four years improvement

It isn’t the first time the question has been asked.  I suspect it was probably asked in 1792, and every nearly half a decade after that.  Is your life better than it was four years ago?  A perfectly reasonable question – and one I suspect we all contemplate whether or not it makes noise in the pundit carousel.

I spend a lot of time in the car these days, so I have time to think on that question.  I imagine my resolution is jaded by political sympathies… or maybe not.  Because, fact of the matter is, my resolution is actually anything but political.  And yet, very much political.

I know I had a different answer in 2008. I already determined the answer to that question on August 29, 2005.  My blood hasn’t simmered at quite the same temperature since January 20, 2009 so my answer this time around is different.  But… well, I’m also a much different person than I was four years ago.

I’m going to beg your indulgence here.  Because I’m typing these words on the restlessness that comes from a final dress and the prescribed remedy of a second-going-on-third glass of wine that I’ll allow because waking up at an early hour for said long hours in the car aren’t going to happen.  But the fact it is the night of a final dress, in the still rather rah rah afterglow of an Obama acceptance speech does put me back to four years ago.  A September that surprisingly molded my life in a way I never thought it would.

It was not a good September.  And yet… it was a great September.  A collision of life’s extremities.  Friendships burned and kinships forged.  A theater memory that is, in retrospect, both best and worst.  A time when I had a good look in the mirror and took a severe turn in life’s direction.

I type these words and think… hm, indulging the hyperbole of the Leonine dramatic.  And yet, really, it is one of those fixed points in my timeline that I hated going through but am actually really glad happened to set in motion so many subsequent events leading to my present life.

But… that’s all personal.  Maybe petty.  Maybe inconsequential to the bigger scheme of American humanity.  So why am I beginning this retrospect with the invocation of politics?  Because they did ask the question.  Am I in a better place than I was four years ago?  Yes.  Yes, I am.

The reason for that has very little to do with the points that came up in the speeches I heard on the radio as I drove home from rehearsal this week.  It has to do with me.  Choices I made.  To leave a theater.  To leave an apartment.  To write a novel.  To move back to my home part of the state.  To buy a hybrid.  To think about possibilities.  To let go.  To go back to theater.  To start writing another novel.  To question myself.  To heal.  To break.  To accept life’s failures.  To see the beauty of life’s regeneration. To pay attention to a larger picture.  To be alone.  To have dinner with friends.  The good, the bad, and the ugly all have made my journey in the four years since 2008 progressive.

All of those details are personal, unique to my experience… and choice to make progress.  And the way the last four years have gone, I do believe in that personal choice to achieve progress.  I have a line in this play I’m rehearsing about going out and buying a saxophone… “just on hope.”  Just doing it on hope.  I wrote…and published a novel in the last four years on that hope.

I can’t live off that book or that hope.  But I feel my life is a better one for following that hope.  I’m not stuck in that pissy, miserable place I was in September 2008.  And while I haven’t gained pecuniary wealth through the novel, the expansion of my life and friendships is phenomenal.

Does that wealth have anything to do with who is president?  I’m not really sure.  I can say that I haven't had anybody to dress up at Mardi Gras parties… not that I’ve hosted a Mardi Gras party since 2008… but I won’t deny that is something lacking in my life since a Republican presidency.  But, life is still pretty good in spite of that absence. And really, I don’t think life being better – or worse – really has anything to do with a president.  I think it is a personal choice, a personal determination to make use of the sour lemons handed to us.

I don’t know if this is a strong thesis of what is a worthier political side to support – but I would like to think this late night verbosity is more a suggestion that if we want life to be better in the four years to come, why look to the speech makers under the lights?  Why not look within ourselves?