trying on potential futures

In the not-imminent-but-foreseeable future (measured in years, not weeks), Marcus and I will likely be spending the majority of our time in the United Kingdom, as opposed to the United States. While this certainly means that both our lives will look considerably different from the way they look now, I’ll venture to say that when the time comes, I’ll feel the shift more sharply than Marcus. After all, England is home for Marcus — he has strong personal and professional ties there, and the culture is part of his bone marrow. I, on the other hand, will be moving to something quite new: while it’s true that I lived for a couple of years in London in my 30s, and we’ve been returning often to the UK to visit Marcus’ family, the culture is still very different from mine, and I don’t have any community or connections of my own in Bath. Yet.

But if there’s one thing I’m pretty proud of in my life, it’s my capacity for curiosity: for example, if you wonder whatever happened to a B-list actor you haven’t seen in a while, I’m the first person to whip out my phone to find out what she’s been up to. Have a question about the symptoms of leprosy? Here, let me look that up for you. Curious about which is more buoyant, a cork or a Croc? I got you, we’ll experiment right now. I’m as curious as anyone could possibly be, is what I’m saying.

For the most part, this curiosity has served me well: it’s the reason I became a lawyer (“I wonder what it takes to apply to law school?”), a parent (“I wonder how difficult it is to adopt?"), and even an author (“I wonder how tough it is to write a book?”). The truth is that all lovely things in my life have come to me because I was curious. But as I look toward the horizon at the changes that I know I’ll face in the next couple of years, I find myself in a situation where I’m not quite sure what the next things I should be curious about are. I’m thinking things like:

What will life be like in a whole new country?
How will I make my living?
How will I fill my days?
How will I build community and connection?

The good thing about pondering these questions now, years before I actually have to know the answers to these questions, is that I can experiment and play with all the possibilities, hopefully in time to feel confident about the life I’ll be creating in the UK when the move eventually happens. And so, the experimentation and curiosity around what Karen 2028 (?) might look like has officially begun. Some of what I’m doing is already visible to you, like the redesign of my Substack and my weaning from social media. And while I don’t plan on creating different personas the way artist Shea Hembrey did, as he describes in this delightful TED talk (although there’s something about what he did that is deeply attractive, am I wrong?), I do plan on looking deeper into different types of work that interest me.

And my wish for this week: that we all entertain a little curiosity about our future uses — how can we be the change we wish to see in our worlds?