Change

Change like the sky
Like the leaves, like a butterfly

In moments of uncertainty, I try to remember our goal: to be comfortable anywhere. When I first wrote that down, some twenty years back, I meant places. I wanted to understand immigration and trains, taxis and busses in every country. I wanted to feel at home in any cluster of humans, to know how to get food with locals. I still do, though I’ve realized my requirement for other humans precludes some places. I’m interested in people, after all; I want to see and understand what we’ve built, who we are, and where we’re trying to go. I’ve always been this way, more interested in the swirl of the party than a specific moment, more interested in the variety of a city’s neighborhoods than in finding the perfect one. It’s why I loved biking across San Francisco, why I loved taking the train home to the suburbs in Tokyo, taking the train around China. It’s a type of fomo, born of wanting to know rather than wanting to do. It drives me to move, to travel, and to look around.

There’s another way to consider this desire, though. I’m trying to be comfortable in a wider variety of circumstances than I would default to. I’m trying to learn how to be myself, at home in my own beliefs and yet unattached to their origins. Those sentences feel inadequate as descriptions of the challenge: to be comfortable without a plan for the future. We’ve been working on it for years, since first leaving Houston to interview cities, since deciding to leave San Francisco and our career-first approach to life. Each time it’s taken effort, long conversations and faith in ourselves. It’s taken huge amounts of trust in each other, in our employability, in our network, in our ability to meet new people and develop new skills. We had to bet on our desire to learn and grow above all other things in order to move to Hong Kong with 9 bags and a cat in a cargo shipment. We had to trust that we had enough luck and enough privilege to survive.

To say that it has worked is to underestimate the effect of broadening our view of ourselves. We may have made less money, but not always. We may have worked on less interesting projects, but not always. And we have undeniably made more friends, learned more places, and made choices we would never have been able to prior. We have been through a flurry of jobs, we have been to countries not our own more frequently than we’d imagined, and we have built a family. None of these things felt likely in San Francisco. Mostly we have been ourselves in uncertain times. During the first months of the pandemic, after shoulder surgery and two startup crashes, we played ping pong outside together, free and unable to see the future.

Thus this month, with the future suddenly again unclear, our prospective paths untethered from any prior plan, I am breathing deep. I am trying to relax into uncertainty with a smile, knowing that every time prior that I’ve been able to do so life has changed for the better. I’m offering myself the space to write, to do yoga, and to talk to my friends. I’m trying to give this space to my colleagues in direct conversation and through my actions. I’m trying to be comfortable anywhere.

Would you walk forever in the light
To never learn the secret of the quiet night?

Quoted lyrics from Big Thief’s ‘Change’ from the 2022 album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You