I have lived what I consider to be an extraordinarily varied life. I think we all probably have. Which I suppose would make it an ordinarily varied life. Who among us knew the trajectory of their lives at five years old? At ten? At twenty? Heck, even at thirty?

I am now in my “sporty-forties.” And I am still (newly?) uncertain of what I want to do with my life. Where it will lead. Where I will end up. How far will I go? I know now not to expect an answer. I am learning not to need one.

A few years ago, I thought I knew where I was going. Just ahead of COVID, things seemed pretty settled. Our kids were in school and doing well. Our business had lost that “new business” terror. We moved to a house that actually fit our family. I had a view. There were migratory birds. Salamanders abounded. We could canoe off the back of our property. I purchased woodworking tools. We were settling into a rhythm.

I remember feeling like a tree—firmly planted in a windy environment, but grown strong and healthy. Able to withstand the rain and the wind and all manner of environmental abuse.

I was, of course, wrong. Within the span of a year, our lives were utterly changed.

On February 28, 2020, my family traveled to Africa. It’s a whole story. The plan was to visit coffee farmers we’d done business with. I was going to visit the film locations of the Howard Hawks classic Hatari!—a slow-moving film that was nonetheless a huge part of my childhood. It was the world’s introduction to Henry Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk”. I was going to stay at the ranch! Or I wanted to, anyway.

Instead, COVID became a household word nearly overnight. Our flights were canceled. My family went on a day trip to an island inhabited by tortoises, and I spent the day waiting on hold, being disconnected, and calling back. Sweating bullets in the Hotel Tembo. What a profoundly stressful time that was for us.

I lost a particular bit of my mind in that space. We eventually found flights home that didn’t go through fully-locked-down-Europe. The airport in Dubai waited for us not with luxury, but with weird full-body scanners and teams of people holding thermal guns. All the perfume shops were closed. Nobody was selling Haribo candies or Toblerone bars. There was nowhere to pay too much for a phone charger. We sat stock still with a million other people trying to get wherever home was. Surely everything would feel alright if we all got home.

We did make it back to Oregon, but you may recall what we made it back to. I closed my coffee shop for a day, then reopened with a walk-up window, serving customers through a little porthole. We learned the difference between surgical masks and N95s. We purchased a big sheet of plexiglass to protect everyone. I consoled baristas enduring people’s stress and fear and rage.

Then the social fabric started to tear. I grew up in the church. I was part of a consistent thread of relationships for more than thirty years. But when church got deeply complex and weird in 2020, we felt a need to create distance. This was a deeply destabilizing experience. I am not over it.

I watched helplessly as kindness and empathy were politicized. Everything became us-vs-them. Everything required a taking of sides and a drawing of swords. My neighbor, who had always been indifferent, became threatening and ugly. I had moved onto that property devoted to neighborliness, and eventually life “handed me my ass” in that area. Not everyone wants to be friends. I didn’t know that before. I arrogantly thought I could make friends with anyone. I was wrong.

George Floyd was murdered and that was a horror. Parts of my community responded with an ugliness that’s become uncomfortably common today, but I was not prepared for it at the time.

Business got hard; customers dwindled. Retail was mostly dead. Regulars did their best, they paid in advance, they came as often as they could. But there were no tourists, no walk-by business, no new customers.

Other people’s businesses suffered. Wholesale dropped off, my income was threatened significantly. I was frightened.

Then came the smoke. I hid inside my house in September 2020 as my beloved Willamette Valley was entirely smoked in. I witnessed the aftermath of vast swaths of my sweet Cascades being burned. Big trees. Trees that had survived fires before, but didn’t survive them now. I contended with having grown up in a culture that mocked global climate change as a hoax, if you can imagine that. It had been years since I’d questioned the validity of broad scientific consensus. But for whatever reason it was then, those September days locked in with smoke, newly knowledgeable about the local Air Quality Index that drew my fearsome rage.

And through it all, my children grew. Sunrise, sunset. I remember looking at photos from that airport trip in 2020, and my eldest child looked “little.” She was interested in little kid things. She was engaged in a little kid’s world. Just a year later my children seemed to have swung pendulum-like to being “big”. My youngest decided to like Taylor Swift. Sunrise, sunset.

My partner and I got our yearly physicals in 2021, which led to a biopsy, which led to a cancer diagnosis. She is thankfully in remission now, having completed a rigorous course of treatment.

My business continued not to work the way it used to. My marriage didn’t look like it used to. My thought processes weren’t recognizable to me.

The point, I suppose, is this: A Varied Life isn’t something that we seek—it is something that happens to us. We can choose some of our circumstances. But we can’t choose not to be confronted by a deadly disease. A layoff. An abusive situation. Or a global pandemic.

Even this project—these essays—is a result of that variety.

One day in 2024, a friend told me about a therapist who had been a pastor for 25 years and was now helping people through “deconstruction”—a hot-button term that for me anyway, describes a process whereby applied beliefs are reevaluated. It has been deep, aching work for me.

My relationship with the church had been complex for years. I was reducing my faith journey to its constituent parts, checking them for potency and future-proofing. I decided I needed to talk to him.

He didn’t take my insurance, so we agreed on a short engagement: a beginning, a middle, and an end.

At one point, he identified that I’d missed a season of “values setting” in my youth. He handed me this Values Deck.

I sorted the cards myself. I identified five values that were affecting my choices in that time of my life. I snapped a picture and made it the background image of my phone.

When I returned for the next session, I relayed my excitement, and he gave me the deck for my very own. I took it home. I did it with my family. Then my closest friends. Then others. Then others. Then others.

Now I’ve done it many times with many people. Some I’ve known since birth, like my little old grandmother. Some are so young they don’t even know what the exercise is about, but they trust me, and they want to be involved. And that’s deeply meaningful for me. I love guiding a ten year old through this process. Reading the cards aloud and creatively explaining an idea like “Reciprocation of Favors” to a child.

It is the most important thing I do with my hands. Not more important than family, you understand. Or world peace.

But in terms of the sticks & bricks of my life, the day-to-day working it out—this is the thing I love to do with people.

I couldn’t have planned this when I was sitting on hold in Zanzibar, or hiding from the smoke in Oregon. We don’t know. Our lives are varied. We can’t count on them to be static or ordinary.

We can try to buy or plan our way into a life of knowing what’s next. But that will produce a life of mediocrity—and anyway, it won’t work.

Life will be variable. The only question is what tools and beautiful new plant life we find in the rubble.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickfromoregon.substack.com