Moving On

The memories we carry and the spaces we leave behind

The street-level office space of an old historic building in downtown Berkeley where I have been coming to work is filled with the detritus of years of occupation. The man in his eighties, who ran a mentoring service, sits directing and watching the movers pack up the desks where young people once sat with their anxieties and dreams—dreams that may or may not have been realized in the years that would stretch before them.

I got to film Robert Reich as he packed up his office at UC Berkeley when he retired from teaching. One of the big questions he faced was where to put all the things he wanted to keep as he gave up the real estate of the spaces he had so long inhabited.

I fast-forward to the unknowable number of years that lie ahead for me, and I wonder how I will feel when my memories are boxed and tossed into bins. What others will see as a mess, I will understand as the tokens of a life no longer being lived.

There is a house on the block where I live that has been stuck in a kind of purgatory of renovation. A neighbor says the new owners are waiting for windows. As some of you know, a twist of fate brought me not only back to San Francisco but to the very block where I grew up. Even though my parents long ago decamped to Boston, a few people from my youth remain—the parents of friends who, at the time, were younger than I am now. Sadly, in recent years, many have passed on.

This includes both the husband and wife who once lived in the house now waiting for windows. I walk or drive by it every day, and almost every time I find myself transported across the decades. It was a wonderfully boisterous destination—a family of teachers who engaged with great proficiency in art, music, science, and the currency of complicated thought.

I remember the walls of their living and dining room filled with sketches and sculptures, the shelves crowded with books and sheet music—a portal into a full life.

Now it is someone else’s home—a new family building the future on their own terms. I look through the large, living room windows and am struck by how different it feels. The decor is clean, tasteful, and spare, with a large TV near the fireplace.

We inhabit our homes while we’re in them, but most of us have no idea what they were like before we arrived—or what they’ll look like once someone else makes them their own.

I think about the places I’ve lived and the meaningful moments I’ve experienced. I can close my eyes and see the location of a table or a chair. I can feel the sunlight streaming through a window and remember how the daily arc it carved across the floor shifted with the seasons.

I see my children, faintly, in different stages of life—images that are sometimes hard to conjure as I am inundated by the present.

I am aware that all of these memories will vanish when we who hold them are ourselves forgotten.

In my own life, too, I mark the changes—the transitions, the moving on. Recently, I made a shift in my work, departing the wonderful science education nonprofit that had been home for years to dedicate myself to making more movies and experimenting with more writing.

When I chose my career and landed at CBS News, I assumed I would likely stay there for decades. The veterans had charted their years on a familiar map, steaming from port to port within the company. But that world has vanished, and now I am keenly aware that I am floating on open seas—moving forward without any guarantee of a safe harbor.

My children, too, are in a time of transition—but truthfully, change is the very definition of parenting. A day can feel like it lasts forever, even as the years rapidly recede into hazy recollection.

There is something particular about Halloween that signifies the passage of time. My daughters’ hands no longer fit as snugly in mine as they once did when I took them trick-or-treating. Their costumes are different. “I’ll see you later” has become the mantra as they head out with friends.

I try to remember being their age—the complicated, simultaneous push and pull of childhood and adulthood, the stumbling firsts, trying to build a foundation for who I might want to be, even though later life stages felt, at the time, incomprehensible.

We live in an age of facile abundance—thousands of pictures and videos stored on our phones. When I walk through the cavernous aisles of Costco, I like to recall that something as basic as a wooden spoon or a sewing needle was once so valuable in medieval Europe that they were often listed individually in tallies of inheritance.

Does all that we accumulate in life—digitally or materially—expand the boundaries of our occupancy of life itself? What will we still hold on to when it is time to move on?