Elsewhere in the Future

Sometimes excitement is all we have, even when we don't yet know what purpose a person, place, or thing will serve in our lives.


Lately, however, my excitement has been severely tested.

I was not born an optimist. And I did not grow up surrounded by optimists. My father, for instance, can project every manner of calamity on the most innocuous of circumstances.


"We'll never make it!" is certainly an appropriate expression for when you are racing to Emerg because you are hemorrhaging from the place where your foot used to be attached to your ankle before it was severed by an errant lawn mower. But the same statement is over the top when you're looking for a parking spot nearest the supermarket doors early on a Tuesday morning when what's spread before you is a vast tract of concrete that resembles the Dust Bowl from the Depression era. But that's never stopped my father.


Being my father's daughter, I admit I share his hyperbolic tendencies, but I never really noticed them until my friend Jacline politely-but-wearily asked me, as we were flying home from a vacation together a few years back, if maybe I could try, once in a while, saying that I was "hungry" instead of "starving" or "sleepy" instead of "dead"?

It's not that I did not believe her when she suggested my language tends towards the dramatic, but I thought it appropriate to put the blame squarely on the shoulders on which it belongs -- my father's. In the car ride on the way home from the airport, my father confirmed his role as the cultivator of my fatalistic vocabulary. It was a hellishly hot August day when we pulled out of the sauna-like airport parking lot into the blistering sun when my father remarked, "winter is upon us." Jacline looked at me and I swear to god I actually heard a whole jackpot of pennies drop. It was a look that said there was no hope for me.


Had my own life not utterly disintegrated a few months earlier, she probably would have been right. But actual calamity changed my cynicism. Forever!

I won't go into the various trauma stories I've told a million times because, really, who cares. Calamities come and go. But what we make of them, the stories we tell, and how we choose to perceive our lives both then and now is what really colours our experience of it, both then and now.


I have spent the last eight years reading every self-help book ever published, and more Oprah magazines than I care to count (because admitting to even one is social suicide in my circles), not to mention talking to my therapist/guru/healer on the phone a few times a week when I could not sit with her in person, and running enough times that I am sure I have cumulatively completed more marathons than most Kenyans. What did all those years of reading and keening teach me? That calamity may happen, but that we are never out of hope, and there is always a way to make our lives worth living.


Depression runs in my family. My brothers and I could have easily surrendered our lives to it, but somehow each of us, by god only knows what grace, found a way to battle our inner "no way it can't be done because you are worthless and joy and fulfillment is for other people not you" with a stronger inner "what's the worst that can happen you may as well give it a try." Where my parents see the world as one big closed door, my brothers and I retained the childish belief that something just might be on the other side of that door. In our own idiosyncratic ways, we threw ourselves against our respective doors until they opened.


Since before my younger brother, Justin, could spell (which was around the time his son, Nicholas, learned to spell), he has longed to own a Porche. How to make the money to manifest that dream was the question. Like me, he was a poor student, so an MBA did not exactly present itself as remotely possible. But somehow he made it to and through university. He truly blossomed later at work. He knew he wanted to own his own company one day, although there was no precedent in our family for such lofty ambitions, so he focused all his energy on emulating his CEO, and volunteering for every company event to make himself seen, known, and indispensable. Today, he does own his own company (which has good and bad years), but, more importantly, last year he bought himself a Porche. An old one. And not the sexiest or most fine-tuned one. But it's his.


Andy, on the other hand, did not go to university but started working as a builder instead. Today, he has five guys working for him, has built himself two homes and, by all accounts, from the outside looking in, he has a great life. Yet building up his own business did not bring him joy. After a few years of depression, thinking he had screwed himself out of fulfillment by avoiding higher education, Andy finally found his nirvana elsewhere. He took flying lessons. His mood altered immediately. And in that state, he pushed the envelope of possibilities and decided to build himself a plane. This enterprise would cost far more money than he had, but he decided to do it anyway. And in the middle of the project, the money did come. And now he has a plane. Yesterday, Andy flew to Toronto from Ottawa to take Justin for a ride.


I grew up thinking I was not only dumb, but stupid. I strove for Cs and got them. But somehow I realized in my last year of high school that I had no fall-back skills, such as being able to make something I could sell. I didn't even know how to cook in those days. I somehow knew that in my case, if I did not go to university, my life would become a black hole of nothingness. In my last year of high school, I had to ask Jacline to teach me how to study (that's how long I've known her. Her role in shaping my life and teaching me optimism, which has carried me places I never thought I could go, is a whole other blog post).


When I was at art school, I lamented to my landlord/friend that I would never make it as an artist because the art world did not accept my particular style of painting, or my age, or my sex, or my whatever I thought "the art world" did not accept. In the space of a sneeze, he dismantled my ill-conceived belief system with two simple words, "who cares?" He didn't mean who cares about your dreams, he meant who cares what "they" think because there really is no they and the world is what we make of it. And even if there was a they, why on earth would I let them tell me how to live my best life? Especially when all around me, if I just looked, were examples of lives that found their level in all kinds of orthodox and unorthodox ways, and successfully, too.

Recently, I have taken an anthropological interest in the way the current economic-crisis rhetoric has taken hold of people I love. People with a job fear its loss, even if that loss may or may not be immanent. People who have lost their jobs fear for their futures, even though possible new jobs may be just around the corner. The common denominator here is that no one really knows anything about what the future holds. And that's always the case, in good times and in bad. I spent the whole of last year -- pre-economic downturn -- jobless. Then, when the news was reporting the worst-case scenarios for job losses, I got a job. With a non-profit no less, and at a time when all budgets are being slashed. I'm not saying it's not scary out there. I'm saying that I honestly believe there is opportunity all around us. We just need to shift our perspectives and paradigms.

Here's what not to do: my father spent the three weeks leading up to his fancy vacation in Italy last year worrying that his luggage would go missing in transit. And you know what? It did. It was missing for four days while he toured the Italian countryside, stuffing his face with one sumptuous meal after another. All his worrying did not prevent his luggage from getting lost. But if he'd had a different perspective on what is in our control and what isn't, he could have suffered only four days of so-called hell instead of including the three preceding weeks of hell, which were totally unnecessary.

I forget more times than I take a breath that living in the now and going forward with hope takes awareness and courage, which is why I often find myself frustrated and exhausted in the face of any kind of naysaying, overt or hinted. It's easy to sit around and blame the world for why you are not living the life you want, but no one is really holding us back, except us. Not even systems. And even if they were, we are still capable of living more fulfilling lives if just a notch above where we are now and within the worst of systems. I recently read an article about a political prisoner who was in solitary confinement for seven years (what about Mr. Mandela!) and used that time to develop all kinds of internal skills, such as optimism.



So instead of harshing on my optimism as you ask me why you should bother going on, much less try for something you don't believe you can achieve (read: deserve), can you please try to ask yourself instead, "why not?" I never thought I'd be a writer for a living and here I am. I never thought I'd go to grad school, never mind write an 80-page thesis filled with theory I not only understood but actually thoroughly enjoyed, but I did. I even got one grade higher than the smart girl (who also happened to be my nemesis), and the highest mark in the class. In grad school! How's that for a C student? And you know what, that A never brought me money or fame or a career in art or love. So all that worrying about it was as useless as spending two days moving a truckload of furniture and other personal stuff that would burn to a crisp two years later in my apartment fire.


We really can't know what the future holds, but we can at least smile on our way to it and assume it'll be pretty fucking good, because that way we are more than likely to contribute positively to its unfolding.

And remember, when something fails, it not only means you at least tried, but it also means another thing is coming round the corner. Because what other choice do you really have than to believe it will be great?