Mapping the Gap

I have been considering the things we do not do in life.  Whether we choose inaction in full sobriety or we fail to show up as victims of inertia, distractibility, or our good friend Fear, the things we do not do can be quite significant to our story.  They can define us.  Our careers.  Our relationships.  Our travels.  Our impact.  A life’s trajectory is built as much on inaction as action.  Upon completion, the shape of a life could be said to arise as much from the negative space of what we did not do with our days as from the positive space of our chosen deeds.

I began this Lake Ohrid leg of the trip thinking I would have a blog post called “Stick Shift.”  I liked that name.  It seemed to pop in my mind when I came upon it.  I love when words do that.  Taken out of context, dug out of the middle of a sentence, some words stand quite well on their own.  They just have panache, a bit of POW.  They cast a shadow you understand will be significant.  Stick Shift.  I liked it, but it didn’t play out as I’d expected.

The inspiration for this title comes from the idea that I have never learned how to drive a stick shift.  At 16, we only had automatic cars in my family.  I’ve had a couple people give me one-off lessons over the years, but I’ve never had a chance to really practice, never the situation of “need” required to get cosy with the mechanics and feel of a manual transmission.  Having been fortunate enough to live a pretty well-educated life, this inability has always felt a bit undermining, like a gap in a handsome hedgerow. 

Here in Ohrid, I was set to put this right.  I was thinking, “We’re here for the month.  We have a manual car.  My partner is working.  I’m on kid-duty.   Now’s my chance.  I’ll learn how to drive a stick.”  Welp, our days in Ohrid have dwindled to none.  And, that didn’t happen.  Didn’t need to, in the end.  We actually found ourselves so well-positioned that the kids and I have been happily entertained by where our feet can take us and where our bums are planted at home. 

Also, it’s hard to believe if you haven’t seen it, but just getting into a car peaceably in our family can feel like a holy act of God.  The boys seem to have electromagnetic fields around them that consistently draw them into one another and then violently repel them apart.  As we walk down the street, I am often positioning myself between the boys for fear of an imminent zap.  We see this shocking script play out again and again as daily routine.  There is the buzz of charged magnetism, the arc of electrical current, a violent discharge of energy, and then a glowing-hot fallout to manage.  This is our current life, the biting current flowing through our days.  We’re almost used to it.  I’m not sure that’s healthy, but, surely it’s temporary.  Or so I tell myself.

In this highly charged atmosphere, you can imagine, car rides aren’t fun.  I sit in the hump seat in the back of the car on most of our family road trips, a buffer to these cuttingly charged collisions.  (Except in Turkey, where we had an automatic… then my partner manned the hump station part of the way.)  Anyway, my point is, even if I was up to getting behind the wheel and repeatedly jerking my children’s vertebrae as I kill the engine on the narrow inclines of our stone-walled neighbourhood while Macedonian drivers impatiently lined up behind us, there might be a bloody cage fight happening in the backseat as I did.  So, maybe now isn’t the time for action.

And, that’s sort of my point, the subject of my present reflection.  Despite being a great proponent of acting with boldness in one’s life, any given “now” isn’t necessarily the time for all actions. And, I’ve realised it is my work as an advancing human to navigate this concept along this rare stretch of long-term family travel.  As the Turn, Turn, Turn lyrics go and Ecclesiastes 3:1, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.”  Now is not the time for many purposes, I’m finding out.  And accepting this fact is part of my learning on this trip. 

There is a lot we “do not do” these days.  Things I want to do but can’t.  All parents suffer this adjustment when they have kids, letting go of all the easy things they once did, all the adult things that are now impossible.  Then you slowly get it all back as the kids grow up, right?  Well, there are still some of these normal-range “do not dos,” like wine-tasting cruises and such, but there is also a lot that we “should be able to do” at this stage but cannot because of the inner struggles our family carries.  Accepting what we are incapable of doing can be a real challenge to achieve without burying resentment along with our unfruited aspirations.  I’m trying to keep the junk out from under the rug on this front, to keep in mind all that we are doing, instead.  It takes some self-talk to accept our limits with honesty and grace.

“That’s not who we are right now,” is something I frequently say to myself.  When we pass an alluring sign pointing to a ruin we could spontaneously explore,  when we spot the perfect table at a seaside café, when we see the ad for an audio guide at a museum, I say to myself, “Nope.  Not this round.  That’s not who we are right now.”  There’s a lot we aren’t doing these days.  And I’m working on being okay with that.  “Know thy self,” Socrates said. “Know thy children,” says the Gap Year mom/mum.

On an epic trip like this, I am grateful for my advanced age (45) for this reason.  Daily, I am thankful to have lived long enough not to be plagued by the FOMO phenomenon.  This fairly new-to-me expression is an acronym for the Fear Of Missing Out- the fear of all we “do not do.”  It’s a modern development, I think, or, at least, it has been made much more pervasive thanks to the internet.  Social media shows us all the edited bite-sized beauty other people are living and makes us feel our lives are falling short.  We are missing out.  It’s an awful thief of satisfaction, one of the great plagues of modern-life. It is wreaking havoc in the minds of our youth, in particular.  Seeing so many curated images of other people’s worlds can leave an unquenchable thirst in the midst of a totally blessed and fulfilled life.  Such a shame to live in paradise and lounge in the hammock of lack. We all do it a bit.

This trend of FOMO experience is also fed, I think, by the sickening abundance of options available to us in so many realms of modern existence.  Netflix browsing, the online shopping scroll, eBook selection, wine purchasing, holiday planning- such an abundant array of options is available to us.  Even when we have made our choice, we can still be haunted by the selections not chosen, our elected course tainted by all the paths not taken. It’s an effect of our spoilt-for-choice culture.  Satisfaction has become accursedly evasive for so many of us.  It reeks of a warning.  Human civilisation may be climbing too high, expanding too far, digging too deep.  So high, so far, and so deep that we may soon meet our demise, I’m afraid.  (I’m a bit of a fatalist… but in the way that makes one “seize the day,” you know?  The cheerful fatalist. The bold kind.)

Luckily, I don’t harbour this FOMO often.  And neither does my partner.  If we did, we’d be suffering big time. I guess this disposition comes from the many gifts of being midlife.  First, before we had kids, we had both already done a great deal of dopamine indulgence.  We had lived as we wanted for a nice long time. This is the beauty of having kids later in life- lots of satiated whims to bolster one’s life-satisfaction through the hard miles of parenting.  We enjoyed those fancy free days, but, I must admit, we both feel the piper we now pay is quite the greedy extortionist.  Regardless, there is a gift in this.  “Seeing and doing it all” is not our aim.  “We’ll see what we see,” is the more appropriate motto for this season.  There is a very middle-aged calm to our approach, much more chill than my FOMO twenty-something self.      

Secondly, presumptuous or not, we are young enough to have confidence that days lie ahead which will afford us more opportunities for light-hearted adventure and pursuits of curiosity, days without the demands of little growing humans.  All that we “do not do” now may be done down the road if we really want to.  Maybe we won’t do it exactly, but something equally as cool is very possible.  This too bolsters our satisfaction with the current state of affairs.  Time is on our side.  We will just assume so, anyway.

Finally, at a certain point in life, we all have to realise that we cannot do it all or see it all.  Ever.  It’s an impossibility.  You realise that the list of wants is ever-regenerating, no matter how gung-ho you are.  You see that all you really have is what you have “now,” what is right in front of you… in whatever state it presents itself.  Claim it.  Own it.  Savour it.  Love it for what it is.  Or do not… at the peril of wasting your one life.  You’ll never be able to do it all or see it all.  You will always be missing out. No human is granted enough time in life to experience all there is to know in this world. Not even the wealthiest among us can buy the time. You will miss out.  That is a certainty.  Arriving at this realisation is really a milestone of liberation. And I’m so glad to be here.  All we have is “now”- whatever that entails.  We must aim to harvest the good in every experience or go hungry at the feast.  I think I choose the wiser most days.

Now, the tricky bit is figuring out where to draw the line of action and inaction with kids in the mix. Those mini extraneous variables wielding such magnificent power on our paths, how do we take them into account as we calculate what to do and not to do?  It’s often an intuition thing, but it is usually quite complicated in the brain, as well.  For example, this past weekend.  Approaching this weekend, my partner and I had been bobbing up and down on the “do it”-“don’t do it” waves of indecision about whether we should run to Greece for the weekend or not.  I know, “run to Greece for the weekend”… is that really a question that requires pondering?  It is, actually.  On the one hand, we should take advantage of this proximity, only four hours by car, to check out all the Alexander the Great sites in Greek Macedonia.  On the other hand, this is our last weekend in North Macedonia before we will be hard-driving the little troops for six weeks of “fast travel.” Can these kids handle it?  Are we squandering limited resources of goodwill?  Will it be worth the money and effort if they are miserable and complaining the whole time?  It’s complicated.

We know we need to give these boys downtime as they aren’t exactly at the top of their emotional regulation game, but we also know, at the same time, we have to push them for their own good during this exceptional chapter of our lives.  We consider this balancing act a lot.  This is one of those conversations we have over and over again, my partner and I.  (Are all marriages like that?  Certain conversations run on glitchy repeat? Dialogue templates applied to countless scenarios?)  I mean, we want to be sensitive to their needs but not enabling of inertia. 

And, we know good and well that many of the things we are doing would not appeal to most kids if we offered them up as optional.  “Hey guys!  We’re going to drive four hours each way to see some ruins, some archaeology museums, and a necropolis.  You game?” I’m sure there are kids out there that would say, “Vamanos! Count me in!” but most kids would probably slouch down, roll eyes, and grumble something self-pitying and parentally reproachful.  That’s what our kids do, anyway, with varying flairs of bitterness, depending on the day and the dude.  (Mercifully, most proposed endeavours usually have one kid of our clan who is, at the very least, politely keen. They sometimes take pity on us and our chosen plight as historical and cultural cheerleaders-slash-drill-sergeants.  This is a promising quality each of them intermittently exhibits.)  In the end, we elected for action and went to Greece.  It was worth it.  It usually is.  Action is usually the right answer.

When it comes down to it, of course, how each of us chooses to play this tension of action and inaction in our lives is up to us.  It’s one of the greatest gifts of a privileged life, and we should all do whatever we damn well please with it.  We get to scribe our own story through the language of our doings and non-doings, and this is no one’s business but our own.  I try to remember, though, in the vast wilderness of life’s beckoning options, some of the most powerful doings we perform aren’t explicit.  The key sticks we shift aren’t overt.  Sometimes the shifting and action that actually matters the most to one’s story are those in the movements of the mind. 

According to Grand Wizard Google, a vehicle transmission is made of “gears that transfer power from the engine to the wheels for changes in speed, torque, and direction.”  And so too it is with power in our lives.  I didn’t learn how to work a manual transmission this month, but I think I grew cosier with the gears of my own brain.  Our lives, in the end, will be determined by our ability to recognise the need to downshift, upshift or brake, to smoothly redirect the speed and torque of our intention, to respond (not react) to the ever-changing terrain and traffic conditions of our lives, and to grease the gears of transmission with gratitude and grace.  Our lives are the result of the power transferred from the engine of the mind to the wheels of choice. Power. We have a lot of it. More than we usually claim. And, we can be on automatic or manual when we direct it. Familiarity with our gears and a dedication to the refinement of their use is key to a wakeful life.

Stick Shift.  It wasn’t what I’d expected, but I now understand why it popped. I’ll end this requiem for “the things we do not do” with one of my favourite touchpoints of guidance, a quote from a fellow Missourian.

”Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the things you did do.”  – (attributed to) Mark Twain

Here are some of the things we did do…