So, before the pandemic hit, I signed up for one of those “Brushes and Brews” classes that our local arts council sponsored. It was at our local brew pub where you paint while drinking beer. Essentially, the more you paint, the more you drink and the more you drink, the better your painting looks.
It’s funny, but this is one of those things I’d think about doing when I was working full-time, but I’d never get around to doing. There were even those times when I’d start to put thought into action by paying for the class and then just not showing up because I was too tired, too busy, had too many commitments… you get the idea.
That’s one of the things I’ve had to learn to do as I’ve changed my life. I call it re-engaging. There’s the disengaging from the office stress, the long days and the constant noise that working with nearly 100 others causes. Then, there’s the re-engagement. It’s one-on-one, hand-to-hand combat with real life. It’s the “getting back out there” and learning to be a friend again, a sister again, a wife again… and most importantly, an interesting person again.
I’m not sure what happens to our natural curiosity as we age. Do we just get lazy? Is it just so much simpler to sit in front of the TV and live vicariously through the characters speaking at us?
When you first make this decision to change your life, your first instinct is to unplug and, in a lot of ways, you need to. For most of us, making the decision to live a more simple life often means taking a step back from the pinnacle of your career. This decision doesn’t necessarily come lightly. In many cases, you are giving up some sort of security – whether it be financial, professional, or emotional. You walk away from what you know and take up what you don’t. So, when you first arrive at I’ve Changed My Life Land, you tend to be exhausted, seeking quiet and needing a break. And there is also anxiety. Will this new venture even work out? Did I just make the biggest mistake of my life? Did they fill my job? Could I go back?
Eventually, exhaustion turns into well-rested. A few months of good sleep and a quieter environment starts to settle the soul deep down where the exhaustion was really hiding. The anxiety is still there – it seems to me like it takes at least a year to get comfortable with your new life – but it’s like healing from a loss. Sometimes, its very acute and seems as fresh as the day you turned in your resignation. Other times, you touch the wound and realize it doesn’t hurt anymore.
But once you get past exhaustion and anxiety begins to fade, you realize that you didn’t make this change to be a couch potato. And then other realizations set in. There really isn’t anything good on TV. You can go to the same stores day after day but their inventory doesn’t change daily. The house is actually clean. Your “to-do” list is manageable. And suddenly, you realize, that there is something more in you. It’s time to get past couch potato time.
Slowly, I see these changes happening in myself. My husband likes to do triathlons and when there’s not a pandemic, I enjoy going to the races on weekends. We get away and spend time together. He’s more relaxed when he’s thinking about a race than when he’s thinking about work. We have actually begun to use our annual park passes to the local state park and even did a few walks this winter and spring there.
And I have found myself getting interested in learning again. The Brushes and Brews are just a fun, easy night out. But, would I want to take a real painting class? Or learn to play the piano or guitar? What about a cooking class?
I am starting to explore my own curiosity again. I want to be creative and build new things. I want to learn and understand more. It’s almost as if my mind had triaged all of the messages coming at me when I was a CEO and the ones which were work-related got in first. Everything else either died waiting for my attention or moved on without me. Very slowly, these things are starting to come back.
After I had graduated from college and several times throughout my career, I wondered if I had majored in something else or gone to a different school, how would my life have been different? It seemed wistful… this idea that you could go back and redo what was already done. That I had gotten my proverbial bite at the apple and this was my course.
As I have moved into the second year of my transition to a more simple lifestyle, it’s slowly dawning on me that I didn’t only get one bite. That I actually had multiple opportunities before to grab another apple and try a different taste. It may have been more difficult back then, but I could have done it. But now, it’s easy to pick another apple from the tree. I just have to get off the couch, walk outside, climb the tree and pick the apple. Before that seemed impossible. I’d see the tree with the apples on it in the fading sunlight when I came home from work and think about “wouldn’t it have been nice if I had realized there were so many choices?” and never think about walking over and grabbing a new one. Now, I have left the couch, slid open the sliding glass doors and stepped outside. I’m still at the base of the tree contemplating the next apple and I have a good feeling I’m going to try more than one.
I think that the challenge for all of us is recapturing the curiosity we had as children. We gradually lose the ability to see anything else but the path we are currently on. When we think about ourselves, we think about what we do or what we need to do. We forget about what we could do.
Recently, in a spate of “Kondo-ing” my house, my husband and I decided to clean out our paint cabinet. Yes, it’s a real thing. We have a four-shelf paint cabinet and this is serious business. First, it was overflowing. Second, of course, was that I have a habit of just shoving supplies and paint cans back into whatever space they will fit and messing up his coordination of paint cans by room and supplies on a singular shelf only.
When we got to the section of wood stains, my husband commented that “we really didn’t need these anymore,” and asked when the last time we used them. Immediately, I sprang to preserve my little cache of stain.
“Those are for my projects,” I stated and he slightly raised a brow. Yep, hadn’t done projects in awhile. But it was the symbolism of those cans – back in the days when I used to do wood refinishing projects, my cache of stain was like a little personal store of possibilities. I swear I could spend half of a day in the paint and stain aisle of a home improvement store and not think a single second had been wasted.
Perhaps it was the stain cans that I successfully argued to preserve that prompted my enrollment in the Brushes and Brews class. Who knows? But as I keep exploring who I am and who I want to be, I realize that I don’t have to “be” anything. Instead, I can simply enjoy.
The Yuppie Homesteader 