me feel uneasy or it makes me worry a little about the future and what that will hold for me when I figure things out.  That's the tough stuff, but there's good stuff, too.

I'm no longer afraid or anxious or nervous. When I smile now, I can literally feel how my face lights up and how that smile is a smile inside and out.  I don't use an alarm clock to wake up any more, and oddly enough, I wake up earlier and want to get out of bed and start the day. I catch myself singing and or dancing while cooking or gardening or cleaning.  I think about things really deeply and fully.  I see details of the world around me that I haven't bothered to notice (a completely shiny silver church steeple in Oak Park.  I looked it up thinking that the shiny-ness was new.  Nope.  I was just so bound up I didn't notice giant 20 feet tall shiny things in a sky that I see weekly). I feel peaceful inside.  I am truly best friends with my dog for maybe the first time in his life.  Dan has a good wife in me now and that makes me infinitely happy and content.

Also, and we'll see if this lasts, I don't really want to buy things. Maybe that's liking kicking coffee or sugar? You just have to go cold turkey, get over the withdrawal, and then you look around and wonder how you accumulated all of the stuff you already have.  And instead of wanting to buy things, suddenly you want to streamline and get rid of things and whittle your life down to just the best bare essentials, making room for thinking and loving and people instead of junk. . .

My friend Slava, who has recently moved her entire life from Chicago to Long Island really abruptly for a new job, has put all of her stuff in storage in Brooklyn and is in temporary digs in Long Island essentially living out of three suitcases.  We talked about this recently, her so far away on the phone in this new life, me in a much different life than when we hugged goodbye in February.  And at some point our conversation turned to the things we owned and why.  She has discovered that all she really needs is the stuff in her three bags and that she's already starting--in just three months--to forget what's in her storage unit.  She and I both were marveling at the surprising sense of freedom that comes from not being burdened by so many things.

We'll see if this feeling lasts.  But I like it.

Also, this morning, I watched this great short documentary about fashion and consumption and whether our level of consumption of clothing is sustainable (spoiler: it's totally not) and then following a few designers around who are trying to investigate ways to make fashion better/more energy efficient/more sustainable and it's fascinating:


I think I aspire to buying fewer things that are of higher quality that will last and last and last, and this documentary definitely is inspirational in that regard.