The best thing about leaving places is starting again in new places.
Like Milwaukee, of all the cities in all the world, which was both the scene of Joe’s first interview post-military and my first trip to that city, because really who goes to Milwaukee, of all places.
It turns out I should. The downtown is cut in half by the Milwaukee River, and its downtown creeps up on the shores of Lake Michigan, a fact of which I had no idea until I was actually in the city. (For some reason I associated Milwaukee with the landlocked Midwest. Sorry geography.)
As we drove the downtown, with its high brick and gleaming buildings, with the seagulls crying overhead, it seemed as good a place as any to begin this new chapter in our lives, and as far as beginnings go, probably better than most.
So, while Joe stayed in one of those tall buildings surrounded by strangers in suits, I walked down and over the river, and along the river walk, in those cold, Midwestern winds that have been so much a part of my past, but are so long ago now I had forgotten them. The river, so much like Chicago, with the brown stone buildings on either side, and the lake, colder than Hawaii and bluer than Newfoundland’s. And then, back the other way to the lake, and unable to find a quick and easy path, I scrambled down some steep hills and across a highway to find the water, because the water has always seemed like home to me.
Allan Watts says, “The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
Which means, to me, that if something has lasted for a while and has had no visible change, it has none of the qualities of life, because life does not last. It is not static, or still, or stationary. Not our lives, nor the trees around us, or even the ground beneath our feet, as it opens up to receive rain and shrinks when it has none, as its grass dies in the cold winter and grows again in the spring.
The oceans stand forever, and the lakes between them, but even in them the waves change; they grow, shift, die down and rise again. It means that the flower that stops growing has started dying, and the duck that stops paddling has given up on life.
And sometimes, we long for permanence. Maybe then, it is a longing for another world, a longing for a world that is so unlike this one that is marked by change and death. And we take those longings, all of us, and we do different things with them at different times. Sometimes we take them in a small way, for an afternoon in bed with nothing but the solid warmth of the blankets. Or we crave something else that we have loved so long in our lives that it seems permanent…like pasta, or chocolate, or maybe an addiction or two. Because those things can seem permanent, can’t they?
And maybe we know people who resist all change in the world around them, who try to live the way they have always lived, in body, soul and spirit. And doesn’t that always feel wrong to us? Don’t we always wonder why they aren’t willing to move on? Can’t it manifest in weird ways, like the mother who refuses to stop treating her older child like a baby? Or the insistence in a friendship to relate to the person your friend was 10 years ago?
The parent/child bond is permanent, but the relationship within it is not. There are good days and bad days, and close decades and separate decades. And some friendships last a lifetime, but they are not the same throughout it. Someone changes the dynamic, someone changes the role. In fact, the instant someone refuses to change the relationship, it will start to crumble, because the people within the relationship change and if the relationship does not reflect that, it begins a slow wilting.
The fact is that all attempts to keep things the same will at some point start to feel unnatural, against the flow of the world and the way it is put together.
Life is marked by movement. Death is marked by stillness.
So we move. So we find life here, at the edges of our previous world, in these new places where we have not been before. In Milwaukee, of all places.
Norma Ely says
Dana don’t ever quit writing. I so look forward to your adventures. I pray God will give you a new life start that you all will love.prayers to you and your family in this transition period.
dananicoleboyer@gmail.com says
Thank you, Norma! For the encouragement and for reading. 🙂 Much love to you!