I listened to a video that a friend made based on a letter of advice he had sent to his granddaughter on the occasion of her going off to college. He was giving her advice about how to make friends and specifically how to selectively establish relationships that will help you create the world you want to inhabit as you go forward. It was all perfectly good advice, but one thing struck me about his comments. He made a point of saying that she should not just take the easy path of befriending those who were most proximate to her, but rather, she should look for specific traits or qualities that worked for her and allowed her to flourish in a way that suited her best. That got me to thinking about how we all create our own worlds as we go through life. I’m not sure I agree with Robert Zemeckis in Forrest Gump when he suggests that life is like a feather on the wind that just gets blown by fate wherever the breeze happens to take it. But then I am also reminded of a friend in college who worked so very hard from the get-go to order his existence to fit a goal he had set for himself to become a doctor. He dogmatically parsed his time and his experiences in college to befriend who he felt would be best for him, date women on a rigorous and sparse schedule so as to not interfere with his plans (women who only fit a predefined model he had imagined for himself), and then strictly follow his own prescription for how to keep what he wanted out of life. That friend’s life was nothing short of a disaster while Forrest Gump lived a full and rich life of experiences that went well beyond what anyone might of expected of this otherwise modest man. Does that tell us that random is always good and planning is bad? I’m guessing not.
This morning I am sitting here in my living room, prompted by my friend’s video, but really thinking more about my own life and how I feel about it. Kim and I make a regular habit of reminding one another about how much we like our lives and how they have end up taking shape. If you go back 25 years for both of us (before we met), I’m not so sure either of us would have said that we were very happy with the lives we had created for ourselves. Kim was single and had largely played out her dreams of trying to be a musical theater actress in New York City. She had done so at the expense of her personal life and was alone and struggling somewhat to make ends meet and, more importantly, to have the primary relationship she had always wanted. I was between marriages, having left two behind for different reasons. I was also in professional transition and while not struggling financially, I was struggling to find meaningful work, dabbling in private equity and reengaging in Wall Street life after thinking that I had left that all behind. We were both, in our own ways, unsettled and somewhat adrift. I doubt either of us would have said we were content with our circumstances and prepared to settle in for the duration with the world we had created for ourselves.
I have described the way we met, so I will not repeat that here, but suffice it to say that it was somewhat random. I, for one, knew immediately upon meeting Kim that this was a person I wanted to spend my life with. But even with that, how one creates one’s world with and around another is still an open question. We cannot control much about the world around us, as much as we may want to try. To some extent we all have to roll with the punches of life and work to make the best of it from that. Once we were together, that’s exactly what happened. The love of my life was forged in the crucible of a Wall Street career debacle the likes of which exceed most traumas faced by any colleagues I know. Think about it this way…We were married in February 2007 and between then and May, my professional world fell apart and I is forced to spend 16-hour days, 7 days a week, trying to sort things out to stanch a major financial collapse. This may seem like an exaggeration, but its not. It was the first tsunami of what became the global financial meltdown that has become known as the Great Recession of 2008. During the second half of 2008, I spent 6 months taking sleeping aids as the forces of government decided whether I was to be indicted for actions which may have led to that collapse. I sold my ski house to stay liquid and muscled through as best I could. Kim probably wondered what she had gotten herself into. But we generally stayed calm and carried on and slowly began to rebuild our world.
Along the way, still living in New York City, we bought this hilltop home with an eye towards some day moving out here in retirement. I’m not sure either of us had imagined a retirement life per se, and not being “country club” people, there was no easy definition for us of what that might entail. All we knew was that New York City was not likely to be where we would settle for good. Finally, eight years after buying this hilltop, we chose to move out here permanently and managed to time that move to get just out ahead of the COVID crisis that hit our collective worlds. In some strange way, that lock-down period helped solidify our commitment to this hilltop. We had settled in as the masks finally came off the world. Lo and behold, when we reemerged into the broader light of the world, we had created our new world on this hilltop. I had found activities like teaching and expert witness work that satisfied me. Kim had found local singing opportunities that have kept her musical spirit alive. And, most importantly, we had settled into a comfort with each other that has left us best friends around which we have comfortably organized our family and friend networks, both local and distant, that form the fabric of our world. Out of all the turbulence of the world at large and our own personal dramas, we had created our world and it suits us immensely.
I have owned 18 homes in my life and fully half of them have been secondary homes, so I have learned that happiness for us does not come from having multiple homes, but rather, finding one that feels right. This hilltop feels right for us at the moment. There will come a time when it won’t be right any longer and we talk about that enough to know that we agree that every place has its time and that the world we create must always be flexible and ready to morph as needed. People come and go in our lives just like places come and go. I find myself thinking that the world we create has its strength in a good solid sense of self and a core relationship, and everything then flows form that. The world is an amazing place and life is good.