An Ongoing Experiment in Living Large

(This is Chapter II of the Living Large Chronicles. Read Chapter I here.)

Exploring the prospect of living in a new place is one of the offshoots of my resolve not to shrink my life as I grow older.

I want to live large. I know that in contemporary use the language of living large has been appropriated for economic signalling, used to connote living with material abundance. Such a waste. I hereby reclaim living large to mean an open way of being in the world that makes room for more. More in knowledge and understanding, in contribution and vocation, in relationship with God and with others. Living expansively. Something akin to what I heard them call Great-Souled Living on the Imagination Redeemed Podcast. Yes, that.

But: I don’t want to glorify the novelty of uprooting oneself at the expense of holding steady over time and remaining deeply rooted in one place. It is possible to live an expansive life right in one’s back yard, gazing in wonder at the stars, and, conversely, a hemmed in, hollowed out one on a ship in a far away place, seeing only huge balls of flaming gas. The point is not moving, it is refusing to shrink.

So: here I am, in the prospective new place, on a reconnaissance trip. Boots on the ground to test a possible new life. Can a fact finding venture such as this be a form of spiritual practice? I have recently read excerpts from Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World for a class I’m taking. He rejects as false the partitions we erect between the sacred and the secular, advocating for receiving the whole world as a gift from God and living our lives in their entirety as communion with God. Seeing every common bush afire with God, Elizabeth Barrett Browning might say. In such a world, even something so logistics-laden as a reconnaissance trip can be a form of spiritual practice if we choose for it to be so. This is the orientation with which I want to move through the world.

It enchants everything. It enlivens even the most banal of things.

Could I live here? Where exactly would I live? What would I do here? How does all this fit into my unfolding story and how, conversely, do I fit into the evolving story of this place?

Although I have been here before, this feels different, perhaps because I am looking at it through a different set of eyes. I am mulling on, rather than brushing past the frictions. Like how the cold can sting even when the sun is out and the sky clear. Like the card machine on the Whippet bus that outrightly and repeatedly rejects my credit card. Ending up in Cambourne because I missed my stop. The cost of everyday things. The way I’m spending an inordinate amount of time nose buried in maps. Not being fluent enough in the nuances of the place to know whether the asking rent for a place is a steal or a theft. Feeling unmoored.

I am paying attention to the random acts of kindness too. Like when I was on the bus the week before last. It had no Passenger Information Display up front, with a continuous scroll announcing where we were and where we were going, as other buses did. I was angsty because I did not want to miss my stop. Night was falling and the dark would complicate my navigation home. I asked the stranger next to me whether she knew the Vet Uni stop. No, she said. Then she whipped out her phone, opened her map app, zoomed in, zoomed out and studied it intently, eyes narrowed, brow furrowed. Following which she turned and said to me, here’s what we’re going to do. Reader, we had become a we. And we did. We (mostly she) figured out where I needed to alight. We waved goodbye and that was that. I still don’t know her name, nor she, mine.

This is not the only act of random stranger kindness that I’ve experienced here and that’s an important data point about a place.

In Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata has a fascinating depiction of Keiko, the protagonist, who has worked in the same store for eighteen years. I barely use my head as the rules ingrained in me issue instructions directly to my body, Keiko says.

My Nairobi life has that short circuit. There’s a great deal that I can do on autopilot.

Here, though, I have to keep my head fully in gear, no time for coasting. This is one of my key observations to date: that just as I had predicted, being out of my comfort zone has forced me to be in a constant state of high alert. Sometimes I’m fully aware that I don’t know where I am going and that I have to keep my eyes up to figure out what street I’m on and where I need to turn next. Sometimes I know, but not enough to completely relax my brace.

I was recently put onto an essay by Jeffrey Snover where he rehashes a speech Microsoft’s Satya Nadella gave his senior team about leadership. He said they had two controls available to them in pursuit of the successful execution of a project: the clarity, energy and culture they gave their teams was one, and how they allocated their resources was the other.

On this particular life project, I am currently a team of one, but I found what he had to say about resource allocation illuminating. The imperative for achieving extraordinary success, he said, was to allocate resources ahead of conventional wisdom. That is, attempting to make accurate predictions about what will matter in the future ahead of the pack. That, of course, calls for boldness and significantly increases the risk of failure. Nadella, well aware of this, gave his top executives permission to fail on one condition: they had to be intellectually honest.

And what does being intellectually honest look like? Four things, he said: you have to have a plausible theory of success in the pursuit of your goal; you have to allocate resources in line with that theory of success; you have to monitor your theory, and you have to pivot as soon as it becomes clear to you that your existing theory of success is implausible.

This, Snover proposes, is the architecture of success.

I’m on a somewhat different journey than the mammoth technology company that is Microsoft, but I find that this basic framework resonates. It could serve as an architecture for intellectual discernment too.

The current life project I’m undertaking is to define and build a good life for myself for this season in my life. I’m in the exploration phase, clear about the two overarching questions I want to answer for myself: a) can I make a good life here and b) do I want to?

To answer the question of whether I can make a good life, I have to be clear about what makes a good life in general, and what makes a good life for me in particular. Which takes me back to Aristotle’s Eudaimonia, often translated into English as flourishing. Flourishing, Aristotle posited, could be achieved by living virtuously, exercising reason and fulfilling one’s potential.

It is the last item on this list that preoccupies me at the moment. My convoluted career journey notwithstanding, writing is where I have always sensed that gravitational pull of vocation which I now feel compelled to yield to or forever feel displaced in my own life. I don’t know how else to explain it except to say that when I write, I feel most at home with myself, most alive, and most in tune with God. It is where I think best and the means by which I discover what I think. I will always have multiple interests and pursuits, but writing is an overarching priority for this season and forward. Writing especially as a core spiritual practice, for the glory of the Giver in accord with Schmemann.

There are practical considerations, of course, as part of the day to day demands of this embodied life. I still need to figure out a way to keep a roof over my head and pay the bills in this emerging dispensation. There’s also the fact that this version of a good life is quite a pivot from the one I cultivated in the past decade and a half. What becomes of all the skills, knowledge, experience and networks I have built and accumulated? Do I just pack them away in boxes in the basement and forget about them? Relinquishing what I have a firm hold of in order to take hold of something else, no matter how much I want it, is complicated. That’s what I’m learning. That liminal space between letting go and taking hold is fraught with self-doubt. To calm my nerves I remind myself that if I have to do other things for practical reasons, I will do them, in service of, not in lieu of, writing.

For now, I’m living the experiment, collating and interpreting the data. I’m making overtures, meeting and talking to people, and visiting places. I have more clarity than a month ago, less clarity, I hope, than a month from now. I am trying to allocate my time and resources according to my theory of success and, at the same time, to treat the journey itself as spiritual practice.

And so we move.