‘Meet Me in the Woods’: Song #12 from the Boundless soundtrack
Take a little journey to the unknown, and find your emotional agility. In BOUNDLESS, my newly published memoir, I learn to take risks again.
At a certain point in life, we stop ourselves from the unknown. Not knowing how it’s going to turn out is uncomfortable.
This is why I say Boundless is one woman’s narrative about recovering your emotional agility.
In today’s featured song from the BOUNDLESS soundtrack, I spotlight “Meet Me in the Woods” by Lord Huron, which opens with, “I took a little journey to the unknown.”
To celebrate the release of BOUNDLESS, the twins and I met at Zion National Park to hike up to Upper Emerald Pools. Dec. 23, 2024
Our parents pour 18 years of instructions in our heads, and the overriding subtext is, “Don’t embark on this until you absolutely know what you’re doing.” Our parents have been around for such a good long time that we get used to the idea that you don’t enter the unknown until you know something.
(My father used to joke that his mother told him not to get in a swimming pool until he knew how to swim. This was always delivered with a smirk that said, “Of course, you have to be in the water to learn how to swim.”)
Fold in 30 more years of adulthood, and you want to rest in the certitude that, at last, you have figured out life. We stop taking risks. We stop looking to change anything at all because that entertains risk. When changes come, they feel thrust upon us. We weren’t looking for it—not the death of a parent, the loss of a job, the indignities of aging, the end of a marriage.
Though these losses will come to many of us, they too often come when we’ve gone stiff in our bones. We’re creaky.
Agility comes from being prepared. When you rehearse things, you do them better. So, too, with meeting changes. Live with possibility, not certitude. Cultivate faith in your ability to respond. Resilience is the reward.
If you trust you will bounce back fast, you can invite opportunity. But at a certain point, we stop practicing this. We grow too comfortable with certainty. We stop imagining other possible lives in which we do not know what will happen next.
‘Aren’t you afraid of the unknown?’
At the opening of BOUNDLESS, I am experiencing a colossal failure of the imagination as to what my life will be when the twins go away to college. At the same time, I’m immersed in their process of imagining all their possible lives. (Many aspirational college essays were written, then edited by me!) What was right in front of my face every day was how energizing it was to see a road wide open.
Not too far into BOUNDLESS, my grand experiment of trying on a new life turns disastrous. I’m plunged into an abyss of the unknown. Lest I’d forgotten how unknown the unknown could be, there I was, stranded on the other side of the country with no idea of how to get back to a home that was no longer home.
As I re-enter the old life that now would be my new life, I remember a conversation with my childhood friend Portia, when as a young woman, I stood at the brink of a decision to take a job in Arizona.
“Aren’t you afraid of the unknown?” she asked my 28-year-old self.
I considered this. Arizona was saguaros, sand and sun, which might as well have been a moonscape to my eyes. But Kentucky, where I grew up, was unknown, too. Some of it was more predictable. A known map. A known culture. A known set of family and friends.
“We just think Kentucky is the known,” I told her. “It’s all the unknown.”
So, won’t you meet me in the woods, take the path to the unknown?
EXCERPT from BOUNDLESS
ONCE I HAD BEEN BRAVE FOR MY FRIEND. I had been twenty-eight, Portia twenty-five, and one twilight night we had stood under oak trees outside on my street. “I’m going to take the job in Arizona,” I told her. I didn’t have children yet. As was the case for each of us, our parents weren’t old yet.
“Aren’t you afraid of the unknown?” she said.
The known world was Lexington, where I would work for my hometown newspaper where an ancient pre-corporate-acquisition rule lived on that the sports pages must publish a photo of a thoroughbred racehorse every day.
The known world was dogwood trees and carefully cultivated roses, gardens crisscrossed with cardinal song. In that world, I would have children soon. It would be time to begin a family.
Arizona had been the unknown world, the place of wind-carved cliffs, a flute line of ancestral melody calling me to the lives of those who had inhabited the place before me. Arizona was the land of towering saguaros, arms held high like a holy-ground preacher calling me into the tent. Arizona was where the promised job was.
“It’s all the unknown,” I had said. “We just think we know how the Kentucky story will be lived. But we don’t know anything, really.”
Stars in Zion National Park, the night of Winter Solstice, near the entrance to the Mount Carmel tunnel. The dark skies in Zion reveal that out there in the unknown, there are trillions of points of light.
And finally, a little dose of cuteness!
The twins at four years old. We’ve been walking the path of the unknown together now for 25 years.
Boundless is available!
BOOKSHOP - proceeds go to Bookworks, an independent bookstore in Albuquerque
The Sixteen Superpowers of Memoir Writers
For the next 12 days, I’m making my most popular post free
It’s easy to write a memoir! All you need to do is write something with universal resonance that is true and comes from your life.
Let’s get real. To write a memoir, you need a basket of superpowers.
https://carolynflynn.substack.com/p/the-sixteen-superpowers-of-memoir
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From Lived Experience to a Book: The Path of My Memoir, Boundless
Gorgeous photo of you and the kids.