Juliet's School of Possibilities

by Laura Vanderkam

  “So there’s that. But he didn’t last?”

  She shrugged. “Too much responsibility. We fought all the time, and then—I’d been waitressing a few hours at night and on weekends when he could be home—I came home one night and he wasn’t home. Two little girls, sitting in front of the TV in our apartment, all alone, waiting for me.” Juliet shuddered at the memory.

  Riley wasn’t sure what to say, but it seemed Juliet didn’t want her to say anything. So she stayed silent.

  “Anyway, there were court appearances and a lawyer I couldn’t afford, but that all happened later. At the time, I think I stayed there shaking and crying in bed for a day. Then Faye threw up, so I had to get out of bed to do laundry. When I hauled the three of us to the laundry room, I found a woman there who had also been crying. I figured I may as well talk to her. It turned out she was upset because her mom could no longer watch her kids during the day while she was working. I needed someone at night. We decided to trade shifts.”

  “Quite the stroke of luck,” Riley said.

  “It bought me time. It also gave me my best craft ideas. Entertaining four small children all day is no joke.” She got quiet for a minute. “But anyway, we survived. And as I settled into that life, I started having all these ideas for the restaurant where I was working. New menu items. Changes in decor. My manager had no interest, so I told my ideas to anyone else who would listen. The only person who cared was one patron who started coming there with friends every Thursday.”

  “Yes?”

  “He owned a small inn outside town. I had heard of the place. It was more luxurious than anything else in the area. He listened to my ideas for six months and then he asked if I was looking for a job. His hotel manager had quit and he needed someone. So the girls and I moved out to the caretaker’s cottage. Much nicer digs. He was OK with me working while they were at preschool, or while they played in the yard. They often wanted to help me. That’s where they learned how to decorate, to plan menus . . .” She looked back toward the school. “We started getting written up in travel magazines. A little gem in western Pennsylvania. I was so grateful.”

  “And?”

  “And then my happiness became misery, because I stopped worrying we were going to starve. I started thinking about possibilities,” she said. “My own business. My own empire of the domestic arts. My own properties. A retreat center housed in an old hotel by the ocean, which I saw advertised for sale in the Wall Street Journal. I got so mad at myself for thinking of these things.”

  “Because?”

  “Because I didn’t have the time! I was too busy.”

  “You were busy.”

  “Yes! I had two young daughters. I was a single mother, newly escaped from penury. And there was always something else to do for the inn. I could come up with a package I could pitch the magazines. Fall foliage. The best gardens of western Pennsylvania. I redid every room in that inn with a different theme. So there were a million contractors, and all the emails about meetings with them, and the budgets, and any time that wasn’t consumed by that was spent figuring out stuff with the girls.”

  “Feeling like you’re constantly behind . . .”

  “Wanting to think about my business, but I’d get to the end of the day and there wouldn’t be any time left over.”

  “But here we are.” Riley looked at Juliet. “So, what happened?”

  “I was complaining about my lack of time to one of our housekeepers. She had been there forever. She never said much, which is probably why I was complaining to her. I’d babble and she’d keep wiping down the counters. But one night, she stopped me. I remember, it was a rainy, stormy night like this one. The girls were watching a movie in the lounge while I was theoretically cleaning out my inbox. She looked up from wiping down the counters, and she said, ‘You have been talking about this business you want to start for the last forty-five minutes. And you talked about it Tuesday night for thirty.’”

  “She’d been keeping track?”

  “I guess. Who knows? But I heard the question she was asking within that number: What else could I have done with that time I spent complaining about my lack of time?”

  “Start writing a business plan?”

  “Maybe. But as I was sputtering about that, she looked me in the eye and told me that if someone offered to give me half a million dollars to start my business on condition of my producing a viable business plan, I would probably find the time to cough it up. I protested that no half million was on offer, and she told me it never would be if I didn’t get started. I could pretend someone was offering the cash. That would make it a top priority for me. And then she said this. I will remember these words forever.”

  “Yes?”

  “‘I don’t have time’ means ‘It’s not a priority.’ We always have time for what matters to us.” Juliet paused. “I wrote that down. I made myself write that phrase over and over. We always have time for what matters to us.”

  “But is that true?”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “You had a million things going on. I have a million things going on. OK, probably less than you with two small children, so you had two million things going on. We can’t just not do the things other people are expecting us to do.”

  “Why not?”

  It was a good question. Riley thought about it. “In my case, because I work for a company. They pay me a lot. More than a small-town Indiana girl like me ever had any hope to expect. And so I need to deliver on what is expected of me.”

  “I agree that we need to deliver results. I saw tonight that you are willing to roll up your sleeves when presented with a challenge. But are you absolutely clear on what is expected of you?”

  “What do you mean? I need to do what my clients and colleagues tell me and . . .”

  “Maybe. It is often easier to meet the expectations that are flashing right in front of us instead of the expectations that are more important, but more nebulous. And here’s the thing: There can be infinite expectations. Even if you never slept, you could not meet all the expectations of your employer, your colleagues, your clients, your friends, your family, yourself. You cannot do everything; the choice to meet one expectation is always a choice not to meet another.” Juliet paused. “The difficult truth in this is that sometimes you need to disappoint someone’s obvious expectation in order to eventually meet bigger ones.”

  Riley pondered this. “Don’t answer the email immediately so you have space to think about the bigger problem? Don’t agree to a meeting just because you’re available if it’s not the best use of anyone’s time?”

  “Perhaps. And sometimes, when we are honest with ourselves, some expectations are self-imposed. Or maybe we have blind spots. As the housekeeper noted, I’d found time to complain about all that I didn’t have time to do.” She thought back. “I remember standing there writing down these words from the counter-wiping oracle when she pointed out something else. ‘Remember when the creek rose after that storm? Remember when it flooded the basement?’ We’d had this horrible wet spell a few months before. I’d spent hours getting the rugs replaced. ‘Where did that time come from?’ she asked me. ‘You didn’t make more time. And yet if the basement hadn’t flooded, you would have claimed you were busy that week too, because the time would have been filled with something else. When the basement flooded, you chucked that something else because it didn’t matter.’ And here’s where she got me. She said this: ‘You could have chosen to chuck it without the basement flooding. You can figure out what’s important to you and treat it like a flooded basement.’”

  “In other words, you decide it is important enough to get to it now.”

  “I thought there was something to what she said. And so that night, as Betsy and Faye were watching Finding Nemo, I tried this mental experiment. I don’t know if it is true that I have time for what matters to me. But what
if I behaved as if it were true?”

  “If you just told yourself you had all the time in the world?”

  “That phrase! You’ve been listening. And why not? I have as much time as anyone else. Rushing just made me feel rushed. Telling myself I had no time made me feel like I had no time. When I told myself I had time for what mattered, something did change. I saw that I could forget the existential angst of my predicament and simply sit down at my computer for the next hour and write. So I did. The next night I did the same. I had a contractor cancel the next day, and instead of jumping back on email, I spent time analyzing the services I could provide, and how I would build up my brand.”

  “And eventually you made the leap?”

  “I started a few things on the side. My blog. I tried doing webinars. I had the girls film my first videos. They used a tripod but still. I cannot believe we got traffic. I got emails about sponsorships and ad possibilities. I mean, a lot of queries. It was like this message from the universe. Eventually I had to talk to the inn’s owner.”

  “Since it was taking too much time?”

  “The more immediate reason was that I needed permission to take photos of projects I’d done at the inn. But, funny enough, the day before I planned to talk with him, I heard from a producer at the Today show who wondered if I had video of me cooking. They thought I could fill in for a segment while their usual guy was on vacation. I didn’t have anything professional. What was I going to do? And then I met with the inn’s owner, and he wanted to learn more.”

  “And you had a business plan.”

  “I did. He looked it over and a few hours later he said, ‘Look, this is good stuff. You are going to be big, and I want to invest in this company. I have friends who want to invest in this. Can we?’ I mentioned they could start by hiring a camera man who wasn’t six years old.”

  “So the hypothetical scenario the housekeeper proposed came to be.”

  “Something not far from it, once I chose to spend my time in ways that helped bring that vision about. Of course, running a business, there are always even more things I could be doing. More emails. More people who want to meet. More projects. The choices are hard.”

  “Yes,” Riley said. “The expectations are infinite . . .”

  “But it is still the same as she told me. I have to see the vision of the life I want. I have to ask of every minute, of every decision, every obligation I choose to take on: Is this bringing me closer to that vision? Or am I doing it just because it’s there? After a while, I formulated my own version of her insight. I inscribed it everywhere:

  Expectations are infinite.

  Time is finite.

  You are always choosing.

  Choose well.

  “I look at that statement when I wake up. I look at it when I go to bed. It is all over the school. Have you seen it?”

  Riley thought back to the phrases on the clocks, the mirror, the door. “I saw snippets . . .”

  “Now you know to look. And when you know to look, you will see.”

  She held up her bracelet, and as the lighthouse beam pulsed in the distance, Riley could see the words etched on it: Choose well.

  “I look at it when I decide to have a difficult conversation with an employee rather than bury myself in my inbox. I think about it when I set my quarterly goals each year, when I plan my weeks, thinking through my business priorities, my family goals, and what I need to do to be a whole person myself. Expectations are infinite. I could fill every minute. We all could. Therefore, the only way to do anything big in life is to choose which expectations—including my own expectations—are worthy of this ultimately limited resource.”

  Chapter 9

  Juliet and Riley stood there, staring at each other. Neither said a word. Then, after what seemed like hours, a peal of thunder shook them out of their silence. The storm was almost upon them. Juliet spun around and set them hustling, even more briskly than before, toward the school. Riley raced to keep up. A few raindrops fell on her face. She pulled the coat tighter. “I think we’d better spend the next few minutes choosing to run!” Juliet yelled.

  They dashed down the boardwalk. The rain fell harder. It accelerated from drops to sheets. Soon it was pelting so hard that they could barely see. They raced faster, splashing, along the boardwalk, blown by the gale, across the road, through the front yard of the school, where the guard was standing in the hut with his flashlight, watching for them. He nodded, relieved. He shook his head as they ran, soaked, up to the porch.

  The rain blew nearly sideways. As Juliet yanked open the door with the leaf wreath, it blew them inside. “Are you OK?” Juliet said as they stood there, dripping, on the rug.

  Bob—who looked more worried than usual—ran up with towels. Riley dried off her soaked hair. Any clothes that had been inside the raincoat were dry, though the bottom of her jeans were wet completely through. She looked around to hand Bob the towel and realized he had reappeared with cups of hot tea.

  “Warm up!” he said. “She is actually crazy,” he told Riley. “Did you know that? I should have warned you.”

  Juliet laughed. “Maybe crazy,” she said. “Just a twist from your average corporate retreat. But I did get her back safely. And we were only gone forty minutes. A bit less than that.”

  Riley felt in her pocket for her phone, then remembered it was back in her room. She looked around and spotted an ornate grandfather clock in the corner. Now that she knew to look, she saw the words clearly. On the chimes themselves. Time is finite. Juliet was right. Thirty-eight minutes. Had it only been that long? She felt like it had been hours. Her mind spun. She took her tea.

  “Well, thank you,” she told Juliet. “I appreciate your . . . showing me everything.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Anytime. I have . . .”

  “All the time in the world?”

  “Certainly.” She tapped her bracelet. “I love seeing possibilities.”

  Riley nodded and took her tea up to the starfish room. She shut the door behind her, changed from her wet jeans into sweatpants, and sat on her bed. She stared at the little balcony with its few pots of shrubbery well hidden from the rain. She looked at the art on the wall, all pictures of starfish. Big. Small. Sure enough, etched somewhere in each picture were those words:

  Expectations are infinite. Time is finite. You are always choosing. Choose well.

  What was she to make of this? She wanted to talk to someone, but Neil had removed himself from her chaos. Skip too, at least until Riley redeemed herself. She pictured Juliet deciding, in that little inn in western Pennsylvania, that she wanted bigger things in life. She pictured her choosing how to spend her minutes in order to bring this life to fruition. Then she pondered these visions of her own future. She felt herself in that triumphant ballroom. And she felt herself in that lonely kitchen. These two images tangled up with each other, the colors and words blurring into one struggle.

  It was too much. Riley knew what felt comforting when she didn’t know what to do. She picked up her phone and began hacking away at the 1,247 unread messages stacked up—all these little birds in the nest, waiting for their worms. A meeting in Geneva in December that somebody else would be attending. A reminder about the correct archiving procedure for slide decks. Someone’s question about the lack of coffee creamer in the office fridge, with a follow-up note confessing that it was there, he just hadn’t seen it. The reading, the deleting, the forwarding to someone with an FYI. It was so reassuring. So satisfying to see that number go down—1,225 . . . 1,214 . . . 1,203.

  Then, all of a sudden, the room lit up, bright as day. Thunder rattled the roof. Riley heard another crack. The lamp flickered. The alarm clock on the bedside table blinked. All the little whirring noises composing the background music of modern life went silent. The power had gone out. The room was pitch-black. But as Riley felt her way toward her bag, intending to
dig out her little travel flashlight, she saw something glowing outside.

  “Oh!” She caught her breath. The black gum tree near her window was actually smoldering. Flames crackled from the drier parts hidden by the leaves of another tree. The lightning—had it hit it? A gust of wind blew a handful of the burning leaves off into the air . . .

  . . . and right onto Riley’s balcony.

  She watched the shrubbery start to burn. Shielded by the roof, the plants must have been bone-dry. The flames raced up the stalks. She fumbled around with her flashlight until she found the house phone on her table. Keeping her eye on the fire, she dialed the front desk.

  “Hello? Hello—this is Riley in the starfish room . . .”

  “Riley?” It was Juliet. “Do you need a flashlight? There’s one—”

  “The tree outside my window is on fire! Some of the leaves landed on the balcony—the plants are burning . . .”

  “Are you OK? I will call the fire department. How big are the flames by your room?”

  Riley tried to stay calm. “Bigger than they were a second ago.”

  “OK, make sure your neighbors are up, right? Get them out in case it spreads. I’m on my way up.”

  Riley ran out the door. She shone her flashlight down the hall. All was quiet. Three doors. She pounded on the first. “Hey!” she yelled. “There’s a fire. You’ve got to get out!”

  Nadia opened the door, sleepy. “What?”

  “My balcony’s on fire. We’re all getting out—go downstairs. In the living room unless they tell you something different down there.”

  She was on to the next one. The next. Two more sleepy women staggered down the hall. Riley hunted around. There had to be a fire extinguisher somewhere. She looked around the corner toward the staircase. There it was. She grabbed it, just as she heard footsteps on the stairs. Bob and Juliet came racing around the corner.

  “In here!” Riley called. As they opened the door, the smoke smell grew stronger than before. Bob grabbed Riley’s things and shoved her bag out into the hall.