Every Possible Way
Hello from county Laois, Ireland,
I’m by myself on the second floor of a nondescript country house along a nondescript country road; Ruairi’s downstairs with grandma Ita, watching a gameshow; his uncle is in the next room watching rugby. It’s a little before 11 p.m. and the sun is only now going down.
Uncle Pat makes a cross every time we pass a church or a cemetery, which, here, in Ireland’s rural midlands, is often. He does it without thinking, one hand draped on the steering wheel, both eyes on the road. I looked away the first time I saw it happen because it seemed so private. But I realized soon that Pat’s entirely un-self-conscious about it; almost unaware that he’s doing it at all. It’s just who he is, as much a part of him as the hunch he has in his back from bending over so often; as much a part of his life — the only one he has — as this plot of land on the border of Laois and Carlow, where he was born, where limestone from the well water leaves chips of chalk in the kettle. Funny, dutiful, lonely; a devotee of the “simple life.” Stuck in his ways. Just who he is.
Maybe because I’ve been spending more time around old people or maybe because I’ve spent the last two weeks in Ireland where time feels like it’s slowed to half a pace — I’ve been thinking more about how people become themselves. How the curves and lines of a person’s “person-ness” become these deep, identifiable grooves. What they like and dislike; what brings them comfort; what draws their attention. The tangible things: What they work as and who they’re with.
So much of what I’ve been through so far has felt like becoming. Now is the first time I’m starting to see how I and the people around me might start to “be.” I don’t mean that we weren’t ourselves until this point or that we would ever settle into stodgy, unchanging blocks. I just mean that right now, it feels like broad strokes are being drawn that will preclude other, different strokes from being drawn. It’s exciting in spite of (because?) of what’s at stake.
When we’re older, say 63 or 97, the things we regret might trace their roots to now. The ways in which we are stuck might be the habits we start now. Just as we feel like our lives are expanding in dizzying new ways, they’re also getting firmer and less pliant.
“We have unlived lives for all sorts of reasons: because we make choices; because society constrains us; because events force our hand; most of all, because we are singular individuals, becoming more so with time. ‘While growth realizes, it narrows,’ Miller writes. ‘Plural possibilities simmer down.’ This is painful, but it’s an odd kind of pain—hypothetical, paradoxical. Even as we regret who we haven’t become, we value who we are. We seem to find meaning in what’s never happened. Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space.”
— “What If You Could Do It All Over?” by Joshua Rothman in the New Yorker
"Adolescence is supposed to be an identity Schrodinger's Cat: multiple simultaneous states which eventually collapse into only one. The goal of adulthood is to let go of the other possible existences and to make the best of the one. A successful adult is one who understands that it doesn't matter which life you ultimately pick, only that you live it well."
These excerpts remind me of a scene in the movie “Belfast” (2021) — a controversially romantic depiction of the city in the 1960s, just before the explosion of the Troubles. The Irish Times called it “black and white and rose-tinted all over.” Politics aside (I do recognize this isn’t actually possible with Belfast; when we visited a week ago, the city was pulsating with sectarian tension), I enjoyed the movie as a broader story on displacement. It follows a young boy, Buddy, growing up in the city as it gets more violent, and ends with his family of four leaving for good. As they board the bus out of Belfast, there’s a close-up shot of Buddy’s grandmother (Judi Dench), who is staying behind. She says directly into camera, “Go. And don’t look back.” This cuts to a shot of the bus leaving, then fades out into an epitaph: “For the ones who stayed. For the ones who left. And for the ones who were lost.”
Unsurprisingly, I bawled in the theater.
—
There’s not much to do in Laois, though our week here has been quite busy. We help out around the house, play with Pat’s kittens, meet visitors (“callers”), boil tea. There are two apple trees out in the yard that are just right for reading under. One day we went to mass. Another day, Pat, Ruairi and I hauled a mountain of bog turf (a soon-to-be banned heating source with devastating implications for the environment) into the garage. Afterwards we walked four miles to the nearest gas station for ice-cream, going in a single file along the side of highway. We took the back roads home, stopping at the stream Pat used to play in as a boy. Pat made fun of me for taking photos of cows so I walked away from him when I started to tear up at the sunset.
The other thing we’ve been doing to pass the time is talking to Ita. At 97, she has an almost perfect view of her life — the roads she took and at what cost. Ita, short for Margaret, has never left a 10, maybe 15-mile radius from where she was born. The initial assumption was that this was by choice. But while talking one day, she told me she’d always wanted to go to Wales, where a sister-in-law lived, and later, to America. But her late husband, Sean, liked to sleep in his own bed every night so they never traveled far. “Too late for me now,” she said.
Ita learned to ride a bicycle when she was a teenager (that’s in the 1930s) and was gifted a nice one when she was 20-something. She used it to bring herself around — plunking her two sons on the back when they were small children — until she became physically unable to cycle. She never learned to drive but loved being in a car, she said. She was happy when I told her I could drive; happy for me.
I remember Vijay used to say this in college but it seemed so much truer when he repeated it a few weeks ago in New York: We (the both of us and the people we know mutually) are some of the most privileged people to ever exist on earth. That’s across both space and time. Resources are part but not all of it; it’s also access — to information, opportunity, mobility — and agency. This is obviously no insulation from pain and no guarantee of happiness. Still, I keep thinking to myself: Neither one of my grandmothers can read or drive; neither one of them were ever paid wages for the work they’ve done; the work they do. I keep thinking about the shape of their lives.
There’s so much more about Pat, Ita and Ireland I want to share. Ita is incredible — sharp, inquisitive, mischievous. She draws people into her schemes, slags off the priest and rolls her eyes when friends on the phone are boring. Her hands are swollen and tender from arthritis, and she loves a chat but she’s going deaf. She hasn’t felt the same since Sean died 10 years ago. And she has no big regrets; “none.” She probably won’t ever see Wales.
It's by some astoundingly bizarre combination of factors that I was able to meet her and make her part of my life. I’m so glad.
—
Ruairi and I move to Singapore at the end of July. That’s in three weeks…!! It’s a ridiculous, hectic time. Lots of goodbyes, feelings I don’t know how to describe and paperwork I need to get to. I made a playlist: “Every Possible Way.” Title credit to "Dreams" by The Cranberries.
My life is changing everyday
In every possible way
And oh, my dreams
It's never quite as it seems
Never quite as it seems
(Yingtong said "Catch Me In the Air" by Rina Sawayama, which is on this playlist, made her feel like she was in a shampoo commercial.)
From a dimming room in the middle of Ireland,
Reb
A week ago, at our Airbnb in Dingle, my new favorite place in the world.
Earlier today on a walk with Ruairi to "Peregrine Corner," a pub that's been operating since the 1800s.
P/S: Back in DC now and drowning in what I can only call "logistics." Sorry if I don't text / call as often in the next two weeks. Will send a flare once we're settled in Singapore <3