compass

Is intuition another word for fate? If we are paying attention, do we know what path it is we are already meant to follow? Is it true what Thoreau said about walking--that when the sounds of the outside world are silenced we have an inner compass that will take us where we need to go? Is that fate, this inner compass? Is it the same compass that directs us in our choices in life? 

"What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtile magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea."

How close are we to the past? Walking to the library today I was thinking that maybe there is no past--maybe everything is with us all the time. Maybe there is only a continuous present. Maybe everything we see and feel and experience gets simply archived, filed away for later use if it is useful and if we are paying attention. I can't make sense of why we remember some things and not others, why some things come back to us while others don't. Most days when I walk by Cipriani at 59th and 5th I can remember as if it were still August 2007 exactly what my belt felt like on my bony hips as I walked past the restaurant, asking Mike on the phone what I should wear to dinner there that evening. I can remember that exact moment, the precise words and tone of the conversation, can still feel my dress, the feel of it, the weather. But I can't feel what it was like, can't retrieve the emotional state of my past self who would ask such a question, who would care about the answer, especially from that person.

What if we could rewrite the past? No, that's not quite the question. The question is: if we could relive the past knowing what we know now, would we be *able* to rewrite the course of our lives? Is it possible, in other words, to rewrite our destiny, if destiny does indeed exist? I think about 2001 when everything in my life changed: I left Wellesley into a French question mark, my parents were in the middle of a massive divorce, I met F, had my first boyfriend, I became independent for the very first time and in a foreign country, September 11th happened, which marked the official end of my childhood and my feeling of safety in the world, our economy tumbled. The safety net I had never known existed, had never noticed and had always subconsciously taken for granted, suddenly vanished in a matter of a few minutes. The idea of home, of family, of country, of security--everything crumbled when the towers crumbled. As long as I live I will never ever forget that feeling, that physiological feeling of falling from a great height, even though my feet were firmly planted on the ground and I could not physically move under the weight of my shock and fear. I watched the live footage of people in the towers jumping from the flames, and felt that I was falling, too. I felt my skin bristle, my heart drop, my stomach sink. It has been 16 years and I can still summon the memory and the feeling that comes with it. 

My personal world and the broader world changed in a very small space of time. I had some premonition of all of this, yet how could I have? How could I have known that literally every reality I knew would change at that moment, were I not on some level attuned to a kind of inner compass, and were there no such thing as fate? Somewhere I still have the journal in which I recorded my August 2001 days in Normandy with F, in which I wrote that I suspected I would look back on that time as that last happiest moment of my life. The sound of the sea, the smell of late summer apples, the warm earth, the open windows of that old gray peugeot, the sun on my skin, the midnight blue tencel tank top. When a few days later I went to Michigan I fell sobbing on the carpet of my middle school and high school bedroom as I packed my suitcase for Miami, listening to the Beatles "Nothing's going change my world" because the certainty that my world would in fact change forever the second I walked out the door came from somewhere outside of myself and crushed me with its finality, its immovability. No evidence I had at the moment I was sobbing on the floor would explain why I felt that everything was about to change. There was no reason for me to believe that, yet I did. And indeed--less than a week later, September 11th happened, and everything changed in an instant, forever. I have found better and truer happiness since then, happiness I have found with Shiv, but what is true is that I will never again feel the innocent, pure, unfettered happiness that I felt in the summer of 2001: before fear of war, fear of my own president, fear of K being imprisoned, fear of my parents self-destructing as I watch helplessly. Those fears are all permanent fixtures of my mind now, in my thoughts every second of every day and night, following me even into my dreams, whereas they didn't even exist before 9/11/01. Yet somehow even in that brief moment of unfettered happiness in 2001, I knew something else--something darker--was coming. But how could I have known if it were not a destiny already written in the stars, so to speak? 

I was thinking this morning: what if she in 2001 had taken her settlement and socked it away in retirement accounts and savings, instead of hopping from house to house, to endless trainings, and making car purchases? What if she had simply put it away as she should have, used part of it as a downpayment on a reasonably priced apartment in Bal Harbor to live in full-time, a down payment on that apartment in Paris in the 6th arrondissement which she could have rented out for income and used for a vacation spot for herself, found a job in her field and started a PhD in nursing program that would together cover all her expenses and provide income as well as full health benefits, took care of her teeth and her health as she should, started seeing a psychologist, joined the Y and exercised every day, engaged in some hobbies that always interested her like learning Spanish, French, taking up painting, photography and singing again? She would have been at this point in time been more than financially secure, would have had a secure, beautiful and healthy place to live, would be more confident and happy about herself, would certainly through those activities met new friends and possibly a companion. Each of those things was within her grasp, each was a completely open opportunity to her, but she chose not to do any of them, instead invented barriers that nonetheless became very real because she could not surmount what she set in front of herself. So perhaps in truth she had no real choice. Maybe the truth is that none of those other options really ever did exist, even if it seems like they did. Maybe the path she has taken, the struggles she has invented for herself  were all part of her destiny: maybe it was her fate to follow this stressful and self-destructive path. But what if it hadn't been? Going back in time, changing the things I have mentioned, would she still have gotten cancer? Was the cancer a result of the stress, the insecurity, the toxic environment of southeastern Michigan? Was it something latent in her body that was waiting only for the correct and bad conditions to exist in order to produce itself? Or was that always going to be her destiny no matter what other decisions she had made? I wonder about this often, today especially, though of course it is a fairly pointless exercise. 

I think about it for myself, too. Would I still have found Shiv were I to go backward in time and do things differently? What if I had said "I love you" to B in that car in Miami in the spring of 2008, for example? We were driving to the airport at night after dinner on Lincoln Road with Noémie, his colleague and his boss's fiancée with whom--though I did not know it at the time--he was having a secret physical relationship, when somewhat out of nowhere, following a heavy silence between us as we drove down the highway, B declared that he loved me, that he had always loved me since we met in school, that I must have always known that even if he hadn't been free to say it before when he was with C, that he wanted to be with me, that he was thinking of asking to be transferred to Miami from Paris and would I consider moving there, too. I had waited for so long for B to tell me he loved me, had waited for so long for us to be at the same place at the same time, both single and wanting to be together: but then when all of those things coalesced, when he said what I had waited for 5 years to hear, it for some reason meant nothing to me, felt like absolutely nothing in my heart.  Every word he spoke sounded and felt empty, meaningless, like the lines of a script in which I was also playing a role. Perhaps some deeper part of my intuition might have picked up on his dishonesty and disloyalty, making it impossible for me to trust his words or motives on a deeper level, but really I don't see how I could have known those things about him at the time. He was so good at hiding all of the lies--even looking back now I can't really see any warning signs. What I felt acutely in the moment he made this declaration was my racing mind, a kind of automatic mental prodding telling me that I was hearing what I been wanting to hear, that the thing to do would be to respond immediately to him by telling him I loved him, too. 

But instead I said nothing. Literally nothing. I just looked at him, looked out the window, looked at him, looked out the window, kept my hands still and folded in my lap. I even know what dress I was wearing. Eventually he stopped talking and we continued on in silence. Even in that very moment I wondered why I could not and would not say anything. I did not stay silent out of fear or embarrassment, but because of something else. Some force inside me was greater than all of my frenzied thoughts and it clamped my vocal chords. I was consciously aware of the fact that I was letting the moment pass, and still I let it go without knowing why I was letting it slip by.  Now I wonder whether it was a kind of inner compass that was guiding me, the hand of destiny in a way--B was not my true north. He was not for me. We were not meant to be, so I would not take the opportunity to test a course with him even when the opportunity to do so was dropped in my lap. We spoke a number of times after that, in the year that followed Miami, before he finally told me that he had gotten Noémie pregnant and they were getting married, were being exiled by his boss and her former fiancé to Bosnia--he even asked me again to move to Miami with him on the phone--but the deepest part of the silence in the car on the highway in Miami was never broken between us again. It is even interesting to think now that someone who was such an important part of my life for 7 years is someone I will almost certainly never see or speak to again, and someone about whom I think very very rarely. 

I think I was always meant to find Shiv eventually, not B. Maybe that is why I knew it as soon as I met Shiv, maybe that is why none of the obstacles that have been placed in our path have ever felt insurmountable--because Shiv and I were always meant to be, even before we met. And maybe that instinct has been guiding me all along in other areas of my life as well. Maybe I have only made mistakes in life when I have not listened to it.