Moving furniture
Hello,
So on Monday, a day before the final interviews, I drove to the National Arboretum by myself. I had spent the morning and the weekend before practicing questions with Ruairi and I needed to calm down. It was high noon, 23 degrees Celsius, and the arboretum was empty except for a few tourists near the colosseums. I drove deeper in, near the Dogwoods, and found a tree with a web of nice bulbous roots.
Anxiety has been a feature of my life for so long, like a piece of ugly, stinking furniture too heavy to move. I've mostly tried to work around it but I didn't want it to muck this opportunity up. Throughout this protracted process, I kept saying to friends: I want to emerge from this having learned something about something. Like how to fake myself into real confidence, how to define myself less through my work or how to "live the question." I didn't want it just to be nerves for nothing, which it so often is.
I wish now, looking back, I could say that that happened — that after a joust with anxiety, some cool sense of zen seeped in and I finally became stoic. But that'd be a lie. It was a slog. Every single day was a slog. I submitted my packet on February 25 and thought it'd just be a matter of weeks before interviews, but then Ukraine delayed things seemingly indefinitely. One of my friends who was applying for a similar job interviewed in April and found out she got it day-of. After that, it was just me left waiting. For weeks, that felt like all I was doing: waiting. I told myself repeatedly that I needed to recognize the potential and value of every day (my sister wrote in an all-caps message: "LIFE IS ALL AROUND YOU") but I couldn't will it. I worked and cleaned my house and went for walks but I was nervous almost constantly.
One of the few exceptions in the last three weeks was at the arboretum. When I got there, I set a mat down, read my notes, sipped coffee and... relaxed. I had taken the day off to prep and it was fun to lie under the sun when everyone else was at work. Being so close to the ground also changed the scope of my attention. I watched some bees pollinate; followed a thin green worm wriggle up a blade of grass and saw some dog paws slowly padding by followed by a walking stick and a pair of human legs. I was really happy and forgot to be anxious.
It was momentary; at 4pm, I had another interview practice session. But still, I hope those few hours helped me form new "neural pathways," as my therapist says. I hope there's now some kind of thread in my brain tying the dreadful feeling of anticipation with grass and birdsong. On Tuesday I interviewed and on Wednesday I wrote in my journal: "I'm sick to my stomach!!!"
On Thursday I reread this Rilke passage on patience — it barely registered.
You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it — but take whatever comes with great trust.
He goes on this tangent about sex then ends with:
Your solitude will be a hold and home for you even amid very unfamiliar conditions and from there you will find all your ways.
On Friday I got a call at 8:25 am saying that I'm going to be the Post's next Southeast Asia Bureau Chief. I've been dancing badly around my house and now I'm here. The plan is for me to move home to Singapore in July and (likely) move again to Bangkok in early 2023.
I'm really, really stoked. I have been dreaming of this job for so long. I'm also intimidated, worried about all the things I need to do to get my arms around the job and scared of failing, but these are feelings I'm putting off till next week. This weekend, I'm just going to steep in celebration with friends, yoga and food. I'm going to make it last as long as I can.
I don't know if this whole experience has left me any wiser. My only emotional insight, I think, is that it's actually really easy to live in the moment when the moment you've stumbled into happens to be just great. Yeah, even for me, this part isn't hard at all.
With joy,
Reb
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P/S: Don't share the news because it's not public quite yet. Love you guys!!!