The Long Way Here

A few lives ago, I was working in large advertising agencies in London and New York.

Today, I’m living in rural New Zealand, building a cabin by hand, somehow owning three tractors, walking with my daughter, baking bread, carrying water from the creek and writing a book about what it has meant to live my life as an adopted person.

It isn’t quite the trajectory I imagined for myself.

Then again, perhaps it’s the trajectory that has finally brought me closer to myself.

The lives that don’t disappear

I don’t think we become new people by discarding the old ones. The man in the agency meeting still exists somewhere inside the man trying to persuade an old engine to turn over. The photographer is present when I stop work because light has fallen strangely across a stack of timber. The father walks beside all of them, trying to remain available to the moment rather than disappearing into the next task.

This journal is a place for those lives to meet.

Not because they form a tidy progression, but because they don’t. A life can contain ambition and retreat, competence and bewilderment, grief and bread still warm from the oven. Sometimes the most honest record is the one that allows these things to stand beside each other without requiring them to agree.

Perhaps a meaningful life doesn’t always move in a straight line. Perhaps the detours are where it begins to acquire a shape of its own.

For now, the cabin remains unfinished. The book does too. This feels less like failure than it once might have. I am learning that making a life may be less about completing it than returning to the work with care.