The Day I Surprised Myself

I always liked the part in American Beauty where Lester says, "It's a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself." For many years, I would remember that quote and ruminate on it and determine that I had never done much to surprise myself. I wasn't hard on myself about it. I just assumed it wasn't my personality. I thought myself careful and steady and I thought someone would have to at least be less wistful as a requirement to be surprising, most of all to themselves.

I surprised myself when I went to Europe. That place is painted with such overwhelming and uniformly romantic brushstrokes as a place that young people from the United States visit to grow or "discover themselves" or whatever. Wonky. Anyway, that is something like the experience I had there. It doesn't embarrass me. For a very long time, I shied away from stereotypical actions and behaviors for no good reason except as some sort of rebellious reflex. But, that is just so exceedingly silly. What really matters is that our experiences are genuine and are our own. Whether others have shared similar experiences does not matter. So, let that be a lesson if you are a young person - you should not align your thoughts or actions by any particular expectations of the world. You should simply align yourself to your own expectations.

The last few days I have been preoccupied with thinking about the summer of 2008. It does not come naturally to us to remember our mindset some time in the past. We cannot recreate the blindness that is the future. But there were days that summer where I was looking at apartments because there were just three of us living at the house and rent and utilities were expensive split three ways. It felt, I guess, like it was finally time to move on, and I am guessing that my idea of moving on was to change as little as possible. I'm not sure that's the same thing as the "path of least resistance" but maybe some people's actions simply construct an unwitting pattern where relative stasis helps to ensure comfort or happiness?

I nurtured a big ball of angst about moving out of Omaha all that previous winter and spring and when summer rolled around I was proud that I had come to the conclusion that everything I needed was in Omaha. Moving somewhere else would not magically bring exciting people or opportunities to myself; I would have to change myself to find those things, here or otherwise. And I did and do love Omaha and my single overwhelming emotion towards it then and now is affection. So sometime in late July of 2008 I was going to move into an apartment and stay healthy running or biking and going to the gym and working as a Product Manager at Avantas because of course all these things were a simple destiny.

On January 1st I flew to Chicago and from Chicago I flew overnight to Stockholm and in the early hours of the new day I sat in the international terminal at Stockholm - Arlanda International and looked out the window into the strange dark of the Scandinavian morning. It was 5:30 am and it wouldn't start to get light out until nine or so, by which time I would have taken the hour-long flight to Helsinki and wandered around the Helsinki airport and taken a bus to the downtown train station. But sitting there in the international terminal, I had my first meditation on how that moment was such a product of my ability to surprise myself and nothing else and I think that one of my initial reactions was, "what the hell have I done?", but of course that was simply a reflex that I had constructed unwittingly from all my wistful years of stasis.

I had been traveling for about a full twenty-four hours when I got off the train in Mikkeli and got into a car and rode the ten minutes through a quiet snowfall to my dorm and I was up most of the night, impossibly isolated and all I wanted to do was talk and in the absence of the chance, I went for a nighttime walk with Bon Iver. I think it just took the moment in the airport for me to internalize impossibility into what it really was, which was reality. I did many amazing things the next five months, but they all felt immediate and real and indeed it was the return to Omaha and a pattern like the one I had previously known that felt unreal.

There's a part in the song "Rocky Dennis' Farewell Song" by Jens Lekman where he says:

"I could sit and watch my life go by
Or I could take a tiny chance, 'cause
Someday I'll be stuck in some museum"

And I think that I have taken one step that I had to take and now I need to learn to become that person always, because I am living in Omaha and staying healthy biking and going to the gym and working as a Product Manager at Avantas, which is not a criticism, just an observation.