Churning

Worry is a difficult emotion.  It's clearly future-referent, but it's also vague.  If we were worried about something in particular, then we'd be able to name it and develop plans.  But worry has to do with the fog of the future, about how we'll address something that isn't even fully formed. 

Nora and I have three competing desires that rotate against one another; that rotation and friction seems to produce the fog, just as churning the milk ultimately creates butter.

• We both want very much to live in Middletown Springs.  It's where our community lies, and it's the landscape we've come to know best.  We know that we can reach out to dozens of people for assistance, and that they wouldn't hesitate to reach out to us as well.
• We're both trained and accomplished in our professional fields, and take much pleasure in teaching and reading and writing. 
• We both are accustomed to a certain degree of physical and economic comfort.

There's an old truism in architecture and construction:  You can have it good; you can have it fast; you can have it cheap.  Pick two.  And it's true.  Good and fast costs a lot of money; good and cheap takes a lot of time; fast and cheap is poor quality.  We seem to have that same triangle in our concerns.  We both have the opportunities to practice our craft, but those opportunities lie in Boston and New York, not in Vermont.  Those opportunities can be lucrative, but only when they take us away from the work we do best and place us into supervisory or administrative roles.  We live in a terrific community, with no roles to fulfill that engage our professional skills or pay health insurance.

And so we churn.  It's funny that when we face specific and immediate problems, we figure out a way to address them — usually pretty quickly, and usually in mutual agreement.  But these less defined ones... those are the ones that keep us awake. 

I know this problem from writing.  When I don't know what the form of the piece is, I just endlessly rotate its elements in my mind, making no progress at all.  And eventually, as though by magic, some resolution presents itself, the pieces nearly fit, and all that's left is the craft of completing the project.  That writerly churning usually takes somewhere between a week and a few months, and it's always painful.  This one is taking longer.  I have to believe, from long experience, that a resolution will present itself here as well.

The British poet Fay Weldon once wrote, "Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens."  I'm not sure if we're on the first or the second nothing...