When I was in my mid-twenties I saw Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in the living room of a house remade into a small theatre. In the play Voynitsky, who’s in his mid-40s tells his niece Sonya that he lies awake at night pained by having wasted his time, when he could have been “winning from life everything!” His mother, like many a Russian one, pipes in with yes, he should have done something with his life. This not wasting life I assured myself was something I would avoid.
Today I’m squarely in middle age. Its sides contain two small children, a mortgage, aging parents and a mid-level job. I see how sensible it is to surrender to the tested grooves of mental habit. I feel the early and hateful signs of aging, and when someone in their 30s says they feel old, I wince and think of my parents looking at me complaining about my back—thinking what a fool. Biology is not beatable.
But I also welcome the middle, finding it between courage and fear, generosity and holding back. I’m a minute or two faster at seeing extremes collapse precisely when they’re summoned. "X changes everything" and "X changes nothing." Perhaps Chekhovian, then? Less prone to finger wagging and instruction on how to live or fix things. Vanya goes back to his accounting. Sonya keeps working. The samovar cools on the table.
Chekhov is my patron saint of working writers. He supported himself, his parents and siblings in Moscow working as a doctor while submitting short comic pieces to Oskolki, a literary weekly. Chekhov wrote to Nicholas Leikin, the editor: “My non-literary work is in front of me, beating me mercilessly against my conscience; in the next room the offspring of a visiting relative is screaming; in another room my father is reading aloud to my mother…someone has cranked up the music box, and I’m hearing 'La Belle Helene'. For a man of letters it is hard to think up something more wretched than these conditions.” - Chekhov’s Letters
Far from wretchedness, I wrote this during bath time with my 3-year-old as she asked me to squeeze water out of her rubber duckies onto her belly, and I reminded her bathwater stays in the tub. Or, with noise-cancelling headphones streaming pan-buddhist flute to dilute kids shows at breakfast before work. Kids change everything and kids change nothing.