Autonomy

At tennis camp, we talk about different kinds of things. I think one of my favorite conversations was about autonomy.

I was talking with two friends, one of whom had moved to Vermont with his girlfriend. The other had moved to Boston to live with his girlfriend. They were talking about the adjustment to a new place and to a new living situation.

My friend in Vermont was loving it. He loved everything about Vermont, the open spaces, the laidback vibe, and even seeing Bernie Sanders in the local grocery store. He said that people wave at him but give him his space. He added it was nice to trust that Bernie knew the cost of coffee and eggs. He said his girlfriend loved it too. The people at her work were friendly and they focused on the students at the small college she worked at and serving the students well. He added he felt like he could do what he wanted and no one cared that much.

He also liked the mix of people. It was a liberal state yet there were a lot of hunters.

My Massachusetts friend was glad he had moved, that it had been hard work. He had lived alone for a while, and dating and spending weekends together was not the same as living together full-time. He said that people had told him not to sell his house, but he was now glad he had.

I asked him why he was glad. He talked about the rough patches they had gone through adjusting to living together, and that if he still had his house he might have given up more easily.

“Nothing like moving in with someone makes you give up more of your autonomy. Hopefully, what you gain makes up for what you give up.”

He thought about that for a moment and said it was true. He added, “I don’t know if I’d had the house still, if I might not have run to it. Both of us knowing we’d committed to this when I gave up the house made us work harder. It’s led to better times.”

That made sense to me and I told him so. I asked him how much tennis he was getting to play.

He said this had been harder to break into. He was able to be a part of a couple of clinics and he and his girlfriend hit with a pro once a week, but it was nothing like Rhode Island tennis.

I told him that made sense to me especially since it had now been there just over a year. I reminded him I had moved to Boston 30 years ago after seminary and it had been a complete culture shock.

I told him it had taken me several years to find regular tennis, and that it took even longer to find friends. I said now I thought that it was Boston. It just took longer to break in.

We laughed when I told the story of playing someone in a match and then asking if he wanted to grab a cup of coffee afterwards and he looked at me like I was a serial killer. I also remembered that a year later I had some people over for doubles (my apartment complex had tennis courts) and then invited them up. They accepted and kept remarking how they would have never thought to invite people in.

‘What do you think that’s about?” I was asked.

“Time. Autonomy. Some of it is about living in a large city where you just don’t know people as well. You’re always rushing from here to there. Traffic can eat up time.”

I told them, when I lived in Washington state, traveling to my tennis club was a 25–26-minute trip. Always. In Boston, the tennis club where my friend played could be as close as 15 minutes and as long as an hour in heavy traffic. You just never knew. And that affected how you interacted. We’re just less social when we have less autonomy and control. “

They both nodded. The friend from Vermont said he just felt like he had so much more time than he used to. The friend from Massachusetts said he never knew where the day went. He was looking forward to having downtime here at tennis camp and not feeling like he had to do anything.

He also said his girlfriend didn’t understand things like tennis camp and being separated. She would just spend every moment together.

I suspected that’s what she was used to and asked if he thought that was true. He wasn’t sure. I wondered if she’d generally had one person in her life whom she did things with as opposed to a group of friends. That made more sense to him.

I said I suspect there are lots of people who love Boston. And that they tended to find other Boston people to be friends with. That for most newcomers, their friends would be other people newer to the culture. I’d seen this a lot in churches, and that the location of the congregation and the size of the church mattered in this.

My friend from Vermont said that the people there cared that you loved Vermont. Once you said you did, they got friendlier.

I said that reminded me of Rhode Island a bit in that tennis people had heard of me and came up and introduced themselves with an “I’ve heard of you.” In Rhode Island, because the state was so small people thought if they didn’t know you, they should.

They both agreed and said they’d heard about me before they’d met me, and this was from 16 years ago.

All of this conversation made me realize how culturally and geographically dependent the concept of autonomy is. Teenagers came to mind as did Margaret Mead.

I thought of her work trying to understand if teenage girls were always rebellious and tumultuous. Margaret Mead’s trip to Samoa led her to believe that they weren’t, that the culture affected a person’s outlook and sense of autonomy more than their biology.

I wondered, to myself, if my Massachusetts’s friend situation would have played out differently in Vermont than in Boston. I suspected it would have. Their sense of time and autonomy would have been radically affected by a less crowded culture, where bears and raccoons in your garbage where your largest concern and not how long it would take you to get to tennis and back.

Yet it’s also undeniably true, there are any number of people who would rather be rooted and feel more at home in Boston than anywhere in Vermont or Rhode Island. I think that’s true most everywhere. We like what we know and what feels familiar. We like where we know we can feel ourselves. Where we can be ourselves. Whoever we are. However we feel rooted.

In The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner he meets a woman in Asheville, North Carolina, a restaurant owner.

I’ll paraphrase their interaction here.

Asheville, prior to the devastating flooding there in 2024, was a hot spot. The book was written long before that. He asked the woman if she liked Asheville and she liked it well enough at the time. Was it home, he wondered, for her. And in a sense, it was. But not quite home.

Weiner remembered encountering in his travels the Buddhist teacher in Nepal who said if you want to know where a person considers home, ask them “Where do you want to die?”

So Weiner asked this of the restaurant owner in Asheville, “Where do you want to die?
She knew in an instant. “In Vermont, where I’m from.”

I suspect, for some more quickly than others, we have a place where we feel at home, where we have a sense of autonomy and freedom, where we get to feel more like ourselves. I think my Vermont friend had found a place where he had more of that and my Massachusetts friend was struggling with that.

Still, it had been a good conversation, and they both said later it had given them a lot to think about. The story from the book gave me a lot to think about. So did the conversation.

In some ways, I could name a lot of places where I’ve felt at home. Most often I’ve said on a tennis court, or at least to die within two days after being on a tennis court. We all want to be in control of how we die, yet so often that’s not the case. Where? I can think of several places, though for me, it could be almost anywhere if the tennis had been enjoyable.

Living with less autonomy and freedom are struggles for many people. We often don’t realize how much we’ve given up until we get more. We often don’t realize how the loss of it affects us and that we’re quietly and unknowingly grieving that.

I just know that where I want to die is where I still have some autonomy and freedom and am close to those who care about me.

I wish our society was structured to allow more of that, that we could discover a little more Vermont (or wherever that place is) for each of us.