Collaborating with Chance
“Dad, are you okay?”
My numbness must have been palpable. My 15-year-old second child looked at me from between the wooden bannister on the stairs that led to the basement.
They repeated the question.
I heard them this time and looked up. I was sitting at the dining room table in their mother’s house. It was February 1st–dead of winter–and I felt dead to a lot of things in life.
I must have been looking off at the darkness beyond the sliding glass door. Blank. Preoccupied. The truth is that I wasn’t all right. I was about to charge $5,500 on a credit card to cover child support, their mother’s mortgage, and my rent. I disregarded my bills; they would get paid later. The charge was made worse knowing that if things didn’t change for the better–and soon–I would have to do this same thing 28 days from now. It was, after all, the shortest month of the year.
“Dad!”
It was the third time they addressed me, and I realized I hadn’t answered them. I heard myself suck in my breath.
“Yeah, I’m alright.”
It wasn’t a lie; more a statement of faith, of hope. A prayer. I hoped I would be all right. I had faith that I would be alright. But there was more to it. I wanted them to be alright. My children. What if I didn’t figure out how to make a shit-ton more money than I had ever made faster than I had ever had to make it? I was trained as a goddam teacher.
“I’m going to be a teacher to make lots of money,” said no one with brains ever because teaching is glorified poverty. All teachers know this.
The rest of the evening blurred into getting a two-year-old ready for bed, cleaning up dinner, making sure the living room was also tidy before my co-parent–now earning her own teacher certification–was done with her online class. The disparity deepened when I returned to my apartment and considered that the last bastion of security after the divorce–their home–could also be taken from them. Something had to give. I imagined my oldest not having this house to come back to on Spring Break.I imagined my second having to box up their “maximalist” decor, fish tank, and art projects. I imagined my third huddled with her dog, Louis–a black Shitzu–next to a yellow moving truck. I imagined my fourth petrified of having to give away the stuff he regards essential to his memory. I imagined my 2-year-old hugging her Lilla while her life was packed up, boxed up, and stuffed into a storage unit. I imagined them sad because I wasn’t able to learn how to manage something I hadn’t been trained in or had ever wanted for that matter–own my own business.
I imagined them hating me.
The reality of my situation was the following: in May of the previous year, I started my business as a side hustle; in June, I was informed that the University of Iowa was not going to offer me a contract for the coming school year; in July, the divorce was finalized, and an avalanche of financial responsibilities fell on me.
It felt like I had been told to run a marathon with both legs broken.
I knew this wasn’t easy for any of us, and I can’t write for them. Only for me. And on this February night, I had burned through my liquidated retirement, maxed out my personal credit card, and was now beginning on my business credit card. I had taken a chance on my ability to learn how to run a business and scale it in time to keep the kids in a well-built house.
But I was unraveling. My journal entries from my 4am writing practice time looked like this.
“I feel like I’m breaking…”
“I’ve cried out to God, the universe… It feels like I’m yelling into the abyss…”
“This is why people traffic drugs. This is why people do terrible things. It’s survival…”
“I will not give up because my kids are here in Iowa City.”
“I feel terror this morning…”
“I’ve never been so desperate…”
“This is the terror of the night for me…”
Days in the month flew at breakneck speed. I had paid January’s child support and mortgage, breathed a sigh of relief, and turned around to see the middle of the month had passed and next month’s financial responsibilities were already here.
February carried the most up-to-date anxieties.
Romanticizing hard times
Full confession: I romanticized rags-to-riches stories all my life without any regard for the people who did NOT make it. Cried over their successes. If they can do it, so can I. I saw them as inspirational, enduring the struggle and coming out enlightened on the other end. Even wished for their crises so I could overcome, be victorious, be amazing.
Utter bullshit. I never gave two fucks for the suckers who couldn’t make it or ended up on the street smoking cigarette butts and coke.
I kept a stack of photos of the kids next to my lamp. “They were everything to me” sounds cliche, I know. But my life was cliche, remember? Now that I was in the hardest time of my life, I knew that I needed to get through it so that I could help them do the same if they ever had to go through something similar. They would have a lawyer represent them in divorce court.
In that moment at the dining room table, it dawned on me that it’s not romantic to tell stories of people not making it. To hear of people ending up on the street like my friend Stacey, who battled adult-onset bipolarity and apparently lives in a cardboard box in southwest Florida. He had been the standout basketball star, a pastor, father of four kids. He’s now nursing a rap sheet. I understand why he trespassed property and attempted fraud.
This shit is real.
Amid those fears that evening, I found another Solnit passage with no idea what it means but intuiting that I needed to pay attention:
It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.
That phrase “collaborating with chance” is what I was attempting to do, and while I’d like to focus on the way that chance gets us to consider possibilities instead of terror-inducing risk, it feels like dancing with the devil himself.
I was taking a chance on me.
An unwanted colleague
Here’s why collaborating with chance scared the shit out of me.
In grad school, I was a 2014 graduate fellow at the Obermann Graduate Institute for Civic Engagement and the Academy. We partnered with someone outside the University of Iowa–a director, a CEO, a community organizer, etc–to create something together that neither of us could do on our own. They were an expert; I was an expert. We collaborated to create something else. Something hybri. Something evolved.
I had a connection at a local elementary school who introduced me to Peggy. She worked with me to create a pull-out class of hand-selected students who would discuss ancient philosophy–my jam–and then create a public service project whose aim was to make their school “better.” That was it. They didn’t have to institute it. They only needed to create the idea and present it to the principal.
To call it “fun” or “rewarding” was an understatement.
Peggy and I worked really well together. She provided the space and carried the trust of the students; I brought the ideas and passion. Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus. All the greats. All from my own choosing. Many of my translations. We did something together–Peggy and I–that the two of us separate and siloed could not have dreamed.
And I keep thinking that my collaboration with Peggy should help me out–but what the hell does collaborating with chance mean?! Chance swims in the waters of possibility–that’s the hopeful perspective. But it’s not probability. I may “possibly” make it through with my kids still in their house, but I cannot say “probably.” This is not the kind of material that made a Hallmark card your go-to source of inspiration.
“You will possibly make it through life” is not a phrase on a pastel card that made J. C. Hall rich. My current collaboration is looking less and less like Batman and Robin and more like Laurel and Hardy. My life really is a fucking joke.
A readiness to deal with what comes next
Eight months have passed, and I know now that the question, “Dad, are you okay?” came in my chrysalis stage–the time when the thing-that-will-become-a-butterfly-but-is-not-a-butterfly-yet is. My post-professoring vocation had gone from content writer to attempted copywriter to message strategist. It would transition again to LinkedIn marketer before any real financial hope could be seen.
But that’s not what I want to focus on.
Solnit notes that the stories of survival often tempt us to think that the “arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting, navigating…” As if there’s a certain knack for survival, a quickness of the intellect that suddenly can spot the thing that will get me what I need. That I will learn to read the signs properly. That I’ll learn how to navigate. That I will know–suddenly and surely–where I am.
Solnit disagrees.
“The real arts of survival,” she writes, “seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next” (80).
It’s not a knack, although you do find things you have a knack for. It’s not knowledge, though you do find that you’ve learned a lot. It’s a readiness. A “Yes” on the tongue before the question has been completely asked.
“Are you willing to–”
“Yes.”
“But I’ve not finished ask–”
“I don’t give a damn. Show me what I must do or not do. I’m ready.”
