I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
My daily writing practice here gives structure to my mornings, and, more important, it allows me to locate myself in my unfolding life. Each day, constrained by the daily category (which often isn’t any constraint at all — as for Friday Flash, Saturday Reflections, and Monday Musings) I figure out what I’m thinking. More than that, I seek to bring in outside guidance from other thinkers, to expand my perspective on my world. It becomes a dialogue — my thoughts and the events of my life with other people, ones I contact via their writing.
My daily writing trains me to be attentive to the events and people in my life. It slows my reactions and allows me to respond with more wisdom, more empathy than I might otherwise.
Lately I’ve been thinking about authorship in two respects: authorship as writing — my daily blog posts, my newsletter articles, my eventual books — and authorship as choosing a life.
With my dad’s recent fall and stay in a skilled nursing facility for rehab, I’ve been faced with choices that have no right answer, only a variety of possibilities. Despite my wanting to determine once and for all that moving Kristy the dog to my house was the right thing, in fact, there were a variety of paths I, my dad, and my sisters might have chosen.
This shift in my thinking from considering that I must choose the right path and instead propose that I must choose the path that allows me to author the life I want for myself and my loved ones has come about partly because of my writing here and on my previous daily blog, The Reinvention Project.
Through the daily writing I started studying philosophical ideas, and found that it was the existentialists like Kierkegaard, Sartre, and de Beauvoir who most spoke to me. My entree was contemporary philosopher Ruth Chang, who has written about how we should choose courses of action that define us rather than simply weighing pros and cons, when a choice involves options that are on par.
For Kierkegaard, authorship of a life requires inner responsibility and taking spiritual risk. For Sartre, existence precedes essence — we make ourselves through our actions, we don’t arrive with a fixed nature or purpose. And in his philosophy authorship would bring together radical freedom and accountability for your choices. For de Beauvoir, you construct the self in context. You must resist oppression, reclaim subjectivity and redefine yourself. You author your life by refusing to be cast as an object in someone else’s story.
I keep writing about the (possibly temporary) rehoming of my dad’s dog Kristy at my house because it is such an earthquake in my life.
I had thought of getting a second dog, a companion for my dog Bo, but had I chosen one myself I would have been careful to choose one that was known to be good with cats.
Instead I find myself with a reactive poodle who has never seen a cat in her life, except ones outside that look like they are just as ripe for chasing and catching (and killing?) as the squirrels and bunnies she sees on her walks.
I have to make this work if my dad decides that he wants Kristy to stay with me instead of returning home to him. I don’t see any good alternative. This is not like taking in a foster dog who can go to a different household if they threaten the cats. This is not like adopting a dog I choose who doesn’t work out — again, I can rehome them. Rehoming my dad’s dog, though, is a step I would never want to take.
My life feels as thrown into an uproar as when I had a baby. I have the cats confined to my bedroom suite, where their litter box is and there are many pleasant sleeping options, with Kristy roaming the rest of the house. For two nights, I’ve slept in an upstairs guest room with Kristy in a crate. I’m so glad she’ll sleep in a crate, because this means moving her into my bedroom eventually can keep the cats safe. But she needs to be desensitized to them first.
Each day I’m allowing Kristy to get to know one of the cats and teaching her to look away and relax. Yesterday’s session was promising. She didn’t lunge or bark or whine at Jessie. I was able to get her attention as I walked her around on leash while Jessie cavorted on the kitchen counter (yes I allow my cats on the counter).
I write about integrating Kristy into my household here as I author how this experience turns out. I don’t have total control, of course, but I have a lot of control about how I choose to do this. And I can bring deep wells of determination and stamina to make it happen. That’s something I inherited from my dad. Both of us Tauruses, we were known in our family for being stubborn and purposeful. Now my dad has little physical stamina (I’m hoping he builds more soon, through physical therapy) but he still has plenty of personal stamina. He seems on board with Kristy’s rehoming even as his partner resists the need for it. He is supporting me in it with interest and financial help. I would do it without any pay, of course, but it’s helpful to have that.
I think there’s an element of courage in both our actions: my father facing up to his decline and his and his partner’s inability to care for the dog in the way she needs without putting themselves at risk, and myself in throwing my household into upheaval to take the dog in. At midlife, it’s so easy to get settled and comfortable in your lifestyle, what Gabriel Marcell calls crispation. When you’re building a family, things are always changin: you get pregnant, have babies, watch them grow and change and need different supports all the time. When you’re in your fifties, living in a house you’ve lived in a while, with pets you’re accustomed to, it’s not easy to take on big changes.
And writing is courageous too. I’ve written online for so long that it no longer feels all that courageous on a daily basis. But sharing difficult situations like rehoming my father’s dog does make me feel vulnerable and a bit exposed.
In The Courage to Create (1975) American existentialist psychologist Rollo May writes:
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.
Every day, I create myself through my writing and through my actions, each of these acts of authorship giving meaning and perspective to the other.