Subject to change

Comfort blanket certainty and RSVPing to your very own life

I still remember the first time I put someone on hold. Forced him into the Twilight Zone of teenage agony and embarrassment no doubt. I just needed a minute. The High School Formal was a pivotal life event. I’d heard whispers of his intentions to ask me at the beginning of lunch break, and so did what any self-respecting adolescent female who was perfectly happy with boys and romance remaining a largely imagination-based notion would do…..I ran to the bathrooms to hide.

Upon my reappearance to the ‘field’, I saw him making a beeline for me outside the R-Block building. The poor, brave young chap. His words were few: awkward and straight to the point. And in response, mine were unintentionally brutal: “Can I think about it?”

I was the last girl in my friend group - and possibly year group - to be asked, so reality was I didn’t actually have the luxury of being choosey. But that wasn’t really why I said it.

Tentatively Confirmed and Pending Confirmation are two code terms I see and use on a daily basis in my current line of work. Producing conferences often feels like planning your birthday party did. Or trying to get the group chat holiday out of the group chat. Lots of moving parts. Many hard maybes. But eventually, the ‘yeses’ appear and my spreadsheet can finally lose the highlighted yellow rows previously set to signal each speaker’s tenuous position of interest. They’re all in!

Until they’re not.

Until a child gets sick, or a more important meeting gets scheduled overtop, or leave gets booked and the calendar placeholder sent 4 months ago is blissfully overlooked.

But that’s the thing about free will and timing - we never actually know what’s ahead. For ourselves, and for others. It’s a miracle anything ever gets past a mutually collaborative finish line if you really think about it. As one friend in the midst of a relationship breakup said recently, “we can’t own people.”

I think that was what blew the whole school field formal proposal way out of proportion. It wasn’t about him not being a good enough formal partner. Not at all. But a fear I’d maybe change my mind if I was too locked in, and in doing so, hurt somebody who didn’t deserve it. Inconvenience their hard work and set vision. That, and there was a handsome French exchange student in the year above who was concurrently dateless that I had crafted a really fantastic mind-story around going with. Now, after my years of nomadic living and context shifts, I see this was perhaps an early hint. The way I seemed to thrive on things being not quite permanent, as surefire access to the rich and evasive fullness that comes from living completely in the present. In the opening page of my book I explained it as:

‘Feeling the notion of possibility without having to give up what is. To be gifted an adjunct storyline to edit into the pages whenever I’m feeling dull to the significance of my choices and career and selfhood. To know it’s there tucked away to deploy in conversation any time I need bolstering — the one that got away — the proof that I am someone who these kinds of things could and “almost did” happen to.
Consider how potential, possibility, presumption, changes how we wait. Suddenly everything that was a drag is sentimental— made enough. You’re moving on to the elusive? perceived? bigger and better so now feel inclined to see it for what it is.’

Travelling is absolutely a fast track to higher tolerance of uncertainty. You and your suitcase as your only tangible investments. The rest all depending on good faith in airlines, booking systems, strangers, and each new day arriving to greet you kindly. Empty space in the calendar is an asset - a masterclass in learning that sometimes the not-knowing can become more addictive than the knowing. Discussing our staunch reasons for life-long avoidance of dating apps recently, a close friend shared the most refreshing thing I’d heard in a long while. “I’d miss the mystery of it”, she said. That giddy hope-rollercoaster that takes off after you meet someone and feel more than just a generic like-ability. The preoccupation with when and how you might meet them again. Sleuthing for clues vis-à-vis anyone who knows them like a nosey journalist trying to get past a very important person’s Comms Representative. It’s the frisson she wants. The exact thing the bullseye aim of algorithmic certainty on match making platforms tends to bypass. She wants to sit in the not-quite-knowing.

Tentatively Confirmed.
Pending Confirmation.
Can I think about it?

Until she does.

By no means am I endorsing self-inflicted waiting periods, delayed decision making, or lukewarm behaviour in all of this. I’m aware a certain privilege allows for such a dreamy and fluid approach to life. But the ‘will-they-or-won’t-they’ stomach drop feeling I tend to get almost every day as I sit down to open my work emails just seems too akin to many of the recent life events I’ve been witnessing friends move through to not find some poetic meaning in it. Breakups, losses, big leaps and bounds, sudden clarity, and spontaneous swivels on the path. None of it is or was ever ours to begin with. Just these hours and this day, and what I’ve now come to practice as loyalty over commitment.

I’ve been so pleasantly ensconced in my little summer village lately - hence the while between words. Reviewing my months away I now have this strange sense of surrealism. Was that actually me? Was I actually there? Does that moment really belong to me, or did I just go there in my mind? My memory sometimes feels like a place so vivid and personal that distinguishing the difference between imagined reality and actual lived experience feels like an oxymoron. I am at once so completely here but so scattered in a million pieces across many locations and inside the lives of so many others. Tentatively Confirmed, yet fully committed. To me, this home has always felt fixed - everything in it and about it so heavily Queenstown and Fea-centric. A fact that most other years upon return has pushed me into momentary bursts of self righteous commentary - “ugh, nothing has changed…” But this summer has been different. I’ve felt myself gripping onto the finer details, suddenly aware of the impermanence we all, like it or not, live inside. The finer details that make this neighbourhood feel like an extension of myself: the pockets of complete silence and secrecy only I know where to find as mass construction and development take over the rest. The deepest of sleeps in the room that has held me since childhood. The familiar quotidian characters I get to re-greet on my walks every time I boomerang myself back to this town. The unruly and explosive rose bush with branches that spindle pink petals and a heady scent up to my bedroom window. The details that have, since return, pushed me into fits of reassured, humbled commentary - “thank God nothing has changed.”

Until I’m sure it will.