As long as it lasts

On a dreary Sunday morning ten years ago this October I awoke – covered in my own vomit – in my apartment on Atwood Street in Pittsburgh, which at the time looked like a miniaturized war zone.  My laptop was upside down on the hallway floor with a broken screen hinge; likewise, a favorite lamp of mine lay shattered in chunks across my tiny bedroom.  I was naked – bloody nose, reeling from the worst hangover I’ve experienced to-date in my life – with no recollection of what sad events had transpired the previous evening.  In this state of misery, I did however recall other inconvenient facts which the handles of tequila had not made vanish:  that after half of a semester I was on the precipice of dropping out of grad school; that my first romantic relationship was in total shambles; that I lived in constant fear of my management consulting internship offer being withdrawn due to the imploding economy; and that the probate process for my mom’s estate was going nowhere fast, on a daily basis sucking more and more money out of my nonexistent financial assets.

I laid in bed for that entire day, crying myself back and forth to sleep with an incessant headache and never wanting to step outside again. 

Thinking back, I now realize that it was the lowest point of my life - the first and only time when I had no hope that things would ever possibly get better.

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Today when I reflect back on 2008 – on all the turmoil and fundamental uprooting of my life which somehow happened to coincide in one hellish year – I usually arrive at the same three emotions:  disbelief that a decade, a full third of my life has (seemingly so quickly) passed since then; astonishment that as a green 20/21-year-old I weathered the period while without fail making the correct long-term choices;  and, more deeply, a sentiment Brazilians would refer to as saudade, a deep nostalgia sometimes referred to as the love which remains after something uniquely precious is gone. 

Saudade, a term with no exact English equivalent, was introduced to me as a concept during my first trip to Brazil in 2013.  It is nostalgia to a degree, but encapsulated in a far more complex brew of sentiments including a deep longing for that which is no more and a sense of privation due to the absence of something; it also often includes an awareness that we will lose what we have and cherish now to the sands of time eventually.  The concept of saudade was beautifully rendered at the closing ceremony of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, as a pouring rain extinguished the Olympic flame but also irrigated the seeds from which beautiful new forms of life emerged.  Watching it one wanted to weep violently for what was now relegated to the past while, at the same time, feeling spiritually uplifted by a reaffirmation of the greatness ahead, somewhere just past the horizon.  And what an unbreakable linkage there is between those two states, between what has already come and given us our identity and what shall follow and give us our ultimate destiny.

What eventually got me out of the bed that October and on so many other bleak days that year was precisely the recognition of this eternal linkage – as I have expressed it before, the knowledge that nothing we create ever belongs to us in its entirety.  The belief that the lives we live are built on the legacy of others and that, so long as our hearts beat and our brains still spark with activity, we have something of value to contribute to the world through the construction of our own legacies – even if, as was the case for me so many times in 2008, our personal value may seem negligible and we have no idea what those contributions might eventually be.

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Since 2008 the long-term choices I made passing through the crucible of that year - choices deeply rooted in my core values - transformed my life into one of stability, happiness, and privilege.  It is a privilege and a sense of purpose which would have been entirely foreign to me during my Pittsburgh years, and even more unimaginable when I was a high school freshman in the rural Florida Panhandle.  The misery which chained me to my bed a decade ago is, today, replaced by a boundless gratitude which propels me into the sunshine of each day with an attitude of plenteousness.

As people far older and wiser than me would likely have intuited, the rains of 2008 which washed away so many things that gave me happiness and meaning in my first 20 years provided fertile conditions for the eventual blossoming of my joy-filled, healthy adult life in New York City.  And while vast portions of my younger life have indeed been washed away by abrupt events and the passing of time, mine is an existence made far richer by that sense of saudade which connects me to those precious memories:  carefree walks on the UF campus with new friends like Carolyn, that first time holding another man’s hand and being in love, drives through dense pine forests to Apalachicola to buy fresh oysters with my mom as a teenager while we chatted, carefree, about life and politics.

While rare for me to quote any religious scripture, sometimes those pearls of wisdom sum things up nicely:  “my cup runneth over.”

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To my mom – I still miss you every day, love you eternally, and can never repay all that you gave me.  52 years was far too short.

To my best friends, those who have always stood by me through my darkest moments – I can never thank you enough for being there, through thick and thin and all of my quirks, in unconditional support.

To New York City – those emotions I felt when I first visited as a kid in the late 1990’s still resonate today.  Not a day passes by when I am not supremely honored to call myself a New Yorker.

And to me, as my grandmother Joan always used to say when I would bring her a straight ‘A’ report card or some trophy from a competition or a trinket from a foreign country – well Adam, what next?