When I graduated from college, I hitchhiked several thousand miles, in wide loops around the Midwest, then out to Utah, then back. I then spent 12 months living in Kansas City at Jerusalem Farm. After a stint on my parents couch, I moved to Chicago, where I spent 14 months. Then I moved here, to Indianapolis, with Liz, where we've been for two and a half years.
At my first "real" job after Jerusalem Farm, I only made it 6 months before quitting. At my second job, I made it 15 months. I've just now hit 16 months working at The Sierra Club.
I enjoy new places: the joy of figuring out a new city, the challenge of meeting & bringing together new friends. New environments have been how I articulate the boundaries of my "self" grow in my self-identity. Being alone in a new city, figuring out what restaurants and grocery stores I want to visit, helps me re-assess my preferences and priorities. Introducing myself and forming new relationships helps me say "this is who I am! this is what I stand for!". This isn't a process of re-invention... just an audit; an opportunity to check in and make updates to my own self-perception.
My adult life, so far, has been full of short chapters. Exciting vignettes, full of newness and creativity and rapid learning, with frequent opportunities for assessment, growth, and re-alignment as described above. But coming out of the pandemic, I can now see my & Liz's life in Indianapolis stretching out ahead of us. And professionally, I find myself -- shockingly, unfamiliarly -- in a job that I have no desire to leave. Our apartment, my work, Liz's masters program, our friends, our neighborhood: all wonderful. No change needed. We've worked hard to build a fun, cute life... and we've succeeded.
But I'm struggling with this restlessness. I am turning each page of this book, and something in the back of my mind is expecting a chapter break... but the chapter keeps going. In a previous essay, I wrote about my & Liz's decision to stay in Indianapolis being accompanied by a sense of "existential rest", and that was true at the time... but now that I've been sitting around, I've been feeling a little itchy.
Without new contexts to explore, new people to meet, or new problems to solve, I am left without my mechanisms (or, maybe, my metrics) for growth and reflection. What can I do to stay interested in new things, apply myself to new problems? Grappling with this question explicitly for last few weeks and implicitly for the past few months has helped me realize the importance of having creative outlets in my life.
The outcome of all this is that, for the first time in my life, I'm starting to develop actual hobbies. I've picked up the new hobbies of playing disc golf (I'm very bad), and playing video games (also very bad): two things I've never done much of up until this point, but both of which I both enjoy immensely.
I've also been enjoying a renewed energy and love for activities I have more experience with. I've always been a big reader, but as I talked about in a previous essay, reading this year has transformed from something I do to be a responsible/pretentious citizen into something I do because I enjoy imagining and inhabiting different worlds. Exercise, too, was something I always did from a place of dissatisfaction with my body, and without any success of changing it; this year I got serious about regularly seeing a doctor (and psychologist), learned about different kinds of workouts and different kinds of muscle groups, and have been able to lose over 20 pounds since January. Coding, too, when I did it on nights and weekends in the past, was basically always just a form of working late; recently, though, I've picked up a new language -- Python -- which I'm enjoying immensely despite the fact that I'll likely never get paid to write it.
Investing time and energy into hobbies -- thinking of my free time in terms of "what could I do" instead of "what should I do" has been an unexpected way to practice self-love; to let myself be creative, instead of productive. These hobbies are the tool I use to overcome my restlessness, and practice my continual re-becoming while staying in the same place. Now that I've explored the city, found my friends, and found a rhythm at work, I am doing a deeper layer of exploration; spending time on, and with, myself. If exploring new places helps me draw my boundaries, staying in the same place for a long time is helping me start to add color inside those boundaries. It's something that I haven't had time for yet; a new, but fun, adjustment.
At my first "real" job after Jerusalem Farm, I only made it 6 months before quitting. At my second job, I made it 15 months. I've just now hit 16 months working at The Sierra Club.
I enjoy new places: the joy of figuring out a new city, the challenge of meeting & bringing together new friends. New environments have been how I articulate the boundaries of my "self" grow in my self-identity. Being alone in a new city, figuring out what restaurants and grocery stores I want to visit, helps me re-assess my preferences and priorities. Introducing myself and forming new relationships helps me say "this is who I am! this is what I stand for!". This isn't a process of re-invention... just an audit; an opportunity to check in and make updates to my own self-perception.
My adult life, so far, has been full of short chapters. Exciting vignettes, full of newness and creativity and rapid learning, with frequent opportunities for assessment, growth, and re-alignment as described above. But coming out of the pandemic, I can now see my & Liz's life in Indianapolis stretching out ahead of us. And professionally, I find myself -- shockingly, unfamiliarly -- in a job that I have no desire to leave. Our apartment, my work, Liz's masters program, our friends, our neighborhood: all wonderful. No change needed. We've worked hard to build a fun, cute life... and we've succeeded.
But I'm struggling with this restlessness. I am turning each page of this book, and something in the back of my mind is expecting a chapter break... but the chapter keeps going. In a previous essay, I wrote about my & Liz's decision to stay in Indianapolis being accompanied by a sense of "existential rest", and that was true at the time... but now that I've been sitting around, I've been feeling a little itchy.
Without new contexts to explore, new people to meet, or new problems to solve, I am left without my mechanisms (or, maybe, my metrics) for growth and reflection. What can I do to stay interested in new things, apply myself to new problems? Grappling with this question explicitly for last few weeks and implicitly for the past few months has helped me realize the importance of having creative outlets in my life.
The outcome of all this is that, for the first time in my life, I'm starting to develop actual hobbies. I've picked up the new hobbies of playing disc golf (I'm very bad), and playing video games (also very bad): two things I've never done much of up until this point, but both of which I both enjoy immensely.
I've also been enjoying a renewed energy and love for activities I have more experience with. I've always been a big reader, but as I talked about in a previous essay, reading this year has transformed from something I do to be a responsible/pretentious citizen into something I do because I enjoy imagining and inhabiting different worlds. Exercise, too, was something I always did from a place of dissatisfaction with my body, and without any success of changing it; this year I got serious about regularly seeing a doctor (and psychologist), learned about different kinds of workouts and different kinds of muscle groups, and have been able to lose over 20 pounds since January. Coding, too, when I did it on nights and weekends in the past, was basically always just a form of working late; recently, though, I've picked up a new language -- Python -- which I'm enjoying immensely despite the fact that I'll likely never get paid to write it.
Investing time and energy into hobbies -- thinking of my free time in terms of "what could I do" instead of "what should I do" has been an unexpected way to practice self-love; to let myself be creative, instead of productive. These hobbies are the tool I use to overcome my restlessness, and practice my continual re-becoming while staying in the same place. Now that I've explored the city, found my friends, and found a rhythm at work, I am doing a deeper layer of exploration; spending time on, and with, myself. If exploring new places helps me draw my boundaries, staying in the same place for a long time is helping me start to add color inside those boundaries. It's something that I haven't had time for yet; a new, but fun, adjustment.