Floating

My entire life changed the day that I read Hope Edelman’s entry in the book “If I’d Known Then.” It’s a collection of letters written by women to younger versions of themselves. At the time this passage came into my life, I could not have been more like the younger version of Hope that is addressed in this letter. From the text, I have gleaned my personal life mantra “Float, Baby, Float.” I’d like to share her words with you in case you have the same life-transforming reaction that I did.

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Dear Hope,

I see you, through the dim tunnel of memory, sitting at the round dining table in your off-campus apartment. It’s winter of your sophomore year, 1984. You’ve got the apartment to yourself, your rommates still in class for another hour. They’re your family of sorts now, these two brilliant, sweet, eccentric women. Soon they’ll come bursting through the front door, windmills of action and noise, stomping snow from their boots and shrugging off their woolen coats, and you’ll all retire to the kitchen to wok a dinner for three. But right now, it’s just you and the rooms of pockmarked hardwood floor, the secondhand upholostered furniture, the row of Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin albums lined up next to the turntable.

A bitterly cold January wind is skidding off Lake Michigan, and as usual the heat in your building is turned up too high. You’ve had to lift the wooden windows a few inches to equalize the room. A thin stream of chilled air trickles in at waist level, and the steam radiator in the living room clangs and hisses in the background. Every eight minutes the El train rumbles by a half block away, making the walls tremble.

This is what you will miss most when you leave here: the warmth, the predictability, the safety that comes from belonging to a place and knowing what comes next. You will look for this kind of security always, the kind you had as a child when your family was still a closed circle unbroken by death.

Sometimes you will find it. Sometimes you will not.

Of course, you don’t know this yet. Right now, you’re pecking with intense focus on the keyboard of your blue Smith-Corona eletric typewriter, working on an application for a summer internship at Outside magazine, and you’re convinced that your professional future depends on how this letter is received.

This is how you think at nineteen: black or white, everything or nothing, unprecedented success or total failure. Everything matters, so much, every action, every word. You measure out your speech in careful doses, obsessing over sentences that come out too fast or sounded wrong. You plan every move in advance, meticulously and carefully. Control– that’s what it will later come to be called. You will embrace control, because control leaves little room for unexpected shifts for which you are neither ready nor prepared. The world cannot tilt of its axis if you have not allowed room for it to happen. This is what you believe.

Control minimizes risk, which feels like a good idea now. Only much later will you discover the downside to this, that the fullest parts of life unroll as the result of impulsive choices. You will think you’re taking a risk when you move to Tennessee after college, and later when you go to graduate school with no clear idea of how you’ll pay for it, but really, these are small ones. You will shy away from big risks because you’ll think you’re lacking courage. This is not true. Courage, you have plenty of. What you’re missing is faith. Faith is something other than yourself. Faith in… well, to rely on a word that’s going to become obsessively overused, the universe. Faith that whatever happens, you will nonetheless survive.

A phone call is coming from your father in a few weeks that’s going to send you into a spin. He’s going to say he’s done being a single parent; it’s too much stress, too hard, and he’s packing his bags to leave, sending your brother and sister to live with your grandmother. You will tell him, with a ferocity you didn’t know you have, so help you G-d if he leaves those kids you’ll make sure he never sees them again. He will stay. Twenty years later, a shaman in Malibu will tell you this was the moment when part of your soul left your body, and she will try to put it back. You will wonder if she’s full of shit, but part of you will know she’s right: You will feel your sense of trust leaving with that phone call like vapor lifting from your body.

What you will feel inside is true: No one is standing on the shore to toss you a life preserver if you start to drown. What you don’t yet know is that for the rest of your life, with uncanny timing, a buoy will always appear when you need one: the offer of a bed to sleep in, a note from a stranger, a check for $425 that arrives in the mail the same day you receive an unexpected $420 bill. This kind of synchronicity will occur again and again, as if relentlessly trying to prove its point, but twenty years will have to pass before you figure out what’s going on.

Twenty years in a long time. So I am here to tell you: try to find faith now. You are not a random peg. There is a hole where you fit in this world, a place uniquely molded just for you. Everything you do does matter- both more and less than you think. Your good choices will please you, but they will not redeem you. Your mistakes will hurt, but they will not cripple you. You are both more resourceful than you think and more protected than you know.

So take risks. Take them now. The man you’re going to meet next year, the pre-law student who loves books and maps and you? You’re not going to marry him, though you won’t ever regret loving him. Still, you might as well join the Peace Corps after graduation, fly off to Niger or Micronesia, instead of taking a job near him. You’ll need the life experience to write about later, but don’t write a Peace Corps memoir, please– there will be far too many of those. Sell your car, but a one-way plane ticket, work your way across Europe. Don’t worry about running out of money, if you do, you’ll figure out how to manage. Write short stories in your free time. So what if they suck? I mean it: really, so what? Stick with it. You’ll get better with time.

Everything you’re worried about won’t happen without careful planning and constant vigilance– the husband, the children, the house– will all eventually come. Your siblings will do better than just survive. They will thrive. Your father’s health will hold out for another twenty years. The next few years are yours for the living. Because, let’s face it, you’re not going to up and go trekking through the Himalayas when you’ve got two kids and a teaching job and an unruly house that keeps breaking down. Start meditating and doing yoga soon; it’ll save you twenty years of anxiety. Sleep with a woman now, so you don’t have to wonder about it later. Try peyote with your roommates instead of always being the designated driver. Follow the Grateful Dead for a summer for no reason other than the music is pretty good and the people seem sort of interesting. Get a tattoo. Dye your hair, just because you feel like a change. Whatever. In the end, your GPA and your resume aren’t going to matter. Raw talent and discipline will. Just get yourself to Iowa City by 1990 because that’s where everything starts clicking into place. The time between now and then is yours for the living. If only you can stop being so afraid.

I know your fear, even better than you do. Who could understand it more than I? I know how may things there are to be afraid of: breast cancer, airplane crashes, homelessness, religious fanatics, orphanhood, AIDS. I know how huge and overwhelming the fear can be, and how planning out every details makes it contract. But one day you’ll learn that fear comes from a projection of what might be, what could be, what better not be, instead of what is. What is is now. What is is you. And you’re too buoyant to drown.

Lean back. Trust the water. I know it’s hard. But the current will carry you safely to places you can’t even imagine. Don’t worry. Really: don’t worry. Let go.

Float, baby. Float,

Hope