Continental Divide

I live a double life.

More than once a month, I zip across three time zones and transmute into an alter ego.

My East Coast life and my West Coast life are about as opposite as two lives can be.  Sometimes I feel slightly schizophrenic.

Here’s an illustration: I’m East Coast now. It’s after 9:00 a.m., and I am lying in bed sipping my second cup of freshly ground coffee. (Thank you, Husband.) I slept in until almost 8:30, then had my Quiet Time and checked emails and schedules. Watched a little Today Show. (Hey, we’re empty nesters. Give me a break.)

If I were West Coast, it would have gone more like this: 6:45 a.m.: Wake up and stumble to kitchen (area) to make some instant coffee. Get back in bed, pick up my Bible and try to see the words through bleary eyes. Read three sentences. Phone buzzes with a text: “Mom, James is crying to come over. Ok?”  Thirty seconds later, my little buddy arrives at my back door, a whirlwind of activity and love and disruption and messes and total adorableness. I’m worn out by 9:00.

The circumstances of my double entities (identities) are different in almost every way.

East Coast, I drive down a long, winding road past other people’s Dream Houses to reach our own. It is on a wooded cul-de-sac. A couple of acres with a pretty pond in the back yard. Each house in the neighborhood occupies its own “space,” both positionally and existentially. We exist together in a state of perfect climate-controlled privacy. Several of my close friends live just down the street, but we don’t run into each other by accident. No one hears anyone else’s business. 

West Coast, we live very close together, in houses that are wide open to the (generally) perfect weather. No central heat or air needed there. (At least, not in 1925, when my little cottage was constructed. No prob until the heat records exceeded 105 a few days ago. Global warming.) Backyards adjoin so closely that every private conversation is heard by one and all. Every fight. Every intimate conversation.

Privacy is pretty much an unknown entity in an urban setting. If I try to take a nap in the afternoon when James does, I am invariably awakened after 10 minutes by screaming sirens or loud teenagers on the sidewalk a couple of feet from my open window. I feel exposed, vulnerable. A couple of times, the whole street's been cordoned off by a battalion of police accompanied by the Canine Unit. I see people looking in the windows as they walk by my tiny abode on the way to a concert or theatre performance. It’s life in a miniature fishbowl.

My West Coast bedroom is smaller than my East Coast closet, if that helps you get the picture.

East Coast, I have Help. (Thank you.)

West Coast, I (mostly) am The Help. Bumbling my way through a newly-necessitated domesticity that does not come easily or naturally. But one that is strangely fulfilling and satisfying nonetheless. As I’ve said, there’s nothing quite like the smell of little boy clothes drying in the sun on a line in the postage-stamp back yard.

West Coast Backyard

East Coast Backyard

East Coast, I jump in my car for each and every errand, mindless of issues like fuel consumption or traffic.

West Coast, I walk to the grocery store. To Starbucks. To the Farmer’s Market. To every restaurant at which I choose to eat.

Not only are the living conditions disparate, the alter egos don't even look alike. Different clothes for different coasts. In LA, anything goes. I walk around on the sidewalk in my pajamas most mornings, without getting a single funny look. East Coast, I have to tone the wardrobe down. In Los Angeles, it is not uncommon to see a 75-year-old woman in the parking lot of Trader Joe’s sporting leggings with a leopard-skin top that doesn’t cover her fanny. (With heels or boots.) I kid you not. I’ve tried to sneak a few pix because I knew that no one back home would believe it. In Georgia, I’m always asking myself, “Will this outfit embarrass my mother? Will she tell me I’m not dressing my age?” 

I’m even going to Talbot’s with her this week.

West Coast, I’m usually too tired to take care of myself. East Coast is all about self-maintenance. At home, I won’t go to the grocery store without at least a smidgen of makeup on. West Coast, there are days when I’m bold enough to let all the world gaze upon my unmasked beauty. (I do try to keep sunglasses on.) Unwashed hair in a clip, the same dirty t-shirt 3 days in a row… but who really cares? I don’t know any of these people. In Athens, I run into 4 or 5 acquaintances every time I try to dash in and grab a loaf of bread.

West Coast, I don’t have a social life.  East Coast, there are more people I want to get together with than there are days in which to do it. I feel lonely one place; stretched thin the other.

It’s funny.

The two lives appear on the surface to be as different as night and day. Looking only at external circumstances, people might be envious of one and pity the other. 

One life is definitely more physically demanding. There are fewer creature comforts. I have less time “for myself.” I don’t get to do what I want to do very often.

But.

I have discovered that life circumstances have absolutely nothing to do with my happiness quotient.

Nothing at all.

Zero.

Actually, I didn’t just discover this. I’ve known it for some time. But to live it out so vividly and experientially has provided a unique opportunity for spiritual growth.

Please listen, people.

This is important.

It really, really, really doesn’t matter where you live or what you do.

…What you have or don’t have.

…Whom you’re with or not with.

Living a contented… joyful… life is completely independent of all of these external matters.

Because I take myself with me wherever I go.

As you take yourself with you.

Although I would not have chosen this lifestyle, our family's circumstances have given me the gift of living extremely disparate lives in two very different places. Neither one is perfect. Fortunately, there are many things I love about both places and lives. I am blessed to be able to savor the richness to be found in each experience.

But I know, in ways I’ve never known before, that while happiness is not to be found on either coast…in one lifestyle or the other…

it may be achieved in either or both.

As long as I remember that my true home is neither.

Wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, I can retreat to that secret sweet spot of the spirit.

Christ in me.

That’s the only place I really fit in.

***************

“I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength.” (Phillipians 4:11-13)

East Coast Across-the-Street Neighbor's Fall Porch Decor

West Coast Across-the-Street Neighbor's Fall Porch Decor

Vive la difference!