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Turn Starting Over into Celebration: Create Your Own Holiday

A few years ago, I became somewhat befuddled about what to do with my life.

Okay, I was completely befuddled.

The cause was (as I put it) losing my job—being displaced, severanced and bridged to an early retirement. My 15-year-old daughter put it this way: fired, broke, preparing to sell the house. Don’t you hate it when your kids get it right?

Anyway, I did what anyone else would have done in my situation: I created a new holiday.

On my calendar, Arrival Day falls on any day in the week before Thanksgiving—though you can slot it anywhere during the year. On this day, the celebrant takes a round-trip on the Staten Island Ferry, across New York Harbor going out, and more importantly, coming back. Coming back past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, you imagine yourself as a new immigrant, with all of your belongings in a bag and your life savings—maybe $50 or $1,000—in your pocket. You have no job, no office, no place to live, no relatives. Only a dream. You alight from the ferry in lower Manhattan. What do you do?

The point is to put yourself in the immigrant’s shoes, not for politically correct, feel-good reasons, but to say: Okay, here I am. Where do I go? What do I do? Where do I stay? How do I build a life from scratch?

When you lose your job and income at fifty-eight-and-a-half in our culture, even if you are relatively wealthy, you have a problem. At least you do if you realize that what we generally call “retirement” should be an accounting term, not a life term.

This is why I like celebrating Arrival Day. This year, after leaving the ferry terminal, I walked for a while. I headed up past the World Trade Center site, which thousands of busy people pass by every day, without making a sound.

In my case I can keep walking north past the place where my grandfather, Adam Welstead, was born at the corner of Bedford and Barrow Streets ,in what we now call the West Village.

This was a guy who got through the eighth grade, landed a Tammany Hall job in the tax office and commuted from Matawan, NJ to Long Island City. Eventually, Mayor LaGuardia appointed him Tax Commissioner in Queens, he bought a house in Forest Hills, thrived during the Depression and entered the upper-middle class.

But that’s someone else’s story. The object of Arrival Day is to ask, what’s your story going to be?

It’s a good way to clear your head of all the ideas, schemes, plans, dead-ends and worries of the year gone past. Arrival Day: a big do-ever, a Life Mulligan.

Happy Arrival Day.

Tags: coping, holidays, layoffs, personal essay