I Am Constantly Dreaming of Alternate Lives….

Or: Maybe I Should Move to Katonah

Maybe I should move to Katonah.

Why is it that every time I visit somewhere I find mildly appealing, I dream of an alternate life in a new location? This past week, it was Katonah, a town in upper Westchester with an old-fashioned main street, train tracks and streets lined with Victorians with messy lawns.

I’ve spent a few hours each day in the town, as I’ve been taking a Transcendental Meditation workshop there. My kids roll their eyes at this, my oldest daughter saying, “I read about it on Reddit. It’s a cult, mom.” Well, the commitment is just a few hours for 4 days. Yes, you pay, but it’s free to those who can’t afford it. The imagined reward is that at the end of the four days, I get to be David Lynch.

The real revelation, besides the fact that I actually enjoy this twice daily 20-minute brain bath, is that maybe a shorter path to inner peace would have been to live in Katonah? Maybe I wouldn’t feel so angsty and left out? Maybe I would have more than five friends (no knock to those five friends—they are very very dear to me, but I’ve lived in my town for almost 30 years). Help! I’m surrounded by yacht clubbers and pickleball-playing bookclub joiners. Maybe…

Maybe introverts like me lived in Katonah, people with indigo auras (ask my daughter, who turned me on to Mystic Michaela). Far enough from the city that it attracted less rushy, less ambitious people. People who believed in science, yes, but with a bit of astrology mixed in.

The people strolling down Main Street, ambling past the animal rescue booth and charming bakeries wore harem pants and unbrushed hair. Maybe these were my people—people who preferred self improvement to pickleball, looking inward to hitting a golf ball playing bridge to joining a country club, church, synagogue or book club where you read the latest bestsellers like Lessons in Chemistry. So. Much. Joining.

Maybe if I joined things…Maybe it’d be easier to join things if I lived in a small town like Katonah. Maybe I’d join the Meditation Center. If only I liked joining things…I shouldn’t say I don’t like joining things. Maybe I can change. Maybe….

This is why I meditate, people.

I once considered joining something after I graduated college as an English major, overwhelmed because no one came to recruit me like my boyfriend’s stoner frat bros in suits. They segued from bong hits to sucking on the corporate pipe, chasing that money high. What could give me that high?

I scoured my father’s Utne Reader (in those days, there were ads)—looking for a commune to join.

Join! I wanted desperately to want to join. But in the end, I decided to move to New York City. Not to the country. Not to a commune. That had always been my dream, ever since visiting my father’s mom in the Bronx as a child. The city was something I could join. It was the equivalent of sitting in the back (you know who you are, the people who would never, ever consider sitting in the front row!). You could be part of something, while still blending in. That was the kind of joining I could do.

This feeling of not belonging has been dogging me since childhood. My parents refused to join anything. My mother refused to become a citizen till she was in her 80s (and only then because she wanted to vote the “goddamn Republicans” out.) She referred to Americans as “Tee-pee-kahl A-meeer-ee-kkahns” and American women as “old sherrings” (Old biddies). They wouldn’t join a church or a synagogue, since they were a lapsed Lutheran and a lapsed Orthodox Jew. They wouldn’t even join the town pool, because my mother hated “svimming pools” (“Ooosh, all that hot water and those sherrings wading around.” But I’m hot, mom!) Joining was for typical Americans, lemmings.

When my kids were school age, I often found myself trying to get them to join things. I wanted to do things differently because I saw that joiners seemed happier, or at least more socially acceptable, whatever that meant to me at the time. My parents had tended toward melancholia. I tended toward rumination, thinking rather than doing. I wanted my kids to be doers.

Why don’t you join the Model UN club or the Mathletes? I’d say, even as I was shuddering inside. “It’ll be fun!” When my daughter resolutely lingered in the minivan as we tried to cajole her out to soccer practice and asked, “Do people have to play soccer?” I started to sweat. Of course not. I myself despised team sports. The one time they forced us to play in gym, I kicked an own goal, confused about which side was which.

Would I have been less inclined to cajole my kids into doing and joining in a more laid back place like Katonah? It’s okay to imagine alternate lives, to let yourself float in and out, like I’m learning to do in meditation.

“Do less,” the instructor said. What?

I thought meditation meant holding your hands in a rigid position, thumb and first finger touching, back ramrod straight till it ached, controlling your damn thoughts.

The TM teacher told us we don’t have to control our thoughts or our breathing or anything else. “Do less.”

So it’s okay to daydream about living in Katonah, or to think that I would be a different person if I lived there. But also, I can circle back to the fact of the essence of me. Wherever you go, there you are.

Or maybe—maybe—I like the pushback, the feeling of being an outlier. Teenage me loved to stand just apart from the crowd, sarcastic comments elevating my place as the contented outsider. I depended on the crowd to push back against.

I often wished I could be one of the happy idiots, wearing the trendy board shorts, going to beach week and becoming one of the woo-hoo girls. But that was never in the cards.

The fact is—I live where I live. I’m not an outlier at all.

So maybe I’ll just stay put, sit still and let myself float away in my mind. Or maybe I’ll move to Katonah.