Phases

 Something that often bothers me is the way I go through phases.

One April I'm into gardening, out with my hands in the dirt every day, taking pictures, cataloguing and saving seeds, processing kale, troubleshooting the weird powder on the cherry tree's leaves, fantasizing about becoming a gardening guru who plants gardens for other people and teaches them the joys of growing their own food. 

Two months later, the thought of going outside and turning on the hose and plucking a few weeds makes me want to cry. I am done with gardening, I am done with anything related to the ground, I just want to walk in the woods and look at birds and read books about economic theory. 

Some things stay constant— if I skip my daily walk(s) I feel like I've lost part of myself, reading and writing have been part of my life for decades, and I've been employed at my teaching and seasonal job for the entirety of my adult life— but my focus, my driving passion, feels as slippery as soap in the bathtub, rocketing into another sphere before I can finish exploring one.

This is a problem when you write a public blog, however small the audience may be. There are still people who refer to me as "the world traveler" even though I haven't traveled anywhere new in years. There are people who still tag me in chicken memes because I owned chickens for a while, and people who ask if it's okay to throw away a plastic wrapper at my house because they have me stuck as the person obsessed with "zero waste."

Sometimes I beat myself up about my phases. After all, both the American Dream and a certain version of the Counter-Cultural Dream require hyperfocus: a corporate ladder to climb, or a driving passion that will side-hustle your life away as you race for your niche that will bring meaning to your life. I don't have to embrace either of these stories, but it's hard not to.

Sometimes I feel self-conscious about my phases. It feels awkward to be like, "Oh yeah, that thing that caused me to read nearly one hundred different books about it and sheet-mulch my entire yard and plant a dozen trees and grow several hundred pounds of food is just not really something that interests me right now." It feels like an embarrassment. It feels like I failed. It feels like maybe I didn't really love that thing in the first place.

All of these feelings are strapped tightly to the myth of progress, the myth of life as a line moving forward, a trajectory, a path up a mountain that squiggles and zigzags but never backtracks. "Life makes you bitter or better," the saying goes, end goals of a journey that plows forward whether you like it or not.

But this isn't the only way to view time. Or life. Or meaning. Or passion.

In the natural world, time is marked by phases. Phases of the moon. Phases of the seasons. Waxing and waning, sunlight and darkness, growing and resting. Circles. Patterns. Webs. Things that are, not things that will be. My ancient ancestors in northern Europe survived by living in circles and cycles: winter for huddling in and storytelling around the fire; summer for fishing in the sunshine and gorging on lingonberries; bonfires at every solstice and equinox to mark the growing and fading of the light. Rituals kept them grounded, kept them from forgetting what to do to survive and thrive in a world of brutal winters. They lived and breathed by the seasons in ways that I'll never be able to comprehend.

Remembering that this way of life existed— and still exists— for people is something I must return to again and again. Human beings are still not adapted to living in this artificially-lit, climate-controlled, divided-into-hours-and-seconds version of time. Phases and rhythms are much more natural, but we've forgotten how to exist there.

Am I saying that the linear view of time, the concept of progress forward, is bad? Of course not. It's my most intuitive way of thinking, one that helps me forge stories to make sense of my reality, like stringing pearls onto a thread. But it has flaws, and it's not the only way of thinking about time. 

Whenever I get frustrated at myself for dipping in and out of a phase, I try to be gentle with myself. I might circle back to the same interest someday (and I notice patterns of what triggers these returns, such as seasons or the media I consume), but even if I don't, the passion was still worth having. That moment is part of who I am, and it brought value to my life. And so I try to rest in the cycle of interests and passions and let myself just have phases. 

Phases are good. I have to remind myself that they are, but they are. So I hold out my hands and feel my way toward the things that create a spark in my heart, unapologetically, and with curiosity and joy. 

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