Félix Edouard Vallotton:
Cancellation sheet,
fragments of ten woodblocks from Intimacies (1898)

" … actively engaging in her separation dance."

We ended our Exile with several preliminary Separations, for we'd become connected, perhaps even addicted, to our Exile after more than a decade gone. We had been Exiled for almost as long as we'd been together before we were Exiled. The Exile threatened to outshine our prior experience together to become the new anchor. The shelf life of any Exile experience was never meant to outlast the sum of any of the Exileds’ pasts. We felt some pressure to return before we exceeded some imagined upper limit, after which no one can credibly reappear, but we couldn't simply disappear. We had made connections. The Muse was still employed and more or less enjoying her Exile career. I'd made peace with where we'd landed, only rarely feeling too isolated to bear. Wherever we were once we landed in Colorado; we were much closer to home but still more than merely a long two-day drive away.

My mom died after we moved to Colorado. We were closer but still further away than we'd realized. We spent her final days as visitors, still dependent upon my sister's hospitality, sharing her basement guest room. We made that last long drive through early spring snow, narrowly avoiding catastrophe when passing over Snowshoe Pass into Idaho in a blizzard. Stranded for two days in Boise with the Blue Mountain passes closed to through traffic, we had ample time to reflect upon where we'd landed. My family converged that one last time to say goodbye to and send off our matriarch, reinforcing again, for at least the ten-thousandth time, just how non-refundable our time had become. Time continued heartlessly passing, and we'd become little more than her powerless pawns. Time truly began to seem as though it was wasting. What were we waiting for?

We were apparently waiting to complete the orderly Separations necessary to conclude any adventure. The Muse began working to get herself reassigned from the role she'd nurtured since the beginning of our Exile. She'd become perhaps too essential to that program's continuing success, a certain start to an inevitable death spiral. She'd always subscribed to the concept that essential personnel should be quickly reassigned lest their very presence undermine the team the program should depend upon. Star players serve as single-thread liabilities more often than lifesavers. Further, she'd grown bored with the repetition. After a few iterations, the variation she faced was reduced to nearly zero, offering few challenges and little opportunity to learn; it was mere drama. The Muse needs to be learning, so she identified a successor and set about promoting him into becoming her replacement.

The National Labs employ a unique strategy for keeping their employees busy. They expect them to find their own assignments. If they're not in demand, they need to understand that they need to wrangle their own customers and figure out how to delight them. This entrepreneurial tactic might have been tailor-made for The Muse's success, for she loves influencing people. She identified where she wanted to "be assigned" and then created the preconditions for that to happen. She volunteered to create the meeting minutes nobody else felt attracted to produce on projects she thought likely to encourage the shift she wanted. Once she gained the power of the pen, she had permission to meet with anyone involved and impress them with the breadth of her comprehension because she had been in conversation with everyone involved. She rather quickly received the nods she needed to affect the shift. The fellow she had targeted to replace her was ultimately defenseless when the sword was actually passed. The Muse had already successfully slipped into a parallel universe by then.

Her new role included frequent visits back to her beloved Pacific Northwest, including a driving tour lasting three weeks, which I volunteered as the chauffeur. I considered that trip to be a confirmation that what we'd been dreaming for so damned long might actually prove to be feasible. The Muse proved terribly successful and popular among her new and appreciative team. They loaded on more and more responsibility that seemed to be right up her alley. I followed along. So when The Damned Pandemic limited the opportunities for face-to-face interactions, it really seemed to make sense for her to relocate to the Pacific Northwest to get closer to most of her customers. Her boss agreed that she might better serve her program's needs if she lived closer to where its principles lived. She just agreed.

We'd need more than The Muse's political maneuvering to make our way back, but her efforts paved our return road. She was able to retain her Exile position while returning from Exile. She had successfully fired herself from the limiting role our Exile had initially cast her into and, by so doing, had liberated herself from a huge barrier to our reentry. She did this in a way that seemed to leave everybody more pleased than before she began actively separating herself. I performed my own preparation while she actively engaged in her separation dance. I'll detail some of that in a future Exiled installment.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz