I was very proud of my car, that first year in Baltimore. I had no idea of its gas mileage, its reliability, or even the true number on the odometer. Those things were not important. As a matter of fact I had never really thought about them as factors in the purchase of a car. Irrelevancies like licenses and insurance never came to mind either. The car was important because I owned it; none of my friends owned a car. It ran.
This car was a true work of art. Above a dirty mottled and graying green body, its formerly vinyl top rusted into a convincing facsimile of a coral reef. The less said about the body the better…I had learned to park by the crash method. (Into brick walls, not other cars.) It didn’t have a muffler, unless you counted the coffee can that I’d wired to the exhaust pipe with a coat hanger. Listening to it start up at seven a.m. on Sunday mornings was a religious experience: ka-POW! whum whum whum…It had to warm up for ten minutes before it would go anywhere.
One warm and humid June morning, my friend Laura and my husband Ralph and I emptied the contents of the car into the neighborhood dumpster, and got in to drive to Portland, Oregon, 3,200 miles away. We planned to do this in two days and seven hours, fifteen minutes less than our previous best. We were well provisioned: A bag of hard-boiled eggs, two loaves of bread, a dozen apples, Snickers bars, and enough money for gas and coffee. The coffee was the only weakness in the plan. We made stops for only one reason – for gas. Any other out-of-car experiences necessarily occurred within the ten minutes it took to fill up the car, pay for the gas, and pull out of the gas station. Ding ding!
We were used to these trips. We made them at least once a year to visit family, celebrate holidays, and to earn some money over the summer. They were, for the most part, uneventful, though from time to time we made unplanned side trips. Once, Laura and I got too interested in a conversation in German and ended up traveling 300 miles toward Texas at 2:00 in the morning. And there was one late evening that had a sort of nightmare quality where Greeley, Colorado kept showing up in the headlights no matter what we did. These were unusual events, however. It’s hard to get lost when most of the trip consists of pointing the car west and then trying not to fall asleep while driving towards North Platte. (It didn’t seem to matter if we did drive off the road in Nebraska – the surrounding countryside was just as flat as the road.)
We were passing Pocatello, Idaho, practically in Portland’s back yard, and feeling that fatal end-of-trip lassitude that comes too early in a journey of this kind. As we watched Pocatello float past us at 75 mph, I said, “God, I’m glad I don’t live in Pocatello.”
Whang whang whang CRASH!
At the time, we didn’t know what had happened. We found ourselves standing on the gravel shoulder of the highway, staring at our smoking car while cars full of westbound travelers whizzed by. As we stood there, speechless, a Jeep pulled up behind us. Out of it jumped a short, muscular man, who threw himself under our car for a brief inspection, leaped to his feet, and pointed to his car. “Get in.”
We got in.
Thinking about ax murderers, highwaymen who prey on helpless music students, and other shady characters, I asked him his name and where we were going.
He was George de Tillot and he was taking us, along with a large potted plant, as a gift to his wife. (We learned later that he had been one of the few French aviators to survive World War II and that his name was really pronounced duh-tee-YOH, but since this was Idaho it was now dee-tillut.)
The double-wide mobile home lived on an acre of dust and was kept company by a large RV, a boat, and a sedan. As we pulled up, Arletta deTillot opened the door. “Look what I’ve brought you!” her husband shouted as he handed her the plant and gave her a resounding kiss. She took one look at us and disappeared into the house, only to reappear a few minutes later with a stack of linens.
As Laura and I made up our beds in the RV (we had been segregated by gender, first thing) and Ralph supposedly was doing the same thing in the house, we speculated about our condition. Are they crazy? Can we trust them? It looks clean. They seem nice. We had been given instructions to make up our beds and then come into the house to wash and have drinks before dinner. Dazedly, dutifully, we finished our beds and presented ourselves for pre-dinner talk.
The talk, over beer, sodas, and bourbon, was about the car. The chief of police was a friend of George’s. George had called him and asked him not to tow the car, it was not abandoned. He, George, would take care of it. Then he had called the mechanic in town (another friend) and asked him to tow the car to his garage and call him with an estimate of the damage. These things would all be done very soon. We had nothing to worry about. We were their guests until the car would be fixed.
I don’t recall any questions about who we were and what we did and why we were so far from home. Gently, in conversation that continued over dinner (meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and peas), and then in the living room over coffee, they extracted the particulars from us. Laura and Brenda are music students. Ralph is a concert pianist. We are traveling from Baltimore to visit our families in Oregon. No, we don’t have a credit card. Actually, we have no money at all – just enough to get to Portland.
They repeated, you have nothing to worry about. Go to bed, get some sleep. Tomorrow we’ll see what the mechanic has to say, and you can do some sightseeing around Pocatello (!). Ralph, our piano is your piano – we would be pleased if you would take this opportunity to practice your regular hours.
Off we went to bed, not much more informed than we had been about who these delightful people were, but no longer worried that they were relatives of Norman Bates.
The next day, we learned that the car was seriously damaged. Something called the “universal bolt” had “sheared off,” and we were lucky that the entire drive train of the car hadn’t ripped through the body and killed us all. How much would it cost to repair? Oh, impossible to tell…it will take several days…don’t worry about it.
Several days! We can’t stay here several days!
Of course you can. Do you have calls you wish to make? We will lend you our car, so you can drive around and look at things. We will be happy to have such distinguished musical guests. You can give us a concert your last night here, to pay for your room and board. We will pay for the car’s repairs, and you can pay us back when you can.
But George, we don’t have any money. We don’t know when we can pay you back.
That is not a worry. Let me tell you a little story.
I believe in angels. Long ago, I was an aviator, flying for France. Most of us were killed in that war. I had many…experiences. I was lucky to live. When I needed help, people helped me. They refused any payment or obligation, and would only say that I must pass on what I had received. After the war, when I came to America and married Arletta, we decided that we would always help people who needed help. So you are not the first, you see. This is a good location. People fall off the highway all the time.
But George! You trust perfect strangers in your house, with your car! Isn’t it dangerous? Don’t you worry about people stealing from you?
How can they steal? We are giving! One couple did take our car once. We never saw them again. But year after year, dozens of people, only one bad lot…we are blessed. We have friends all over the world now.
George, how can we ever repay you?
I will tell you exactly how to repay me. Pass it on. Help others. And when you drive through Pocatello again, you must stop and visit and play for us.
We sat over our cups of coffee, looking at the angel in jeans and a plaid shirt.
That’s about all. The car was repaired, I don’t know how. George’s friend must have rebuilt the engine. We did add a muffler, greatly diminishing the drama of Sunday mornings. The car ran fine for several trips after that, trips that always included a visit to Pocatello and our angels, until the day Ralph drove the car west, away from Baltimore, and me.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Thursday, January 7, 2010
We'll Never Get Out of This Alive
I read once that we die of the ills that our age is heir to. In other words, we’ll die of whatever is going around, and lucky for us that it probably won’t be the Black Death or being stoned as a witch. So how afraid can I be of the swine flu, AIDS, radon gas, antibiotic resistant staph? Should I be afraid of flying? (I have been, ever since Reagan broke the back of the traffic controllers’ union.) I took nuclear winter off my list when my American history professor notified me that the Cold War had been over for some years now. Now I worry about stuff like heart disease and cancer, and sometimes surviving the traffic on I-5 during rush hour.
And I have some friends struggling with serious health issues, so worrying about myself seems laughable when my health issues are more along the lines of “No, you can’t eat ice cream every day and expect to stay a reasonable weight.” I’ve even lost some friends to heart disease and cancer recently, which is not only a sad thing but also alarming – I get nervous when people die in their fifties or, God forbid, in their forties. What’s the deal with people dying? He was so young…she was so young…
What I tend to forget is that death is imminent for everybody, depending on how you define imminent. Sometime in the next fifty years, I’ll be dead. That’s pretty soon. I make a lot of long term plans, always have, and fifty years is just the other side of long-term. I had to change my retirement plans so I wouldn’t be out of money and unemployed at the age of 100. Heck, I have a plan to go to Italy to celebrate my 100th birthday, it IS a milestone birthday, although I’m having a hard time getting takers for people to go with me. But even I have to admit that I probably don’t need to make a financial plan for after 106 or so.
Then there are the charms of aging. I have lovely neighbors in their late 90s, retired educators, who are helping me think about what advanced old age can be like if you plan well, stay healthy, and are very lucky. It still looks like hell. And even if I am the luckiest of all and die in my sleep at the same moment with my sweetie, hand in hand, at the age of 106 after having done everything I wanted to do…it’s…still…a world without me anymore.
Now, dying is worth worrying about. It’d be crazy talk to say it isn’t. The thought of not being part of the warp and woof of our family and our friends’ lives is certainly worth concern and maybe even some planning. Children count on us. Spouses and friends. I find, though, that I fear death for itself, not just for the effect my death would have on others. I know that the concept that I won’t be around, forever meddling in the world, is a powerful one that propels me to take all kinds of rash actions.
But the little thought has been creeping into my head lately that maybe the fear of not existing anymore…is maybe a fear that I don’t need to keep. Of all the certainties that life has for us, death is the most certain. Soon or late, we end, and we are remembered or not. We began, too, and had the same amount of consciousness before coming into the world as we presumably will when we leave it. I don’t spend any time thinking about my fate BEFORE my life. Why worry about after?
A friend came over for breakfast this morning and asked me why I wanted to spend my work life in a little box when I could do so much more. She pointed out that we shouldn’t waste any time being miserable, if we can help it. Whether we have ten days, ten years or more, it’s a finite amount of time. So if we want to contribute something lasting to the world, accomplish something specific, have some fun or even get enough sleep, we need to hold the awareness that there is a limited amount of time in which to act.
And maybe that’s what ultimately bothers us about death. Finite isn’t a concept we Americans like. We want to think that we can have it all, if we can afford it. Life, however, does come with an expiration date.
When I was younger, I got around the time limit by carrying on parallel lives. For three memorable years, I was a concert soprano, voice teacher, owner of a pasta business, mother of a young child, a church soloist and a corporate secretary. I don’t recommend it, but it did make the three years seem longer. I spent four years once attending college full-time, working full-time as a college administrator (that’s how I paid for the college), and holding two, no, three part-time jobs. This may have been a bad idea, even if it meant I graduated debt-free.
Now I realize that a time limit can be helpful. Who said that it focuses your mind wonderfully to know you’ll be hanged in the morning? I do pay more attention now, and I stopped feeling smug about multi-tasking on the macro level, even before I recovered from the chronic fatigue. It is permissible to do just one (or maybe two or three, okay?) things at once?
And we do control, to some degree, how much we limit ourselves in other ways. Because, you know, being alive is the discrepancy. It’s the odd state we happen to be in. For most of human history, we weren’t here! Most of the billions of people in the world right now aren’t affected by us, either. The corollary of that is, we are HERE, affecting the few people we affect -- NOW. So all we have to do is live HERE and NOW.
Not easy. I’m the one with the fifty-year plan, remember? But I also need to remember that I’ll never get out of this alive.
So this is it. Here and now.
Live it up!
And I have some friends struggling with serious health issues, so worrying about myself seems laughable when my health issues are more along the lines of “No, you can’t eat ice cream every day and expect to stay a reasonable weight.” I’ve even lost some friends to heart disease and cancer recently, which is not only a sad thing but also alarming – I get nervous when people die in their fifties or, God forbid, in their forties. What’s the deal with people dying? He was so young…she was so young…
What I tend to forget is that death is imminent for everybody, depending on how you define imminent. Sometime in the next fifty years, I’ll be dead. That’s pretty soon. I make a lot of long term plans, always have, and fifty years is just the other side of long-term. I had to change my retirement plans so I wouldn’t be out of money and unemployed at the age of 100. Heck, I have a plan to go to Italy to celebrate my 100th birthday, it IS a milestone birthday, although I’m having a hard time getting takers for people to go with me. But even I have to admit that I probably don’t need to make a financial plan for after 106 or so.
Then there are the charms of aging. I have lovely neighbors in their late 90s, retired educators, who are helping me think about what advanced old age can be like if you plan well, stay healthy, and are very lucky. It still looks like hell. And even if I am the luckiest of all and die in my sleep at the same moment with my sweetie, hand in hand, at the age of 106 after having done everything I wanted to do…it’s…still…a world without me anymore.
Now, dying is worth worrying about. It’d be crazy talk to say it isn’t. The thought of not being part of the warp and woof of our family and our friends’ lives is certainly worth concern and maybe even some planning. Children count on us. Spouses and friends. I find, though, that I fear death for itself, not just for the effect my death would have on others. I know that the concept that I won’t be around, forever meddling in the world, is a powerful one that propels me to take all kinds of rash actions.
But the little thought has been creeping into my head lately that maybe the fear of not existing anymore…is maybe a fear that I don’t need to keep. Of all the certainties that life has for us, death is the most certain. Soon or late, we end, and we are remembered or not. We began, too, and had the same amount of consciousness before coming into the world as we presumably will when we leave it. I don’t spend any time thinking about my fate BEFORE my life. Why worry about after?
A friend came over for breakfast this morning and asked me why I wanted to spend my work life in a little box when I could do so much more. She pointed out that we shouldn’t waste any time being miserable, if we can help it. Whether we have ten days, ten years or more, it’s a finite amount of time. So if we want to contribute something lasting to the world, accomplish something specific, have some fun or even get enough sleep, we need to hold the awareness that there is a limited amount of time in which to act.
And maybe that’s what ultimately bothers us about death. Finite isn’t a concept we Americans like. We want to think that we can have it all, if we can afford it. Life, however, does come with an expiration date.
When I was younger, I got around the time limit by carrying on parallel lives. For three memorable years, I was a concert soprano, voice teacher, owner of a pasta business, mother of a young child, a church soloist and a corporate secretary. I don’t recommend it, but it did make the three years seem longer. I spent four years once attending college full-time, working full-time as a college administrator (that’s how I paid for the college), and holding two, no, three part-time jobs. This may have been a bad idea, even if it meant I graduated debt-free.
Now I realize that a time limit can be helpful. Who said that it focuses your mind wonderfully to know you’ll be hanged in the morning? I do pay more attention now, and I stopped feeling smug about multi-tasking on the macro level, even before I recovered from the chronic fatigue. It is permissible to do just one (or maybe two or three, okay?) things at once?
And we do control, to some degree, how much we limit ourselves in other ways. Because, you know, being alive is the discrepancy. It’s the odd state we happen to be in. For most of human history, we weren’t here! Most of the billions of people in the world right now aren’t affected by us, either. The corollary of that is, we are HERE, affecting the few people we affect -- NOW. So all we have to do is live HERE and NOW.
Not easy. I’m the one with the fifty-year plan, remember? But I also need to remember that I’ll never get out of this alive.
So this is it. Here and now.
Live it up!
The Back Half of the Game
I live and vacation in Oregon, and I like walking on the beach that stretches from Neahkahnie to Nehalem Bay State Park. When the tide is out, it’s possible to walk for eight miles in one direction, thanks to a long sand spit and Oregon’s beach law that says nobody owns the beaches. But the tide never seems to be out in December, and since we live in a part of the Pacific Northwest where we get rain pretty much every day from October to June, it’s a startling coincidence if the sun comes out during low tide. And we live above the 45th parallel, so that means no matter what you had planned, if there’s a sun break (we call them “sun breaks”), get out there while the getting’s good because the sun is above the horizon for maybe eight hours altogether near the turn of the year.
So there I was, walking south toward the winter sun. I had decided to walk 5,000 steps and then turn around – about two and a half miles each way, a good walk on level hard-packed sand. The white foam on the waves reflected brilliantly. That, and the salty wind in my face, made me squint. The awareness of Neahkahnie Mountain behind me made a nice comfortable psychological backrest. I talk to myself when I walk, when I’m not singing arias from La Traviata, and as I walked I flipped through different ways of looking at being in my fifties. (I’m constantly bumping into this fact and getting surprised all over again.)
I reached 5,000 steps and turned around, toward the mountain. And suddenly the ocean turned blue. I had been looking at hard brilliance, walking toward the sun, but now the sun and the wind were at my back and the giant green mountain was before me. I was halfway through my walk, heading home.
And just at that moment, at that halfway point when the world surprised me by becoming even more unbearably beautiful, I had a wonderful realization – I am just halfway through my adult life. I’m not near-elderly, as the federal government likes to call people in their mid-fifties. I’ve been an adult for thirty years and with any luck, I’ll be an adult for at least another thirty. And this thirty years will be the thirty years in which I know who I am, in which I have good friends, in which I know how to take care of my emotional and physical health – all a huge improvement over the first thirty years.
So I’m heading into the back half of the game. Heading home, toward the mountain, wind at my back, sea and sky blue. I’m just starting the best part of my adult life.
I intend to enjoy every bit of it.
So there I was, walking south toward the winter sun. I had decided to walk 5,000 steps and then turn around – about two and a half miles each way, a good walk on level hard-packed sand. The white foam on the waves reflected brilliantly. That, and the salty wind in my face, made me squint. The awareness of Neahkahnie Mountain behind me made a nice comfortable psychological backrest. I talk to myself when I walk, when I’m not singing arias from La Traviata, and as I walked I flipped through different ways of looking at being in my fifties. (I’m constantly bumping into this fact and getting surprised all over again.)
I reached 5,000 steps and turned around, toward the mountain. And suddenly the ocean turned blue. I had been looking at hard brilliance, walking toward the sun, but now the sun and the wind were at my back and the giant green mountain was before me. I was halfway through my walk, heading home.
And just at that moment, at that halfway point when the world surprised me by becoming even more unbearably beautiful, I had a wonderful realization – I am just halfway through my adult life. I’m not near-elderly, as the federal government likes to call people in their mid-fifties. I’ve been an adult for thirty years and with any luck, I’ll be an adult for at least another thirty. And this thirty years will be the thirty years in which I know who I am, in which I have good friends, in which I know how to take care of my emotional and physical health – all a huge improvement over the first thirty years.
So I’m heading into the back half of the game. Heading home, toward the mountain, wind at my back, sea and sky blue. I’m just starting the best part of my adult life.
I intend to enjoy every bit of it.
Thoughts on the Day After the Shortest Day
And.
That’s it. That’s possibly the most important idea that human language has captured.
I always thought life was a checklist. You make the list. You do the things on the list. You check them off and they’re done. I coach vocal technique and I’m constantly trying to figure out ways to get my students to automatically, naturally, relax their throats. One way is to tell them to imagine, especially around the holidays, that “Everything is done!” The student instantly emits a blissful sigh from a visibly relaxed throat and jaw.
The problem is that there is always more to put on the list. Sometimes I’m not employed in a full-time job, either on purpose or because of some misadventure on the universe’s part or an odd combination of the two, and my check-off list is always just about as long. My mother has been retired for over twenty years and HER check-off list is as long as mine. When there isn’t a 45-hour-a-week job involved in the mix, though, the check-off list has more, shall we say, optional things in it, like friends and house maintenance, and it spans a longer period of time. I start doing things in advance. I’ve always done this, always the first teacher in the building to have my grades done, for example, but when I’m not so slammed for time I tend to do my Christmas shopping in September, so it’ll be done. My idea of nirvana is to get everything done. In advance.
And…then what?
Exactly. And.
My brother always says, When everything is done, you’ll be dead. A smart guy, my brother, and as a long-time John Lennon fan, he is more able to Let It Be than most people.
I’m not much for process. I’d like to be. I’d like to live in the moment and smell the flowers and all those things. But I seem to always be looking at the end. What’s the long-range plan? What’s my mission statement and how will I get there in twenty years? How are today’s tasks building toward a life structure that I envisioned five years ago? Earlier this year I wrote a list (a list, a list!) of things I would do when I retire. At the top of the list was, “Get enough sleep.” And the funny thing is, I’m self-employed. And I’m the second income. And there’s no reason not to get enough sleep. Except I have this list…
And what’s on the list? I’m always either looking for a job or changing careers. This being me, I’m doing both right now, and since I can’t just choose a life direction and head there, I’ve got three career changes going on. I’ve been working on a career change to teaching for ten years, so now I have six licenses, covering an age range from Early Childhood to Middle School and a range of subjects that is conservatively Pretty Much Everything – and I’m working on getting an acting career going, and oh yes, there’s that writing thing. So networking, rehearsals, coaching, writing a blog. Actually, my biggest job at the moment is being the Keeper of the Keys for our household and we’re just coming off a year of renovation and smoke damage, plus we have a teenage son. So most items on the list have to do with scheduling, procurement, quality assurance, and inventory control of homework, clothing and food. We unexpectedly made a couple dozen friends this year and, never having done anything like that before, we were surprised at how much time it takes to have friends, kind of like what happens when you get a boyfriend or have a baby. And I’m putting off really settling into my fifties, so that takes time for working out, walking, and choosing food wisely. I used to schedule in non-motorized transportation time, because that’s a two-fer -- saving the earth and my health – but it took too long.
And I need to add more Saving the Earth stuff to my list. Yesterday I read in Time magazine that the Himalayan glaciers are melting. Three billion people literally depend on that glacier melt for their lives. The same article stated that many climatologists believe that we’re looking at the extreme edge of the envelope for global warming, and much faster than anyone anticipated – you can see the changes, year by year, with the human eye. You don’t even read about the “Great Die-off,” also known as the biggest extinction rate since the dinosaurs, or the deterioration of the ozone layer any more. Seems that we’ve run out of brain space for the number of planet-sized disasters we’ve created as a species.
But it might not be that bad. A friend of mine says that it’s not the planet we need to worry about. It’s ourselves. This big ol’ planet has healed itself, or changed to sustain different kinds of life, several times. Evolutionary niches will always be filled anew, if you wait long enough. It’s just that the Earth doesn’t much care if we’re one of those species being sustained or filling the niches, and I don’t think my descendants are guaranteed a seat in the theater to see what does fill those spaces in another couple million years.
So maybe I don’t like the process that we’re in, this particular epoch. Or maybe the flowers need to be sniffed now while they’re still there.
Martin Luther said, If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would still plant my little apple tree. And who was it who said that jobs worth doing couldn’t be accomplished in one lifetime? As I mosey toward certain death (actually, in my twenties it felt like moseying – thirty years on it feels more like sliding and soon it may feel like hurtling), I’m becoming more aware that I will have to leave some jobs to others. (Although I’ve already picked out two candidates for my husband’s next wife, women I approve of and who will treat him well. There are two so he’ll have a choice.) I never did get that job of Empress of the World, so the task of delegating some of the bigger jobs is going more slowly than I’d like, the bigger jobs being things like achieving universal health care, outlawing meanness, and nuclear disarmament.
Today, the day after the winter solstice, is the first day of the new solar year – this morning, as Susan Cooper wrote in her beautiful poem “The Shortest Day,” the new year’s sunshine blazed awake. As the Earth continues in its accustomed path around the sun, our hemisphere will be tilting toward radiance more and more for the next six months. Instead of the days darkening and shortening, they will brighten and lengthen, as they have every year for the past billion years or so.
I will never finish everything on my list.
(Can I take a nap then, and read a non-improving book, and take the time to walk to the store?)
We’ll keep working on those jobs, daily and eternal, and when we’re done with our part, other people will pick up what we were doing.
And that’s the way it is.
And.
That’s it. That’s possibly the most important idea that human language has captured.
I always thought life was a checklist. You make the list. You do the things on the list. You check them off and they’re done. I coach vocal technique and I’m constantly trying to figure out ways to get my students to automatically, naturally, relax their throats. One way is to tell them to imagine, especially around the holidays, that “Everything is done!” The student instantly emits a blissful sigh from a visibly relaxed throat and jaw.
The problem is that there is always more to put on the list. Sometimes I’m not employed in a full-time job, either on purpose or because of some misadventure on the universe’s part or an odd combination of the two, and my check-off list is always just about as long. My mother has been retired for over twenty years and HER check-off list is as long as mine. When there isn’t a 45-hour-a-week job involved in the mix, though, the check-off list has more, shall we say, optional things in it, like friends and house maintenance, and it spans a longer period of time. I start doing things in advance. I’ve always done this, always the first teacher in the building to have my grades done, for example, but when I’m not so slammed for time I tend to do my Christmas shopping in September, so it’ll be done. My idea of nirvana is to get everything done. In advance.
And…then what?
Exactly. And.
My brother always says, When everything is done, you’ll be dead. A smart guy, my brother, and as a long-time John Lennon fan, he is more able to Let It Be than most people.
I’m not much for process. I’d like to be. I’d like to live in the moment and smell the flowers and all those things. But I seem to always be looking at the end. What’s the long-range plan? What’s my mission statement and how will I get there in twenty years? How are today’s tasks building toward a life structure that I envisioned five years ago? Earlier this year I wrote a list (a list, a list!) of things I would do when I retire. At the top of the list was, “Get enough sleep.” And the funny thing is, I’m self-employed. And I’m the second income. And there’s no reason not to get enough sleep. Except I have this list…
And what’s on the list? I’m always either looking for a job or changing careers. This being me, I’m doing both right now, and since I can’t just choose a life direction and head there, I’ve got three career changes going on. I’ve been working on a career change to teaching for ten years, so now I have six licenses, covering an age range from Early Childhood to Middle School and a range of subjects that is conservatively Pretty Much Everything – and I’m working on getting an acting career going, and oh yes, there’s that writing thing. So networking, rehearsals, coaching, writing a blog. Actually, my biggest job at the moment is being the Keeper of the Keys for our household and we’re just coming off a year of renovation and smoke damage, plus we have a teenage son. So most items on the list have to do with scheduling, procurement, quality assurance, and inventory control of homework, clothing and food. We unexpectedly made a couple dozen friends this year and, never having done anything like that before, we were surprised at how much time it takes to have friends, kind of like what happens when you get a boyfriend or have a baby. And I’m putting off really settling into my fifties, so that takes time for working out, walking, and choosing food wisely. I used to schedule in non-motorized transportation time, because that’s a two-fer -- saving the earth and my health – but it took too long.
And I need to add more Saving the Earth stuff to my list. Yesterday I read in Time magazine that the Himalayan glaciers are melting. Three billion people literally depend on that glacier melt for their lives. The same article stated that many climatologists believe that we’re looking at the extreme edge of the envelope for global warming, and much faster than anyone anticipated – you can see the changes, year by year, with the human eye. You don’t even read about the “Great Die-off,” also known as the biggest extinction rate since the dinosaurs, or the deterioration of the ozone layer any more. Seems that we’ve run out of brain space for the number of planet-sized disasters we’ve created as a species.
But it might not be that bad. A friend of mine says that it’s not the planet we need to worry about. It’s ourselves. This big ol’ planet has healed itself, or changed to sustain different kinds of life, several times. Evolutionary niches will always be filled anew, if you wait long enough. It’s just that the Earth doesn’t much care if we’re one of those species being sustained or filling the niches, and I don’t think my descendants are guaranteed a seat in the theater to see what does fill those spaces in another couple million years.
So maybe I don’t like the process that we’re in, this particular epoch. Or maybe the flowers need to be sniffed now while they’re still there.
Martin Luther said, If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would still plant my little apple tree. And who was it who said that jobs worth doing couldn’t be accomplished in one lifetime? As I mosey toward certain death (actually, in my twenties it felt like moseying – thirty years on it feels more like sliding and soon it may feel like hurtling), I’m becoming more aware that I will have to leave some jobs to others. (Although I’ve already picked out two candidates for my husband’s next wife, women I approve of and who will treat him well. There are two so he’ll have a choice.) I never did get that job of Empress of the World, so the task of delegating some of the bigger jobs is going more slowly than I’d like, the bigger jobs being things like achieving universal health care, outlawing meanness, and nuclear disarmament.
Today, the day after the winter solstice, is the first day of the new solar year – this morning, as Susan Cooper wrote in her beautiful poem “The Shortest Day,” the new year’s sunshine blazed awake. As the Earth continues in its accustomed path around the sun, our hemisphere will be tilting toward radiance more and more for the next six months. Instead of the days darkening and shortening, they will brighten and lengthen, as they have every year for the past billion years or so.
I will never finish everything on my list.
(Can I take a nap then, and read a non-improving book, and take the time to walk to the store?)
We’ll keep working on those jobs, daily and eternal, and when we’re done with our part, other people will pick up what we were doing.
And that’s the way it is.
And.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Home Town
When you're driving toward the top edge of a square state and see a small highway mileage sign that says curtly "301," it's nice that this bit of information tells you that you are exactly where you think you are. You have to take your certainties where you find them.
I've lived in Portland all my life, except for two years at a state college and five years of clenched jaw in Baltimore. It rains a lot in Portland. The Willamette Valley is breathtaking in the pictures, but since the residents don't look at the pictures, they don't usually see the spectacular views. This morning was straight out of a travel folder, or maybe an ad for a spiritual retreat. I even forgave the doctor for giving us a 7:00 a.m. appointment, because that meant that Robin and I walked out the door while Venus still shone in the East, too big to be believed, and Jupiter, only slightly less bulging, glowed in the South. Sometimes I get the blues when I think about our planet's illnesses, and it makes me happy to know that we have neighbors close by.
The city behind us was still asleep in the dark, and even Mt. St. Helens, to the north, was in shadow. But as we crossed the sky-scraping bridge, over the steel gray river lit by streetlights, the mountain showed smoky gray against a lemon sky. The picture was signed with a whimsically pink thumb print. Robin started to sing the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey. He's my sound track boy.
Portland isn't a big town though. Even when it's drippy, living in Portland is a little like Playing House (I guess that would be Playing City). You can get on a bus or a train and be downtown in five minutes. You can walk across the whole thing in half an hour. There's a bookstore and a coffee shop in nearly any block. Even with the down economy, it's hard to find a parking place at night. The sidewalks are full of pedestrians, bent on trysts with Thai or Vietnamese food, modern art or jazz.
I feel a little bad that I've only lived in three of the four quadrants of Portland, but then I missed the Northeast by only a half a block. You can't say I haven't tried. I've been fairly peripatetic, averaging 2.2 years in each house since I was twenty-five years old, and I have been reproved as a gypsy by my eldest child, who suffered most from these impulsive moves, but I'm settled in now. I lived in my last house for seven years, longer than I have in any since my teens, and we moved two years ago into a house that we optimistically plan to live in for the rest of our lives. Usually after six months I can see the advantages to living somewhere else, but so far the only disadvantage I can see is that this isn't Italy. I could trade in one or two neighbors. Still, out of 26 people on our street, that's not bad. It's a good neighborhood, too - people water your flowers when you have to be away, and stop by to tell you that your car lights are on.
Are the cities really to be destroyed? Even a die-hard pessimist like me, comfy with bad news, sometimes has doubts, even though E.B. White says they are. And John Steinbeck stated that all cities, without exception, are ringed with garbage. But ours isn't. Of course there is the egg white of suburbs, but even that is surrounded by farmland, and then the not-too-wild loggers' playground before you make a 90 degree turn to parallel the Pacific Ocean.
Portland is a city of optimists, even when the sun hasn't come out in so many weeks that we don't know what to make of the radioactive ball when it does finally show up. We've tried all kinds of crazy things. The Bottle Bill, Right to Die, the right of all citizens to get to a beach without buying a hotel reservation. We're not too sure, now, about whether or not somebody really is getting rich by wasting money in our public schools, crowded and in disrepair as they are, and it makes us feel bad to hear that there are 55 students in an English Lit classroom downtown. And I've seen thousands of people gather downtown to demonstrate against the last war or to run 26 miles, even though the sight of these crowds is usually cordoned off from the shopping district.
But I'm no fool. I read the papers, those that still exist. (Are they still papers when they're free and you read them on the computer screen?) I keep reading about the devastating effects of global warming and the prognosis for our future. Is it a problem if the Arctic ice cap melts? What about the dead zone off the Oregon coast? A major American city got lost four years ago, and tens of thousands of people are still living in temporary houses, in a city still unprotected by sturdy levees. Why should I care about the massive die-off of frogs and hundreds, if not thousands of other species? After all, the dinosaurs died off and after millions of years, evolution filled in all those biological niches again.
I'm not talking about undifferentiated anxiety here. As Frank McCourt said, There Are Dark Forces. Should I concern myself with the government's new right to eavesdrop on Americans without a search warrant? What about health care reform - a young, healthy friend of mine was turned down for health insurance because she has had hemorrhoids. There are so many forces bigger than I am, even though I repeat Martin Luther's mantra nearly every day: Even if I knew the that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would plant my apple tree.
So I don't know what to think. Go with the sadness that hurts so good, sink into the warm belief that there's nothing left to be done? Or get out there in the dusty argumentative cold and join the ones who are shoving their shoulders against the side? I like comfort and it's a puzzle. How much can I afford to care? I love my city. I love my home. My life is pretty close to perfect right now. How much discomfort am I willing to feel to pay attention, and maybe even lift a hand?
I've lived in Portland all my life, except for two years at a state college and five years of clenched jaw in Baltimore. It rains a lot in Portland. The Willamette Valley is breathtaking in the pictures, but since the residents don't look at the pictures, they don't usually see the spectacular views. This morning was straight out of a travel folder, or maybe an ad for a spiritual retreat. I even forgave the doctor for giving us a 7:00 a.m. appointment, because that meant that Robin and I walked out the door while Venus still shone in the East, too big to be believed, and Jupiter, only slightly less bulging, glowed in the South. Sometimes I get the blues when I think about our planet's illnesses, and it makes me happy to know that we have neighbors close by.
The city behind us was still asleep in the dark, and even Mt. St. Helens, to the north, was in shadow. But as we crossed the sky-scraping bridge, over the steel gray river lit by streetlights, the mountain showed smoky gray against a lemon sky. The picture was signed with a whimsically pink thumb print. Robin started to sing the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey. He's my sound track boy.
Portland isn't a big town though. Even when it's drippy, living in Portland is a little like Playing House (I guess that would be Playing City). You can get on a bus or a train and be downtown in five minutes. You can walk across the whole thing in half an hour. There's a bookstore and a coffee shop in nearly any block. Even with the down economy, it's hard to find a parking place at night. The sidewalks are full of pedestrians, bent on trysts with Thai or Vietnamese food, modern art or jazz.
I feel a little bad that I've only lived in three of the four quadrants of Portland, but then I missed the Northeast by only a half a block. You can't say I haven't tried. I've been fairly peripatetic, averaging 2.2 years in each house since I was twenty-five years old, and I have been reproved as a gypsy by my eldest child, who suffered most from these impulsive moves, but I'm settled in now. I lived in my last house for seven years, longer than I have in any since my teens, and we moved two years ago into a house that we optimistically plan to live in for the rest of our lives. Usually after six months I can see the advantages to living somewhere else, but so far the only disadvantage I can see is that this isn't Italy. I could trade in one or two neighbors. Still, out of 26 people on our street, that's not bad. It's a good neighborhood, too - people water your flowers when you have to be away, and stop by to tell you that your car lights are on.
Are the cities really to be destroyed? Even a die-hard pessimist like me, comfy with bad news, sometimes has doubts, even though E.B. White says they are. And John Steinbeck stated that all cities, without exception, are ringed with garbage. But ours isn't. Of course there is the egg white of suburbs, but even that is surrounded by farmland, and then the not-too-wild loggers' playground before you make a 90 degree turn to parallel the Pacific Ocean.
Portland is a city of optimists, even when the sun hasn't come out in so many weeks that we don't know what to make of the radioactive ball when it does finally show up. We've tried all kinds of crazy things. The Bottle Bill, Right to Die, the right of all citizens to get to a beach without buying a hotel reservation. We're not too sure, now, about whether or not somebody really is getting rich by wasting money in our public schools, crowded and in disrepair as they are, and it makes us feel bad to hear that there are 55 students in an English Lit classroom downtown. And I've seen thousands of people gather downtown to demonstrate against the last war or to run 26 miles, even though the sight of these crowds is usually cordoned off from the shopping district.
But I'm no fool. I read the papers, those that still exist. (Are they still papers when they're free and you read them on the computer screen?) I keep reading about the devastating effects of global warming and the prognosis for our future. Is it a problem if the Arctic ice cap melts? What about the dead zone off the Oregon coast? A major American city got lost four years ago, and tens of thousands of people are still living in temporary houses, in a city still unprotected by sturdy levees. Why should I care about the massive die-off of frogs and hundreds, if not thousands of other species? After all, the dinosaurs died off and after millions of years, evolution filled in all those biological niches again.
I'm not talking about undifferentiated anxiety here. As Frank McCourt said, There Are Dark Forces. Should I concern myself with the government's new right to eavesdrop on Americans without a search warrant? What about health care reform - a young, healthy friend of mine was turned down for health insurance because she has had hemorrhoids. There are so many forces bigger than I am, even though I repeat Martin Luther's mantra nearly every day: Even if I knew the that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would plant my apple tree.
So I don't know what to think. Go with the sadness that hurts so good, sink into the warm belief that there's nothing left to be done? Or get out there in the dusty argumentative cold and join the ones who are shoving their shoulders against the side? I like comfort and it's a puzzle. How much can I afford to care? I love my city. I love my home. My life is pretty close to perfect right now. How much discomfort am I willing to feel to pay attention, and maybe even lift a hand?
Friday, October 16, 2009
Under Acceleration
I’m a multi-tasker and proud of it. I got my college degree without taking out loans, as everybody in my family knows, by working one full-time and three part-time jobs. I’ve spent years where I owned a business, worked at Tektronix, sang in the opera chorus, was a church soloist, had twenty voice students and was the mother of a toddler – all at once. As I’ve matured (some call it “aging,”) I’ve noticed that my ability to do more than three things at a time is becoming compromised. This is disabling, but I’m starting to come to terms with it, much as I have come to terms to bifocals. Grumpily.
Now my multi-tasking feels more like meandering. I looked in the hall closet this morning at 6:30 a.m. to find my son a hat, while booting up my computer to read the New York Times and eating my breakfast. Three hours later, the contents of the closet are strewn around the room waiting to be sorted and put into other closets, my breakfast sits uneaten, and the Times has become the jumping off point for this essay.
Whether you stack time vertically or take the more linear approach, having enough time to accomplish everything in a day has become one of our highest anxieties. According to the Times, there are now 111 million people on the road working while driving. They e-mail, talk on the phone, eat lunch – sometimes all at once. This, despite research showing that people who talk on the phone, even it it’s hands-free, are four times more likely to crash.
“It’s a seconds-count economy,” one worker said. In other words, he believes that you absolutely must risk your life, and the lives of other people on the road, in order to do the minimum required to do your job well. He’s right, too – in this tight economy, the first person on the spot wins the job or lands the customer. If you take a breath, sit down at a table to eat your lunch, wait until you get where you’re going to check your e-mail or take a phone call – well, you might as well be Bob Cratchit, scrivener. It’s all so quaint, and you’re history, just like a Dickens character.
However, we are still the same one-thing-at-a-time mammals that we were before “the seconds-count economy.” Our brains just don’t evolve that fast. Brain research shows clearly that we aren’t built to multi-task well. My teenage son and I will both argue this point, but we are wrong. In order to do two or six things at once, the brain switches back and forth between tasks. This makes it less efficient, and lowers significantly the quality of brain function. So if you’re multi-tasking to save time, you are more likely to make a mistake that you’ll have to fix later. Or you’ll learn something incorrectly. If you’re driving, you might die. Or kill somebody. And that’s too high a price to pay for staying competitive, folks.
Trying to do several things at once shortens our attention spans, too. Just as TV has trained us to pay attention for one- or two-second flashes of information, the brains of multi-taskers are being trained to jump from task to task, so that it’s harder to investigate and think critically about more complex ideas.
We know in our heart of hearts that it’s not always comfortable or safe to cram so much into each moment. Why do we do it?
Well, time is the most precious commodity of all, isn’t it? We hoard it, schedule it, slice and dice it and package it up in our electronic devices or even, anachronistically, on family calendars posted on the fridge. We probably obsess about having enough time more than we think about having enough money. And if we have the feeling that there ARE no more “normal” days, that every day feels like a crisis and we just can’t get to everything any more, we are right.
There’s no lack of opinions and studies to support our nostalgic belief that we used to have more time. We DID used to have more time. Americans work more hours now than the Japanese, who sometimes commit suicide because of job pressures. We work WAY more hours than the Europeans. (Many Europeans believe that if you’re going to work in the U.S., do it before you get married and have children, because an American job precludes the possibility of spending time with them.)
Ironically, we may not even be keeping up with the growing demands of our lives by working longer hours. We’ve got 16 waking hours in a day. (I’d like to assume that everybody is in bed for the other eight, but then I’m a dreamer.) There’s just so much you’re going to get done in those 16 hours, no matter how efficient you are.
But wait. Remember those studies that showed that we made up for the loss of buying power by sending the other adult in the family to work? If one person can’t keep up with the modern cost of living, a second person can make up the difference. If we’re lucky enough to have a partner in the household, and have the willpower to delegate and the communication skills to job-share our lives, we really can keep up with our insistent schedules.
We think. Although sometimes I wonder, “What happens when we need a third adult in the house to get a job?”
I’m not advocating polygamy. I’m just asking.
Just as we need a second adult to earn enough money to stay ahead, we may find that we have to delegate to everybody over the age of ten in the family, do five things at once, sleep less, and eat in the car, just to stay up with the minimum required to make our lives work. How do we have enough TIME to do everything necessary to get a job, keep a job, do a job – without endangering our health, our sanity, or relationships, or the lives of people on the road?
My friend Sara is one of the most efficient people I know. She and her husband both work full-time. They have two children, who attend two different schools. These kids are busy and bright, with lots of friends and activities. Her house is always clean and she manages to have people over to dinner often, and she’s got a network of friends that would make Margaret Mead sit up and notice.
But she’s constantly on the road, managing life from her cell phone. She’s tired. She’s grateful…she is aware of her blessings and takes many of her precious moments to give thanks for a great life. But she is amazingly, unrelentingly BUSY. And she’s typical of most working people I know.
For most people, personal time comes out of sleep time, or sitting down and eating time, or quiet time. Children don’t have time to sit and dream or run over to the neighbor’s house to play or dawdle over their breakfast. (Well, that ship sailed decades ago, anyway.) Even worse, work time comes out of sleeping or eating time. There is no personal time.
This takes a toll, make no mistake about that. A 2005 Washington Post article cited an “avalanche” of studies that showed that human beings who sleep less than six or seven hours a night have a much higher risk cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity. Recent studies in the U.S. and Europe show that, due to an increase in work hours, we have fewer friends and spend less time with them than we used to. We’re a service economy, in large part, because we don’t have time to cook our own dinner or do our own taxes. We may not have even had time to learn how to cook. We were too busy working.
It’s a seconds-count world. What happens when the time deficit gets bigger? When one or two efficient, sleep-deprived, motivated, multi-tasking adults just can’t get it all done? Make no mistake, we will get there. We may be there now.
There aren’t more than 24 hours in a day. We can layer those moments and fill them up vertically. We can slice into our sleep time. We can delegate to our spouses and children. We can schedule efficiently and yes, we can e-mail and talk on the phone while driving. But when the demands on us become so great that we just need another six hours a day, even at peak efficiency, to get everything done, at that point, we’ll just have to re-think the whole system.
Harold Ross, legendary editor of The New Yorker, used to bawl, “The system’s falling down!” Has it fallen and we were too busy to notice it?
And what’s the alternative?
I don't know. But I think we'd better get cracking on it...in our spare time.
Now my multi-tasking feels more like meandering. I looked in the hall closet this morning at 6:30 a.m. to find my son a hat, while booting up my computer to read the New York Times and eating my breakfast. Three hours later, the contents of the closet are strewn around the room waiting to be sorted and put into other closets, my breakfast sits uneaten, and the Times has become the jumping off point for this essay.
Whether you stack time vertically or take the more linear approach, having enough time to accomplish everything in a day has become one of our highest anxieties. According to the Times, there are now 111 million people on the road working while driving. They e-mail, talk on the phone, eat lunch – sometimes all at once. This, despite research showing that people who talk on the phone, even it it’s hands-free, are four times more likely to crash.
“It’s a seconds-count economy,” one worker said. In other words, he believes that you absolutely must risk your life, and the lives of other people on the road, in order to do the minimum required to do your job well. He’s right, too – in this tight economy, the first person on the spot wins the job or lands the customer. If you take a breath, sit down at a table to eat your lunch, wait until you get where you’re going to check your e-mail or take a phone call – well, you might as well be Bob Cratchit, scrivener. It’s all so quaint, and you’re history, just like a Dickens character.
However, we are still the same one-thing-at-a-time mammals that we were before “the seconds-count economy.” Our brains just don’t evolve that fast. Brain research shows clearly that we aren’t built to multi-task well. My teenage son and I will both argue this point, but we are wrong. In order to do two or six things at once, the brain switches back and forth between tasks. This makes it less efficient, and lowers significantly the quality of brain function. So if you’re multi-tasking to save time, you are more likely to make a mistake that you’ll have to fix later. Or you’ll learn something incorrectly. If you’re driving, you might die. Or kill somebody. And that’s too high a price to pay for staying competitive, folks.
Trying to do several things at once shortens our attention spans, too. Just as TV has trained us to pay attention for one- or two-second flashes of information, the brains of multi-taskers are being trained to jump from task to task, so that it’s harder to investigate and think critically about more complex ideas.
We know in our heart of hearts that it’s not always comfortable or safe to cram so much into each moment. Why do we do it?
Well, time is the most precious commodity of all, isn’t it? We hoard it, schedule it, slice and dice it and package it up in our electronic devices or even, anachronistically, on family calendars posted on the fridge. We probably obsess about having enough time more than we think about having enough money. And if we have the feeling that there ARE no more “normal” days, that every day feels like a crisis and we just can’t get to everything any more, we are right.
There’s no lack of opinions and studies to support our nostalgic belief that we used to have more time. We DID used to have more time. Americans work more hours now than the Japanese, who sometimes commit suicide because of job pressures. We work WAY more hours than the Europeans. (Many Europeans believe that if you’re going to work in the U.S., do it before you get married and have children, because an American job precludes the possibility of spending time with them.)
Ironically, we may not even be keeping up with the growing demands of our lives by working longer hours. We’ve got 16 waking hours in a day. (I’d like to assume that everybody is in bed for the other eight, but then I’m a dreamer.) There’s just so much you’re going to get done in those 16 hours, no matter how efficient you are.
But wait. Remember those studies that showed that we made up for the loss of buying power by sending the other adult in the family to work? If one person can’t keep up with the modern cost of living, a second person can make up the difference. If we’re lucky enough to have a partner in the household, and have the willpower to delegate and the communication skills to job-share our lives, we really can keep up with our insistent schedules.
We think. Although sometimes I wonder, “What happens when we need a third adult in the house to get a job?”
I’m not advocating polygamy. I’m just asking.
Just as we need a second adult to earn enough money to stay ahead, we may find that we have to delegate to everybody over the age of ten in the family, do five things at once, sleep less, and eat in the car, just to stay up with the minimum required to make our lives work. How do we have enough TIME to do everything necessary to get a job, keep a job, do a job – without endangering our health, our sanity, or relationships, or the lives of people on the road?
My friend Sara is one of the most efficient people I know. She and her husband both work full-time. They have two children, who attend two different schools. These kids are busy and bright, with lots of friends and activities. Her house is always clean and she manages to have people over to dinner often, and she’s got a network of friends that would make Margaret Mead sit up and notice.
But she’s constantly on the road, managing life from her cell phone. She’s tired. She’s grateful…she is aware of her blessings and takes many of her precious moments to give thanks for a great life. But she is amazingly, unrelentingly BUSY. And she’s typical of most working people I know.
For most people, personal time comes out of sleep time, or sitting down and eating time, or quiet time. Children don’t have time to sit and dream or run over to the neighbor’s house to play or dawdle over their breakfast. (Well, that ship sailed decades ago, anyway.) Even worse, work time comes out of sleeping or eating time. There is no personal time.
This takes a toll, make no mistake about that. A 2005 Washington Post article cited an “avalanche” of studies that showed that human beings who sleep less than six or seven hours a night have a much higher risk cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity. Recent studies in the U.S. and Europe show that, due to an increase in work hours, we have fewer friends and spend less time with them than we used to. We’re a service economy, in large part, because we don’t have time to cook our own dinner or do our own taxes. We may not have even had time to learn how to cook. We were too busy working.
It’s a seconds-count world. What happens when the time deficit gets bigger? When one or two efficient, sleep-deprived, motivated, multi-tasking adults just can’t get it all done? Make no mistake, we will get there. We may be there now.
There aren’t more than 24 hours in a day. We can layer those moments and fill them up vertically. We can slice into our sleep time. We can delegate to our spouses and children. We can schedule efficiently and yes, we can e-mail and talk on the phone while driving. But when the demands on us become so great that we just need another six hours a day, even at peak efficiency, to get everything done, at that point, we’ll just have to re-think the whole system.
Harold Ross, legendary editor of The New Yorker, used to bawl, “The system’s falling down!” Has it fallen and we were too busy to notice it?
And what’s the alternative?
I don't know. But I think we'd better get cracking on it...in our spare time.
It's Not Easy Being Yellow
I realize that I am literally wincing as I walk down the stairs, my arms full of indispensable tools for writing: calendar, notes, my fountain pen, my netbook. I’ve already walked past and talked myself out of a dozen activities to keep from going into my office – washing the oatmeal pot, putting away books, un-packaging the new iron – but I can’t take full credit. I stopped to do other things so I wouldn’t have to turn on the computer just yet. I made a to-do list of things that are already listed in five places and that will take years to complete, some of which aren’t even my jobs. Even now, with my back against the wall, I’m straightening up my desk and dusting the top of the monitor. What do I fear?
I’m a procrastinator. Now that’s a secret shame. There should be Procrastinators Anonymous meetings. It’s one of those character flaws that most people would have to admit to themselves, if not to anybody else. I know this because of the plethora of books, magazine articles and blogs on the subject. Psychology Today, the Times, even my favorite used bookstore have all conspired to bring this up to me in the last week. (I loved the book title, “Stop Procrastinating…Now!”)
I put off opening mail, filing taxes, paying bills. WHERE is that receipt? What is this extra charge? I had all that stuff in color-coded files. Where are they now?
There’s always too much stuff in the house and garage, stuff I don’t need anymore, stuff that’s driving me crazy. Stuff. And this really is a source of shame because what I SAY is that I don’t want or need extra stuff or the square footage to store it. I am a true Thoreau-ite and would like nothing more than to live in a 160 square foot house with just the necessities to be healthy and happy. But here I sit with a leaky kayak, a bike that doesn’t fit, a two-and-a-half-cylinder car with expired tags, and piles and piles of books and clothing that I don’t want to read or wear.
It gets worse. One of my favorite ways to keep from doing things is to read the paper, although why it’s called the paper when it’s just patterns of light on an electronic screen I don’t know. Lately I’ve been reading a lot about retirement, old age and death, being in my fifties and all. The question yesterday was, “What would you do if you only had five years to live?” My list looked like this:
1. Get enough sleep
2. Exercise for energy, mood uplift and weight loss
3. Have time to write
This is really funny. This is not a retirement list or 100 places to see before you die. I actually took a leave of absence this year so I would have time to write. I’ve already done the hard part. All I have to do is…do it.
All I have to do? Is that all? You’re kidding, right?
I’ve been putting off bills, chores and satisfaction all my life. Procrastination has cost me thousands of dollars, time spent worrying, days, weeks and months of inconvenience, and the depreciation and loss of dreams.
Why? Why do I do it?
It’s a powerful force, this compulsion to put things off. Remember the monitor dusting? I can spin out reading the paper into a two-hour thread. Wait, there’s the international papers too! What’s in this old purse?
I know I’m more comfortable with short-term pain than long-term gain. I’ve cultivated the skill of living in the moment, refusing to look ten days or ten years into the future. Who really wants to think seriously about how much they have to pay in taxes or bills, much less what their retirement or declining health will look like? And it’s easy to put these big jobs off – I’m distracted, and how! I can spend hours on Facebook and e-mail alone. Lest you think this is because I am self-employed, be deluded no longer – I’m corresponding with people sitting in cubicles. It’s not my fault!
Besides, I use up my willpower muscles early. By the time I’ve bypassed the doughnut and worked out in addition to working, running an errand or two plus a load of laundry, there isn’t a lot of go-juice left for these far-off chores.
But it’s more than a lack of vision or energy. I really hate this, but I think that despite my out-there, can-do persona, I lack confidence, fearing that I’ll fail if I try. I’ve pushed this one so far under the bed that I’m not even aware that I’m doing it. No, no, it’s not that I’m afraid of failure, I’m just too damned busy. Sure, there’s a low-level itch, feeling a little like dry skin and a little like hives, but as long as I don’t look at it too closely, all it does is…cost me.
I didn’t realize how strong this one is. This one. I can’t do it. The essay won’t be good enough. I’ll let people down. I’ll be too old. No one will buy it. No one will hire me. They’ll laugh. They’ll be bored. They won’t even notice.
When this one has got you around the neck, all the rational thought you can muster may be just barely enough. I made schedules. I made concessions. I set my alarm. I got a workout done early. I promised that I would not read the paper before 4:00. I got to my desk at nine o’clock with a plan to sit there for three hours.
And so there I was, my face drawn up in a grimace, moving vertical files around on my desk, dusting the surge protector, realizing just how deep the fear goes.
I have given…procrastination…too much power. It has stolen my money, my peace of mind, and years of satisfaction from acting on my strengths. I want to say, no more.
It’s much easier to read the paper. But it’s 10:30 now, and I’ve written about something buried deeply in my heart. And whether it’s good enough or not, here it is.
I’m a procrastinator. Now that’s a secret shame. There should be Procrastinators Anonymous meetings. It’s one of those character flaws that most people would have to admit to themselves, if not to anybody else. I know this because of the plethora of books, magazine articles and blogs on the subject. Psychology Today, the Times, even my favorite used bookstore have all conspired to bring this up to me in the last week. (I loved the book title, “Stop Procrastinating…Now!”)
I put off opening mail, filing taxes, paying bills. WHERE is that receipt? What is this extra charge? I had all that stuff in color-coded files. Where are they now?
There’s always too much stuff in the house and garage, stuff I don’t need anymore, stuff that’s driving me crazy. Stuff. And this really is a source of shame because what I SAY is that I don’t want or need extra stuff or the square footage to store it. I am a true Thoreau-ite and would like nothing more than to live in a 160 square foot house with just the necessities to be healthy and happy. But here I sit with a leaky kayak, a bike that doesn’t fit, a two-and-a-half-cylinder car with expired tags, and piles and piles of books and clothing that I don’t want to read or wear.
It gets worse. One of my favorite ways to keep from doing things is to read the paper, although why it’s called the paper when it’s just patterns of light on an electronic screen I don’t know. Lately I’ve been reading a lot about retirement, old age and death, being in my fifties and all. The question yesterday was, “What would you do if you only had five years to live?” My list looked like this:
1. Get enough sleep
2. Exercise for energy, mood uplift and weight loss
3. Have time to write
This is really funny. This is not a retirement list or 100 places to see before you die. I actually took a leave of absence this year so I would have time to write. I’ve already done the hard part. All I have to do is…do it.
All I have to do? Is that all? You’re kidding, right?
I’ve been putting off bills, chores and satisfaction all my life. Procrastination has cost me thousands of dollars, time spent worrying, days, weeks and months of inconvenience, and the depreciation and loss of dreams.
Why? Why do I do it?
It’s a powerful force, this compulsion to put things off. Remember the monitor dusting? I can spin out reading the paper into a two-hour thread. Wait, there’s the international papers too! What’s in this old purse?
I know I’m more comfortable with short-term pain than long-term gain. I’ve cultivated the skill of living in the moment, refusing to look ten days or ten years into the future. Who really wants to think seriously about how much they have to pay in taxes or bills, much less what their retirement or declining health will look like? And it’s easy to put these big jobs off – I’m distracted, and how! I can spend hours on Facebook and e-mail alone. Lest you think this is because I am self-employed, be deluded no longer – I’m corresponding with people sitting in cubicles. It’s not my fault!
Besides, I use up my willpower muscles early. By the time I’ve bypassed the doughnut and worked out in addition to working, running an errand or two plus a load of laundry, there isn’t a lot of go-juice left for these far-off chores.
But it’s more than a lack of vision or energy. I really hate this, but I think that despite my out-there, can-do persona, I lack confidence, fearing that I’ll fail if I try. I’ve pushed this one so far under the bed that I’m not even aware that I’m doing it. No, no, it’s not that I’m afraid of failure, I’m just too damned busy. Sure, there’s a low-level itch, feeling a little like dry skin and a little like hives, but as long as I don’t look at it too closely, all it does is…cost me.
I didn’t realize how strong this one is. This one. I can’t do it. The essay won’t be good enough. I’ll let people down. I’ll be too old. No one will buy it. No one will hire me. They’ll laugh. They’ll be bored. They won’t even notice.
When this one has got you around the neck, all the rational thought you can muster may be just barely enough. I made schedules. I made concessions. I set my alarm. I got a workout done early. I promised that I would not read the paper before 4:00. I got to my desk at nine o’clock with a plan to sit there for three hours.
And so there I was, my face drawn up in a grimace, moving vertical files around on my desk, dusting the surge protector, realizing just how deep the fear goes.
I have given…procrastination…too much power. It has stolen my money, my peace of mind, and years of satisfaction from acting on my strengths. I want to say, no more.
It’s much easier to read the paper. But it’s 10:30 now, and I’ve written about something buried deeply in my heart. And whether it’s good enough or not, here it is.
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