when friends leave

It was towards the end of dinner with friends who’d cooked a roast vegetable pasta dish to thank me for looking after their stick insects while they were overseas. ‘Did you hear about those friends of yours’, asked David, ‘you know, the lawyer and her writer partner, who have moved to Sydney?’

‘Which friends?’ I asked, sifting through my mind and trying not to panic.

‘You don’t mean Anna and Zac, who’ve moved to France with their kids?’

‘No’, said David, ‘the ones in West Hobart with the pink camellia bush out the front.’

‘Oh’, I said, ‘That must be Sue and Tom. No, I hadn’t heard that. Just goes to show how out of touch I am.’

That night in bed, I flicked through my notebook to find the list that I made a month ago of friends who, just this year, have left Hobart. After adding Sue and Tom to the list, I counted up 12 names. ’12 friends’, I thought, trying not to make a big deal of it. ‘That’s a lot of friends to lose in one year in a place the size of Hobart’. I stared down at the list. Covid, I thought, had a lot to answer for.

But of course it wasn’t just Covid. Wherever you happen to live, change is real and inevitable, even when it’s unwelcome. Our lives are made up of so many moving parts that it’s impossible to ascribe one cause to the rippling changes that follow from one person putting one foot in front of the other; let alone if that person is part of a couple or family.

Not wanting to feel melancholy before sleep, I shut my notebook, opened up my book – Heather Havrilesky’s quietly brilliant ‘What If This Were Enough?’ – and, after reading an essay or two, found refuge in sleep.

Next morning, I opened my notebook to check that there really were 12 names on the list, and that the mass departure of friends hadn’t been a bad dream. But no, there they were, 12 names staring back from my lined notebook, and this even without including partners or adding my ex-husband to the list.

It wasn’t until evening, walking my dog on the beach, that I had enough headspace to think about this again. Why, with no warning, this sudden exodus? Did the friends who’d left Hobart know something about the place where I live that I don’t?

At the beginning of winter, when I drove Jodie home after dinner at my place, she told me that she’d been offered a new post in Sydney. I wished her well, knowing that it was the right thing for her, although not necessarily for her cats. When Anna – a magazine editor who commissioned 4 stories from me – and her family moved to Europe for her kids’ education, I congratulated her on a brave move. When Tessa, a friend who spent 2 years working for a bank from home, was lured to Brisbane for what we hope will be a dream job, I cooked her dinner before she left and told her, in a follow-up text, that good friends didn’t have to stay in touch. When Natalie gave up trying to make Hobart work for her, after a tricky death in her family, and moved to Eastern Europe (happily, if her Instagram posts are to be believed), I felt relieved that she’d found an existential answer to an impossible situation here. When Phoebe – my first yoga student and now firm friend – and her partner moved to Sydney to return to her roots in Balmain, leaving me with a peony bush which thankfully is thriving in a pot by my front door, I reassured her that she was doing the right thing. And when older ex-neighbours, Missy and Geoff, moved to the north of the state to build a modern house on the banks of a river, I asked them around for dinner so they could show me the plans of their new build.

Still, it’s been hard not to feel the loss of these friends, and four others. Especially when I go on to create a sub-list of friends who, during my marital separation, stayed loyal to James over me (though I vowed friends wouldn’t have to choose between us, some did anyway). I don’t blame anyone for this. It seems to be something that happens among friends in the confoundment that follows an unexpected break-up.

The departure of 12 friends from Hobart might matter less, I tell myself, if Hobart were a bigger place. Except that the sadness I feel, at friends leaving, really has little to do with the scale of the city I live in. Certainly, when Paul and I left London, a truly vast city, and then 8 years later Melbourne, another sprawling city, our friends at the time made it clear that our departure was their loss too.

None of us own our friends. We can’t make them like us any more than we can make them stay near us if they do. Not even a good friend makes life choices based on the impact their leaving-taking will have on us.

When I’m in a self-pitying mood, I can make the leave-taking of friends into a drama; with me, of course, at the middle of it. However, mostly I don’t do this. Mostly I don’t feel that I’ve been forsaken for better places, for better things. I know that life is more like standing on the shore, watching the tide come in or out, while boats sail past, than it is like standing at the front of an orchestra, wearing black and waving a baton. The fact of friends leaving for elsewhere seems tidal, a fact of life and not some paranoid conspiracy designed to leave me feeling friendless. Besides, I know that the various elsewheres that friends have left for aren’t better than the place I call home – and that I’m not just stuck here because this is where my kids and I happen to live and I’ve convinced myself I’ve put down roots.

Some people, I imagine, are never prey to doubts like mine. They stand on the seashore, alive to the comings and goings of the people they care about, without taking it personally. Or they stand at the front of the orchestra, gesturing to the strings at the side and bassoon at the back, shaping their life in their own image. However, I suspect that many of us stand between these two positions. We’re affected by the life choices that friends make, carrying around the impression they’ve made on our souls when they go. But we don’t let on about this, preferring to stay quiet; not wanting to get in anyone’s way and choosing to cheer from the sidelines. And we say, on hearing the news, ‘How exciting!’ without feeling anything like excitement ourselves.

A few days ago, something happened to jolt me out of my introspection. Just as I was worrying that life might be passing me by while I had my head down gardening, writing, cooking and teaching yoga, I received an email from the manager of the big yoga studio where I practice most days, and where I teach the odd class when a teacher can’t make it. For the last few weeks, I’ve hatched the idea that the truth – that I’m not a very good yoga teacher – had filtered through to the studio manager, and that this is why she hadn’t contacted me lately. But no, in the email, the manager asked if I could teach a regular class – 7am on Wednesdays – when the current teacher, who has far more experience than I’ll ever have, goes interstate. Registering the irony, that I was benefiting from this teacher leaving Hobart, I replied straight away to the manager and, in pressing Send, changed my own little world for the better.

on having enough time

“It’s not that there was a time when we could have everything; but there was a time before we had to commit ourselves and thus confront our losses.”

Keiran Setiya, Mid-Life

The strangest thing has been happening in my world. Most days, I have more time to play with. And it’s not just the result of the start of daylight saving. Because nowadays, fewer external demands to field, I feel as if I have more hours in my day.

I still drop everything when my son has a mountain bike accident (he is okay), or when I have a gardening accident (I’m okay), or when my daughter arrives unexpectedly (she always arrives unexpectedly, a human whirlwind). But still, in between having the dishwasher fixed and arranging to replace fences with three neighbours and teaching yoga and walking the dog and maintaining the house and garden and trying to write, I have tracts of time that simply weren’t there even a year ago.

When my kids were young, I had hardly any time to myself. As they got older, it was just weekends and school holidays and days when they were sick that I didn’t have enough time. Although, in those days, I anyway thought in terms of ‘we and us’ rather than ‘I and me’. (I didn’t ask myself whether I felt like going on a picnic, because it was we that went on it.)

These days, the pronouns are less clear. It’s not so obvious where ‘I’ start and ‘we’ ends. Everything and nothing has changed. Now that my daughter and ex-husband have left the house, and my son is planning a long voyage, the signposts have been flipped around to read backwards.

Having enough time is not the same as having too much time, which I don’t possess. Having enough time – after 25 years of not having enough of it, coinciding with my years of active mothering – is just that, enough.

Next month, I’ll have been writing this blog for ten years. Every fortnight or so, I’ve carved out time and space to write a post. I often find myself recommending starting a blog to new writers, to flex their writing muscles. ‘Just do it’, I urge, knowing how much more of a push they’ll need to start a blog than just these words. As I well know, it’s an act of temerity to make a demand on another person’s time by having them read a post on wordpress. And yet it is small acts of creativity like these that tell the world, and importantly oneself, that making sense of one’s place in it is a priority. Writing a blog is a tiny act of legitimation in the face of the overwhelming nature of life.

Yes, you need enough time in order to be creative, in even the smallest of ways. But it’s not just time that you need. You also need to find a medium that expresses what you care about most. For me, this medium is the written word, I think because it’s when I write that I affirm my life-long gut feeling that it’s the quality of our inner life that matters most.

I end where I began. It’s not that there was a time when I had everything I wanted. I’ve always been too lacking in confidence to even know what that would be. However, now that I have enough time, I‘m in a position to want what I have.

question

‘If someone took control of your life tomorrow, what is the first thing they would change?’

When I first stumbled on this question, by Atomic Habits author James Clear, I felt hooked by it. It seemed obvious that anyone stepping into my life, from the outside, would want to change something big before they even sat down and had a look around. This new broom would not stop at one significant change – like getting out of bed on time in the morning. My new CEO would look around at the lack of structure, up-and-down rate of productivity and hit-and-miss approach to my ‘big rocks’ and clap their hands in anticipation of all the sweeping changes to come.

A month has passed since I happened upon James Clear’s question. Since that time, I have been thinking and reading, not about motivation and getting things done, but about kindness and compassion – both of which have a very different trajectory to that of self-evaluation. Kindness and compassion are founded on a withholding of judgment, on a refusal to give one part of oneself the job of evaluating another part. Such that what seemed like a fantastic question a month ago (If someone took over my life tomorrow, what is the first thing they would change?) now reads like a recipe for mental illness. Why on earth, I ask myself, would I want to invite someone in that I don’t even know to do an audit of my days?

I’ve spent way too much of my life in conflict with myself. Looking back, I can see that much of this conflict was founded on my assumption that someone else – mother, father, conscience, therapist, supervisor, agent, editor, grown-up kids – was in a better position to know me than I was. Mostly this conflict wasn’t conscious. On the outside, I believed in democracy, feminism and free-will, just like everyone else I knew. But in times of insecurity, indecision and self-doubt, I fell back on the belief that someone else was better placed to advise me than I was.

Often this fantasy took the following form: if only I was more single-minded, self-directed and goal driven, I would feel less pulled about by the needs and demands of others. If only I could reach that quiet, still place that meditators speak of, all would become clear. However, I’ve never reached those sunlit uplands in any kind of reliable way – fleeting moments, enough to know they’re there, is all.

Lately I’ve been drawn, not to the sunlit uplands, but to the grassy lowlands. I know when I’ve reached them because, when I look around, I can see that my life is fine as it is. I don’t need to ask someone else to tell me what I should care about or what I should do, because I already know this for myself. I don’t have to keep striving onward and upward, because I’m already where I want to be.

Every night, before I open the book that I’m reading in bed, I open my notebook and write down in a loose column the main things I did that day. When my ex-husband left for Italy, I started this green notebook – a present from a niece – to make it clear to myself that the rest of my life was beginning and not ending. Although I rarely look back at my entries, I like having this record. Writing each entry helps me to let go of and say goodbye to my day. Opening this notebook is part of my evening ritual, a way of handing over my bag at the gates of sleep.

‘All the misery in life’, wrote Pema Chodron, ‘comes from the gap between how we would like things to be and how things actually are’. Without this gap – without this marshaling of one part of oneself to adjudicate over another part – most of our conflicts fall away. When we cease to call up the judging part of ourselves, the part that calls out our failings and ‘could do better’s, we are just as we are. Or, as military officers like to say once they’re done giving commands to their subordinates, ‘As you were’.