By D.J. Reiter
I’ve written about death a lot lately. Some of that has been personal. Some of it has
been about remembrance. All of it has made me think about the people I love and what
I want to do with the time I have.
Lately, I keep coming back to the concept of an “Ordinary World,” especially the idea of
finding your way toward an everyday life you can recognize and inhabit again. After
weeks of writing about loss, those words feel like a way to begin writing about living.
The everyday version. The one that involves groceries, work emails, school pickup, and
figuring out whether that noise the car is making needs immediate attention. The kind of
life I want is fairly ordinary.
I want work I can count on. I want to take care of my family. I want to pay the bills and
have something left. I want to enjoy a good afternoon without mentally reviewing
everything I should be doing instead. I would like an unexpected expense to be an
inconvenience. That last one feels like a pretty good definition of success.
Four decades in, I find myself thinking about what I expected this stage of life to feel
like. I knew there would be responsibilities. I knew raising a family would take work. I
understood, at least in theory, that a career could have uncertain stretches.
I still thought I would feel more settled. I imagined that years of working, learning,
making mistakes, and getting better at things would eventually add up to a little more
confidence about the next month. Maybe even the next year.
It is difficult to admit when your life doesn’t feel the way you thought it would by now.
Especially when you have things you are deeply grateful for. I love my family. I have
work I’m proud of. There are moments with my son that I wish I could keep exactly as
they are.
And I worry.
Sometimes those things happen within minutes of each other. I can be laughing with my
child and then remember an email I’m waiting for, a bill I need to deal with, or a question
about work that still has no answer.
The happiness is real. So is the worry. I wish I gave myself more permission to
acknowledge both.
When the country talks about affordability, the conversation usually comes with
numbers. Prices, wages, interest rates, employment reports. Those numbers matter.
They help explain what is happening and what might need to change.
But there is another part of the story that is harder to measure.
How much of your attention does it take to keep your household going?
How often do you have to make a phone call during work hours to resolve something
that should have been straightforward?
How much time do you spend considering a purchase you once would have made
without thinking?
And how much of that follows you into the parts of your life you most want to enjoy?
I think about being present with my family. I want to listen well. I want to have patience. I
want to be available for the small, meandering conversations that a four-year-old
considers urgent.
Those conversations matter to me.
I also know that being physically in the room doesn’t always mean I’ve brought my full
attention with me. Uncertainty can be distracting. So can the feeling that there is always
one more thing I need to take care of before I can relax. I’m responsible for how I
respond to that. But I’m trying to understand it with a little less self-contempt. There is a
particular shame in believing you should be doing better.
You look at your age. Your experience. The effort you have put in. You think about the
people who depend on you. Then you see someone else announce a promotion, buy a
house, or take a vacation, and you begin making comparisons with information you
don’t actually have. You know your own bills. You don’t know theirs. You know the
conversation you had at your kitchen table. You don’t know what happened at theirs.
Still, it can be hard to resist the question: What am I doing wrong?
Sometimes there are useful answers. A choice to reconsider. A habit to change. A
conversation you have been avoiding. I have my share of those.
But there are also circumstances you cannot resolve by being harder on yourself. A gap
between jobs. A rising expense. A family responsibility that takes more time or money
than you expected. Acknowledging those circumstances helps you see what you can
actually do next. Shame mostly makes it harder to ask for help. Where is the life that I
recognize?
I hear something in it now about letting go of the life I assumed I would have figured out
by this age. I can spend so much time measuring the present against that expectation
that I fail to notice what deserves my attention today.
There is sadness in accepting that some things haven’t worked out the way I hoped.
There is also relief in admitting that I’m still learning how to do this.
I don’t have to pretend I’m settled to take the next step.
I can’t speak for what everyone wants. My own ambitions have become easier to
describe.
I want enough stability to make plans.
I want to occasionally say yes to something enjoyable without conducting a financial
review.
I want to finish a day feeling that I had something left to give the people I love.And I
want to feel comfortable saying when things are hard, without immediately following it
with an apology or a list of reasons I shouldn’t complain.
Maybe that is a place where we can be more useful to one another.
We can suggest a less expensive way to get together.
We can pass along a work opportunity.
We can hear “that’s outside my budget” without making someone explain further.
We can ask how a friend is doing and give them enough time to answer beyond “busy.”
None of that settles the larger questions about the cost of living. Those questions
deserve serious answers. But it can make the experience less lonely while we work
through them.
For my part, I’m trying to stop treating stability as an unimpressive ambition. I’m also
trying to stop postponing every moment of peace until I feel I’ve earned it by resolving
everything else.
There is a life I want to be available for. It includes my wife, my son, my friends, work
that matters to me, and a few hours I haven’t already promised to something else.
Some of that life needs work. Some of it is already here, asking for my attention.
My son has something to tell me. My wife has had a day I want to hear about. There is a
friend I’ve been meaning to call.
And as I try to make my way to an ordinary world, I will learn to survive and be present
for the parts of it I already have.
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