It’s time to make a change

And this is where I get completely selfish— where I really, really take advantage of the fact that I am my own boss. It’s where I have one of those Ah-ha moments and realize that even though I think I am completely free, traveling around the country in my camper with my dog, carrying only as much as what fits in my box on wheels, I am still tied down by what my friend Jim calls “a compulsion for completion.”

The morning I left his and Stephanie’s Park Slope apartment in New York City, he asked me if I suffered from such a thing and I asked if that meant that I tried to complete things and he said yes, so I said yes, that I did try to finish whatever I started but he said that people with a compulsion to complete things do not try; they just do it. Every. Single. Time.

“When you don’t finish something, do you feel bad about it?” he asked.

And I said that I did, so he suggested I choose something with a low cost for not finishing it, and then try not finishing it, just to get used to the feeling.

I asked for an example.

“Like a state,” he said.

Because at the time, I happened to be devoting an awful lot of coverage to Maine. But then he felt bad for saying that, so he backed up and gave me an example from his life instead. When he was claustrophobic, he said, he made himself go spelunking, forcing himself to stay there until his heart rate slowed down, finally making himself get over his fear of small spaces. Or when he starts a book and has a hard time finishing it, he said, he will throw it away, just to get it out of his sight, so that he can stop feeling like he needs to finish it, which reminded me of the copy of The New Empire that I had seen sitting on his neighbor’s stoop for about the last two days and had almost picked up, just so that whoever had put it there could feel like someone else had wanted what clearly no one had actually wanted. And I was glad I had not picked it up, because that would have been one more thing to finish and the thing I am finding hardest to fit in right now is reading— especially books.

Anyhow, Jim’s advice was not to let the tendency control me. It was the product of my German genes and it had been passed down to him from his Indo-European ancestors, too, he said, and I should just be aware of any compulsions that try to control me, because they will make my life suck. And I took the advice to heart but I did not know what to do with it until three weeks later, which was this past Friday, when I met up with a friend, Liz, who I really barely knew but had met when she and her husband came to the island and stayed at our hotel my first year there, back when I was mostly trying to get my visa and the business paperwork approved and hating pretty much everything, though I apparently somehow gave her the impression that I was upbeat about the whole situation. That was 2008. But I knew that Liz lived in the D.C. area and that she was a painter, and I had been a fan of her Daily Paintings that she put on Facebook, though at some point I had stopped seeing them and did not think much about it, until she was sitting right in front of me at a bustling bistro in Old Town Alexandria, telling me about her process to stop painting those daily pieces of art.

A year and a half ago, you see, she stopped working at a residential architecture firm and started following her lifelong dream to paint. Then, it was November and December of last year and she and her husband were moving houses, so she was packing boxes instead of painting, but she was listening to her iPod a lot and just thinking about change, knowing that she needed to alter something with her technique to make it work better for her. Enter a Facebook Note that I wrote at about that time, talking about how I had finally decided to stop shilly-shallying around and devote myself to writing, and I linked to some of my favorite bloggers, one of them being Penelope Trunk, so Liz followed all those links and then became a huge fan of Trunk and read more of her stuff and kept reading her until earlier this year, when she says she stopped reading, because she had suddenly figured out what she needed to do. If she wanted to get into a gallery, she said, she needed to paint bigger, because her daily paintings were too small.

Of course, in our product-based society, this was hard to do, she said, because we like to hear the answer to the question: “What did you do today? How did you change the world?” But she prepared her husband to see some not-very-good work and just started working on canvases, scraping them down, starting over, scraping them down again, and starting over again, sometimes scratching five a month. By the end of February, she had been doing this for two months, she said, and she finally ended up with one she liked. Then she got her first gallery show in March. That led to another one in July. Then one in September and finally, a fourth one in New York later this month. And now, she said, she is working on an 18-by-24-inch piece, which is about three times bigger than her old daily still-lifes, and she is a good fraction of the way to finishing it, while a year ago, she would have been stalled by the monstrosity of the task. And this huge change all happened, she said, because she got over her fear of starting over.

And it clicked. I realized that my fear that was holding me back was related to skipping over anything in the chronicles of my project. With that, however, I was also fighting the fact that I do not have enough hours in the day to see people, and also drive where I need to drive, and also write down fairly detailed journals about what is happening, and also take photos, and then also edit them, and also take care of Rennie, and also take care of myself, and also plan my next stops down the line, and also do all that other stuff that takes up time, like e-mailing and eating and going to the bathroom, and then also write frequent, chronological posts about how I did this and that, and saw this person and that person, and thought this and thought that. Because writing to publish on here is a lot different from just writing daily notes as part of my material-gathering for an eventual book. It takes time to polish words and images.

And anytime you fight something as natural and immovable as time, bad things happen.

Many of you right now are probably going, “Duh. We were waiting for this to happen. Relax already.” But it took me a little longer to come to the conclusion that something had to give: either the content of the blog or the pace of the trip. That is: I had to let my words catch up with my travels by stopping somewhere with no people and just holing up to write for a week, or I had to let my words go. I have chosen the latter and I called it the selfish way earlier, because I view it as being in my best interest and not in the best interest of the people along the way. I would love to include a post about every single host who has made it possible to get to where I am now but I think it’s probably better to aim for that in the end, not right now, in the middle of it all, because if I take time out now, it will detract from that year that I am supposed to be devoting to making face-to-face contact with people.

It seems ironically fitting that on the day when we set all our clocks back an hour, I move things forward several weeks. That’s not to say that my adventures between Princeton and Washington, D.C. will not make it on the pages of this blog. They might in the form of a picture story, should I decide to just sum up a chunk of time in images. Or they might in the form of stories that eventually tie into later stories farther down the road, as happened today with my conversation with Jim— and as happens with any conversation, really, because although life itself might be chronological, the way that we process it is not.

So, as I alluded to earlier, my adventures of the last two weeks may not make it on here at all and will istead find their way into the book at the end of it all. Or maybe they will just be part of my private collection, quietly shaping my overall experience in a manner as subtle as that drop of water that helps carve a canyon out of a towering rock wall— you never saw it but you know it was there.