moirai

So how much do things fall into place because they were meant to, and how much do our own efforts (or lack thereof) contribute to what doors open and slam closed? Should closed doors be walked away from, or should you look for a key? Or fetch a crowbar?  For all my latching on to the fortune in a cookie, is any one path really meant to be? There have been plenty of events in my own life that have seemed to just work out and I always sort of trusted that they were supposed to. But looking back now, I start to wonder if other factors, factors I was well and truly in control of, weren’t in play as well.

When everything pertaining to my trip north began to fall through, I went into an existential panic. Ever since it was proposed, I have not been entirely sure if the endeavor to spend two months back home is a good idea or a very bad one. But suddenly faced with not going, it was quickly clear to me that ill-advised or not, deep down at the truth I want, no, I need, to go. The thought of staying here for the duration of the fall became suddenly and irrevocably untenable. So, over the weekend that everything fell apart, I dove into action. I scanned Craigslist obsessively, trying to find some affordable, non-sketchy housing option. I called or e-mailed every friend I could think of in Fairbanks, scrambling for a lead on a house or a cabin or a shack. I even wrote long emails to complete strangers in town who I was familiar with only from their blogging or mushing circles, essentially cold-calling, a practice which for me has always been anathema. And for a week I got nowhere. Every lead turned cold, either through expense, sketchiness or outright rejection.

Then, on Thursday night, I got a call from some friends with whom I’d left a message nearly a week before. They have a place out in Salcha, and I can stay there for free on a couple of completely agreeable conditions. And then I got a follow-up e-mail about more work, and then another, all in quick succession. The trip was back on, just as suddenly as it seemed to be shut down the week before.

Now, four days from departure and giddy with it, I wonder about all this. It’s not to say that things don’t happen utterly outside of our control. Accidents, breakdowns, fortuitous meetings. Working in emergency services, the fact that tragedy strikes out of the blue is never far from my mind. But then there is what we do with these things, how we weave the threads that the fates spin and cut in and around us. Without my own mad scramble last week, I wouldn’t have gotten the lead I finally did, nor would I have been privy to the weft of rejections and dead-ends before it. I am left with the sense that I am making this trip happen, because I know that it needs to, and not that this trip is happening to me because it was supposed to. And being in control of that gives me some peace, too, that I will make of these next two months what needs to be made of them. For myself, and by my own doing. And this is what I needed from the uncertainty of the last weeks, and the certainty created in its wake.