Finding a place to be

On place as a sense of belonging.

Today I visited a friend in her new house. She has rooted herself in a place where the landscape crumples and unfolds. The one-lane track to her home ripples through the not-quite-flat moorlands. Aside, ahead and behind, hills and edges rise, scratched with footpaths made from many wandering feet, etched with the demarcations of old dry-stone walls.

I rode the curves of the road, ascending towards the point where nude trees posed brazen against winter-stripped skies, then took a sharp right and descended across the rumble of the cattle grid into the cleavage of a valley. Partway there, a pelt of cold horizontal rain slashed across the land. The low sunlight illuminated each drop as they flew in front of my windscreen. Just as suddenly it ceased and a squat pillar of rainbow appeared, the arc itself sequestered in the smudge of gray cloud hovering low over the land.

My friend is a writer, keeper, and giver of myths and legends and, even before we began our long conversation about creativity and publishing, I thought: what an apt place for a wordsmith to place herself, this land that mimics the form of a first draft on paper, marked up, scrunched into peaks, discarded, retrieved and imperfectly smoothed out, touched with both tears of frustration and the beginnings of soaring beauty, bearing ideas that find their genesis in earlier generations.

Even as the tea was being brewed and the chocolate biscuits being proffered, our conversation turned to place. At first, we remembered the geographic moves we have had - she many more than me - and the renovations we have made to properties. The amorphous times between our in-person meetings were given shape by tagging locations to events. “Of course! It was Edinburgh where I stayed in your rented flat!” “No, that visit was my first house so it must have been 1999.” Soon we began to explore the idea of place more psychologically; place in the sense of a creative standpoint, place in the form of belonging, authority, and contentedness. Place as less a static location and more a sense of fulfilling an internal vocation, as the experience of standing firm in the knowledge that you are doing your life’s true work.

As it happens my friend, her husband and I have all found ourselves leaving a career to start again in a different place, One of us shifted a career in a new direction, moving through different professional vistas before carving out a niche in which to flourish, one of us had a planned retirement and later found a new love to embrace, and one of us crashed and burned and was flung unexpectedly into a new situation, forced to scrabble for purchase. All three of us experienced upheaving change and a form of struggle. All three of us found a home in the land of words - writing and/or linguistic studies - yet the architecture of our lives is uniquely expressive of our own personalities and gifts.

I lingered with them, maybe a little longer than I should have, beguiled by the sense of having found a place, a company, in which I was entirely myself, not seduced into any form of conformation, yet mirrored in my own quirky delights. I sat, discussing literary agents and the grammatical structure of Hebrew verbs. Their rescue collie snuggled against my leg and licked my wrist below the table. I was in a strange house, meeting my friend’s spouse for the first time, yet wholly, completely at home.

Maybe ten days ago I had a fleeting sensation that crossed my bones as I went to sit at my writing desk. The chair I have there is an expensive ergonomic one. It originated in an old court building that was being closed and I rescued it from a skip. Sometimes it feels like it has been imprinted with the sounds of litigation which now echo in my office even as I have dismantled almost everything else from my former career.

That day I pulled the chair up to my desk to play with words and I had the feeling of pulling myself up with it. It was a moment of instinctive mental preparation for an event that was not going to happen but which had happened many times before when I sat on that chair in a different place at a different time. It was a casting onto myself the mantle of professionalism, a cloak of invisibility that disguised me as an individual and clothed me with the authority of a Judge. For less than a second, as the castors scootched across the laminate, I took on again the vulnerability, isolation, and responsibility. As the chair moved to the desk I felt myself prepare to take my place in a system.

The moment dissipated almost at once. As soon as I realized what was happening the knowledge burst the bubble of unconscious regression. I was left with a damp absence, the ghosting of a role I knew how to inhabit. I knew where I wasn’t anymore, but I didn’t quite yet know my place in this new creative life. I felt placeless.

In our first-half-of-life careers, most of us occupy a pre-formed place. We pull up a chair to a table that is already set with responsibilities described in a multi-page job description. Whether it’s a corporate job, a public service organisation or even the military, the role exists before we get there and we slot into it. Once there there may be some broadening or narrowing of the space, some squeezing or expanding of yourself to find more comfort in that place, but the essence is that we occupy other people’s needs and expectations for us.

With a move to a second-half-of-life focus on creativity comes the challenge of relocating ourselves to a world where we are encouraged to do our own thing and set roles no longer exist. Flying free is a wonderful thing but all birds eventually need a place to roost. The creative world can feel both wonderfully open and scarily closed. No one can stop you from making anything you like but neither can anyone guarantee you an audience or a market. No one can censor your creativity but gatekeepers still control galleries and publishing houses. How then do we find our new place, that space where we feel a settling, a recognition, an external matching of sensibilities with our internal ones? How do we find the precise spot where we feel both at rest and welcomed in the creative world?

I left my friends’ home and pondering that question, missed a turn and drove an unintentionally circuitous route, literally up hill and down dale. The irony was not lost on me; so often that’s what the last three years have felt like for me. I am in the right location generally but meandering, not unhappily so, but not yet rooted.

My friend has much to say about the importance of geographic place and she finds great meaning in her relationship with the physical land. Increasingly I too am coming to appreciate how much I now benefit from places with space and openness combined with solitude, despite my history as a city-loving girl. I am learning to accept that there are internal changes in me that make me not who I was before and which require me to recalibrate my sense of identity. That involves more than just relinquishing a job title, it requires the shedding of habit and routine and asks of me that I open up to newness and be willing to be surprised. It challenges me to see myself differently and to be prepared to change shape as I inhabit my potential.

Finding or creating the right physical spaces from which to create can be deeply supportive. Yet creativity is also location-independent. I loved my friend’s cosy study with its cubbies and warm-toned wallpaper, yet I am writing this in the driver’s seat of my car in the car park of a closed entertainment complex because if I return to the house and the people waiting there for me I will lose the immediacy of my thoughts.

In any event place for me is more than a coordinate on a map. To feel in ‘my’ place in the world is to be at the precise intersection where what I have to give meets what someone else needs. The form of place I am writing about here is a form of ethereal creative ‘Beit Knesset’ ( Hebrew: House of meeting), where I can form a connection with people I may never actually know.

The reality is that to slot into the place to which we truly belong, the place where we can have the greatest impact, we must first make ourselves into the shape that will fit into that place. The paradox is that this time around that place may not be wholly defined by the requirements of others. It may be created from the boundaries of our desires. And yet, still, we must ready ourselves to fit the life of which we dream.

An element of co-creation may be needed. Just as an architect needs engineers and builders and city planners to realise their plans, we may need to collaborate with other professionals - editors, framers, recording studio owners - to bring our creative endeavors to reality. We can, however, choose to remain the architects of our lives rather than buying off-the-rack plans. The process becomes one of call and response. We listen to the narrative of our dreams and also work to become the person being described in them. We construct what right now feel like castles in the sky and then by a process of both trust and steady action, become the people for whom they can be solid reality.

This takes time. Where, then is the place we should occupy while this construction is underway? Where is the safe shelter for this liminal time of becoming anew? I suggest not in the Beit Midrash (Place of learning) run by people who tout magical tools to help you inhabit a replica of their original success. Nor with people who explain how without the exact attributes they possess or the habits they adopt you are doomed to build only houses of straw.

Rather I recommend you camp out with people like my friends. People who say, ‘I will never walk the road you are on and I do not want you to walk mine, but I can support you by telling you what it is like to walk a road that is unlike anyone else’s.’ People who say not, “I (and only I) have what you need,” but rather, “You don’t need anything other than to expand what you already are inside.” People who don’t sell you their used plans for their place in the world but who offer you a guestroom while you create your own.

Shalom,

Helen

---