Choosing to live in town here was, we thought, well-reasoned, yet all of the possible hitches to the plan have come to light, also just as expected. Does this mean that I didn't listen to my intuition and instead focused on my fears?
A couple of evenings back, I watched a Woody Allen movie a friend gave me before returning to Netflix, and saw two characters who embody such choosing in Christina Victoria Barcelona, though their choices have to do with whom to love rather than where to live. Christina finds it easier to say what she doesn't want and continually readjusts her thoughts according to her experiences. Vicki has rationally come to conclusions about whom to marry and live with and had committed herself to this person until she allowed herself to slip into Christina's mode of being for a while and experience a more passionate evolving of a relationship that then haunts her, even after she's married. I suppose that both, in the end, do not know what they want until after having experienced it. I can fully relate.
I am haunted by the choice I didn't make----that is, living in the woods in a more remote place rather than in this noisy and bright small-town with barking dogs, sirens, and the widows across the street with their bright porch lights (the better to scare away intruders, they think) blazing through our bedroom windows at night.
True, we have a big enough yard to have planted apple trees, satsumas, lemons, blueberries, and to continue to enjoy the lovely plum trees that produce prolifically already here. We just planted a little garden of raised beds and have put in a large herb bed. I've spotted the yard here and there with flowers and bulbs, so it's beginning to look playfully colorful. We can walk to the farmers' market and to everywhere else in town, not to mention to the rocky Pacific coast and its trecherous waves that our little newspaper's headlines all-too-frequently blare about yet another fisherman or careless beach-walker who turned his (no women yet!) back to the ocean and was killed. We can bike to the redwoods or the small college. I walk two blocks up our street for yoga on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
All so . . . civilized.
Which is why I tend to become restless and unsatisfied in so little time. I spin and spin my little deeds and then feel like I'm spinning my life away rather than living fully in the moment, rather than feeling truly connected. How easy it is to lose ourselves.
How difficult it is to make choices, in part because we cannot know everything in advance. We have to experience certain things in order to know, in our bodies, what is right for us. Guess this is why we humans can't seem to learn from history and the experiences of others.
