Chapter 21 — Second Saskia
Rufus muses on the value of following your dreams.
Followed by Chapter 21 —— Second Saskia, in which Saskia’s double starts life anew.
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Hello Friends,
The exhortation to follow your dreams is a loaded one. Some view it as the sagest advice, for what is the point of living under the shackles of other people’s expectations of you? The flip-side is a view that doing so is a supreme act of selfishness, prioritizing your desires over those around you.
It is sometimes couched as “doing what makes you happy”. When couched that way, I can understand the perspective of the naysayers. But I think that’s a mischaracterization of those who advocate this counsel. In fact, I suggest, following your dreams is the quintessential stone hitting the water and sending ripples of happiness out in all directions, where doing something just because it is “the right thing to do” can have precisely the opposite effect.
To me it is the difference between doing what you are supposed to do and understanding what you are supposed to do. One is heeding conventional wisdom, which can of course be noble and good——where would we be had most of us not had the love and support of parents and friends who, throughout our lives, have made sacrifices of which we’ve been the beneficiary. But it’s also important, if and when you find your passion——and here I speak as someone who has had a wonderful and often meandering life——when you find your passion, follow it. There will be unexpected ripples that your passion generates.
It’s surprising how often your own little ripples will coincide with other peoples’ and in doing so amplify one another’s, turning into waves. Waves which will roll to far off corners of the world where, maybe just for a fleeting moment, they might lighten someone else’s existence. Create a few seconds of sailing free. Floating. Skimming across the surface of the ocean. And maybe those seconds will conclude with an unexpected drubbing in the washing machine that is one of mother nature’s most powerful tumblers. Even grinding them into the sand underneath the water … but for those few seconds, that someone you never met, that someone far far removed from your day-to-day … well if your little ripple has grown after it left you and brings even a fleeting moment of transcendent bliss … that’s what I tell myself. That’s the reason I’m writing right now.
And in today’s chapter, we’ll witness the first steps that Saskia’s doppelganger takes, tossing aside the expectations that others have over the years piled upon her, and stepping out anew. It’s a case of looking at what might have been and taking some first tentative steps back in that direction.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter twenty one, in which Saskia’s double starts life anew.
— 21 —
Second Saskia
Saskia’s twin had considered going back in time and replaying the game of Roshambo, but Saskia had planted a seed, and it had grown in her double’s mind.
If she was going to opt for a major overhaul of her life’s context it felt important to put a stake in the sand. She decided to switch to Sienna, her middle name. Sienna had always had a romantic appeal to her, ever since her father had described his visit, in his own youth, to the famous Italian city of similar appellation. He’d added the extra “n” as he’d hoped it might imbue his daughter with an earthy-ness that he sometimes felt the world was losing.
Reflecting on this, Sienna recalled another story her father had related, about her namesake city. An apropos history given her plan to submit to self-imposed exile. Galileo, the father of the heliocentric theory that put a golden orb——an object other than the earth——at the center of our universe, had been banished to Siena before returning to Florence to live out the rest of his life under house arrest. She wondered if Galileo had ruminated on the general gravity that the sentence of exile represented as a punishment. Particularly given that at times, especially in antiquity, it was considered the equivalent of a death sentence.
∞
Initially, Sienna had thought to escape herself by going forward in time. But that would only work if you could get far enough ahead that you wouldn’t bump into your other self again later. It was the sort of thinking that time travel movies inspired. The problem was: that plan was predicated on the assumption that you could jump ahead as far into the future as you wanted. The continuous nature of the time travel that she had stumbled upon was much more like physical travel. It took time to get where you were going, and who was to say that someone you knew might not visit that destination later, by chance.
Merely traveling to the future guaranteed that many people you knew would “get there by chance”. On the other hand, relocating to another physical location stood a better shot at escaping. Wasn’t that the fugitive’s trope? Sipping Mai Tai’s on a Caribbean beach?
So, she packed a small bag——a leather one she hadn’t used in a long time. She figured it would help root her to something, while still leaving Saskia to live the life they had lived to this point; she only remembered the bag herself when rummaging high up in a closet, it wouldn’t be missed. She included some old favorite clothes that no longer fit well from the wardrobe of the woman she’d grown into, but which still spoke to her heart.
Once she got over the shock of what she was doing, Sienna found it liberating to be shut out of her own life.
It was the sort of thing that everyone fantasized about, even if the scary reality of tossing your past aside kept most people in their daily grind. Moreover, those pathological enough to consider upping and leaving invariably didn’t, often out of some strange duty to their friends and their context. It was, after all, disconcerting when someone disappeared, and who, with any semblance of a conscience, would inflict that on the loved ones that they had built their life around. Disappear without word of why. Hers was happily a more invisible disappearance.
The life she had carved out had necessitated forsaking opportunities that had presented themselves in the past, but which didn’t fit her plan, or the model others had of her. Sienna suddenly realized how often, in order to make a consistent whole, she’d turned away from an enticing path that led into a forest, forbidden by her circumstances. Lucky breaks that she would have loved to accept. Sometimes it was other people’s image of her that she’d subjugated her own whims to. Difficult though it was, Sienna’s commitment to herself, and her other self——her commitment to make a complete and clean break from her life——opened a window of opportunity to embrace something new and different. Mandated it. Sienna determined to climb through that window.
Though it was self duplication triggered by slipping in time that had forced this overhaul of her life, she marveled to herself that time travel was not actually necessary to have made this bold choice.
She winked at the woman sitting across the table from her. She had plopped herself in an empty chair just thirty minutes ago, and already the woman she was sharing her morning chai with felt like a long lost friend.
“Be brave,” she encouraged her. “Life holds more opportunity than you realize, you just have to seize it.” Had decamping really liberated her so fast? It was easy to chat with someone you’d never met before and never expected to see again.
Sienna was pleased with how quickly she’d gone from sheep in the flock to kelpie herding the sheep.
As they talked, it surprised Sienna how intimately her self-identity was tied to her past achievements and experiences. She felt almost physical pain eliding the truth, embellishing a past that didn’t exist. She had read——she wasn’t sure where——that, as they got older, people gave themselves unearned degrees on public surveys and censuses. That recollection made it much easier to embrace the deception her predicament required.
Initially, she had wanted to lean on her past achievements, it was her default, and they were naturally things she’d been very proud of——at least those she was inclined to trot out——but now ...now she was being forced into choosing a different history. Perhaps, history was not be the right word, because she was explicitly choosing a past that hadn’t happened. Then again, the past no longer felt quite so set in stone.
She described her time in Berkeley. Time as a philosophy major. It made a much better foundation for flirting than chronicling her path to a degree in applied mathematics. It was invigorating, and to prolong the joy she bought herself another tea and each of of them a croissant.
In the whole explore—exploit spectrum she had moved firmly into the seeking new experiences column again. She had chosen this particular cafe precisely because she’d never been before. And for a brief moment she felt a pang of regret that she was about to disappear from here for good.
It was fun to invent a past. A past that would never be fact-checked. In a weird way, it was a more honest representation of her id, if not her lived experience. These stories were truer to her heart than the prosaic chapters of her actual personal history.
There was a thrill and a freedom to choose who she was. Could that have been what people meant when they said “fake it 'til you make it”. That was not how Saskia had led her life, but it was how Sienna would going forward.
She felt like a confidence woman running a grift.
