Letting go

A friend of mine recently decided to become a priest.

And somehow that feels like dying.

I do not mean to say this in a way that is negative. I don't mean that he's dead to me or anything like that. It's simply that in making this huge life change it strikes me that he is giving up so many of the things that I understand as motivators to move through and be in the world.

This friend and I met in high school, in a camp for theater where we ended up in the same group. We studied scenes and created motivations and we dug into the minutiae of acting in the hopes of finding some deeper kind of truth about art and life. At least, that's what it felt like at 16.

This friend and I had a funny kind of chemistry. We spent a lot of time together that summer and there was a kind of kinship of understanding that I sensed. Underneath social dynamics and classroom abilities was some deeper need to make sense of the world through the art we were making. That seeking was the thing in my friend that I valued. It was the aspect, more than any acting ability, that made me want to know him in the program.

Years later I remember sitting in a hotel room in Virginia. I was working sound on a touring production for a relatively big name theater company and happened to take a show to his alma mater. He was across the country working for a very very big name media company. I had stuck with the stage in the intervening years. He moved on to more technological artistic pursuits.

"Theater is a dead medium," he said. Or typed rather. We chatted online and not over the phone.

"No it's not. You are just seeing the wrong stuff!"

This is the tenor of hours of back and forth that ensued.

I wish I had a transcript of those conversations still saved. I would love to see my fervent and completely unironic belief in the power of theater. It was so clear, so genuine, so unquestioning then.

"Whatever, I think you're wrong but if you want to hitch your wagon to that train, be my guest,"  he said.

At least this is what I remember him saying. Something to that effect.

"I will prove you wrong," said I.

Or something like that.

Years later, he in a job with a 95% retention rate ("Happy people never leave," he said, or something like it) and I about to embark on my largest project ever, we met again in person. I don't even really remember how it happened. Was he visiting Philly anyway? How did I decide that I wanted someone with that expertise to come in to the very beginning of our rehearsals and offer some perspective from a  different artistic medium? I know that he stayed with me and I remember his car window breaking and the two of us going to the Home Depot for find plexiglass to seal it for the drive back to DC.

Months later than this he returned and like a giddy kid ran through my performance ensuring he'd found every version of the choose your own adventure play we'd been able to offer. He seemed to like it almost more than I could. I was so aware of the flaws I couldn't see the larger whole but for the sum of its imperfect parts.  In my memory we have a conversation about how I'd done it, how I'd actually proved that theater wasn't dead, that it just needed to be something like the play he, in a small but important way, had helped to make possible.

Maybe that happened. Maybe I just made it up.

On facebook years later again I remember noticing him announce a move across the coast and wondering about it. I remember wondering why a happy person would ever leave.

Once in a while he'd post something and I'd send a comment. Once in a while I'd write a blog post and he'd respond. Once in a while I'd ask for advice about something in his field or he'd mention a show that he'd seen. Somehow through the lightest kind of contact we managed to stay connected across time and space.

And also, somehow, it seemed that both of us began to seem a little tired. Both of us seemed a little discontent. I began to wonder if despite all my early protestations that perhaps he hadn't been right all along, that I had in fact hitched my horse to a dying wagon that no one wanted to ride. That I was simply delaying the inevitable. I began to wonder if maybe I just took longer than everyone else to wake up and realize what was obvious. And I began to look deeper into the field that he had chosen. It began to interest me more. That spark from the small piece we had worked on together ignited further.

But when we recently got in touch again, it seemed that he was tired too. That just as I began to see possibility in this new direction, he had decided that he might get off this path as well. It felt like I was once again chasing behind yelling "No no! Seriously. There's something here, I know it."

So when I heard this friend had decided to give all that up, give up all the chasing and trying and working to make meaning out of making, when I heard that he had decided to give away everything he owned, and all the constraints of the world that it seemed I was still bound to, when he was able to make such a brave choice to change literally everything about the world he knew to take a stab at something bigger... it felt a little bit like something dying. It felt like he had moved on to something I would never know. It made me jealous, in a way, that a person who had been akin in this way could simply move on to something else. That they could find deeper meaning in other places. That they could sense the lessening of reward and seek out something more fulfilling. That they had something in their life like this to pursue.

I watch from online afar as things are given away. I watch as possessions are passed on.

I think, "It looks so light."

I think, "It looks so free."

What would it be like to let go?

And somehow it feels like dying. And it's hard to explain exactly why.