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Posts Tagged ‘modern life’

The Introvert’s Calendar

Posted in Creativity, Culture, tagged , , , , on 07 Sep 2023| 4 Comments »

Bless me, Reader. It’s been three weeks since my last post.

Why? Because my calendar broke. Or more accurately, my introvert calendar broke.

What’s an introvert calendar? A calendar with nothing on it. Clean slate. Empty boxes with no fixed engagements. A fully functioning introvert calendar doesn’t mean I plan to do nothing. It means I have nothing planned. Big difference.

In this, my last year before retirement (T-minus 207 days and counting), there is much to do, and we’ve been doing it. Our calendar—especially during the past two months—has been chockablock with appointments, meetings, consultations, meet-n-greets, follow-ups, examinations, and procedures. We’ve seen doctors, dermatologists, radiologists, phlebotomists, dentists, and oral surgeons (yes, #32 strikes again). We’ve met face-to-face with financial advisors, Medicare consultants, contractors, plumbers, and suppliers. And, somehow, we also managed to squeeze in a birthday (hers), a 40th wedding anniversary (ours), and even a few social engagements.

For anyone it would be a serious course in Advanced Adulting, but for a serious introvert like me, it’s been all that whilst running a marathon, and to be perfectly frank, I simply haven’t had the spoons for anything creative. My brain has been filled with concerns, info, deadlines, questions, and fretfulness both reasonable and un-, so my gardening mode has been “maintenance,” my cooking has been pedestrian, my reading has been limited to emails and current events, and I’ve written little and woven even less.

However (thankfully) September’s schedule has a bit more white space than did July/August, and we’re both counting on October to remain featureless and calm as the doldrums, because come November, it’s a new round of activity, with another birthday (mine), the holiday season, some brief travel, and a bathroom renovation stuck in for good measure.

But here’s the thing I want to pass along: during this time of non-creative busy-ness, I chided myself for avoiding creative endeavors, or at least I did, until I actually looked back at the calendar (the broken calendar) and saw just how busy we’ve actually been. Creativity takes energy, and as an introvert, I need quiet to recharge my batteries, and I haven’t had any of that. All of my energy has gone into what was needed, leaving little (or none) for what was wanted.

So when you find that you haven’t gotten back to that quilting project or written that poem, when you find yourself exhausted at the end of the day with no energy for that new recipe or insufficient focus to get back to that book you’ve been reading, take a breath and admit two things: we all have only so much energy, and we have to prioritize demands on it.

Life is rarely constant; it much prefers cycles, rising and falling, waves and troughs. As long as we keep creativity on the To Do list, there will eventually be time for it.

Just keep it on the list.

k

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500 Days

Posted in Culture, tagged , , , on 18 Nov 2022| 2 Comments »

In 500 days, I will retire. In more ways than one.

I will retire, as in leave the job I have held for lo these decades past.
I will also, for a time, retire, as in go to bed and sleep (I hope) for more than 5 hours at a shot.
I may also retire, in that I may allow my naturally reticent nature may be more the norm.

Either way, in 500 days I will have, for the first time ever, a long stretch of time where I do not have a day job.

I began working in my teens. During my college years I had to hold down a job. Even when I was studying in Jerusalem, I cleaned flats and played in the symphony for extra cash. After I dropped out and returned home, at age 21 or so, I began to work full-time. Vacations, if I had them, for the first decade or so were at most one week long. In the late 90s, I had enough seniority to afford my first two-week vacation and, in the early “oughts,” I had my first  three-week vacation (I’ve only had one other, in the mid-2010s). I’ve had a full-time job for over forty years, and have been at my current company for over three decades.

I’ve been lucky. I lucked into a good profession for which I had no schooling at a time when learning “on the job” was still a thing and aptitude combined with hard work carried enough weight to balance out the lack of a degree. I got lucky with a spouse who is good with money, contented more by daily kindnesses than by flashy acquisitions, and who truly is a life partner in every sense. As a result of these lucky breaks (and my perseverance), I can retire in my mid-60s, rather than having to work until I’m in my mid-70s.

Advice on making the transition from work-a-day-monkey-boy to curmudgeonly-semi-hermit is plentiful (although perhaps not that specifically tailored to my expectations). I have friends and relatives who’ve made the transition, have seen a shift in my news- and article-feeds toward the topic, and am in contact with professional advisors on how to handle the various mechanical and financial aspects of it.

More to the point, though, I’ve begun to mentally prepare. Work takes up a large chunk of my waking life (and a not insubstantial chunk of my sleep). What time that’s left over is usually spent with chores, errands, time with my spouse, with slivers left over to spend with friends, books, and this blog (really my only writing outlet, these days). When I get back that chunk of work-time, I know I will have to apply a level of discipline to my schedule that is currently handled by my desire to receive a paycheck. Not everything will change, but a lot will, and knowing that ahead of time seems crucial to a smooth phase-shift.

But there are some questions that cannot be answered before I reach the promised land. Currently, I am a morning person, but this is primarily because at 4AM, my brain often clicks into gear in order to prepare for the work-day. Absent that impetus, will I still be a morning person? Or will I join my wife in her night-owlishness? And what of reading time? I’m not a fast reader, but part of that is because my mind is distracted and focus is often difficult to achieve. Will that change when I don’t have on-call duties or inter-office politics niggling at my attention span?

Naturally, one thing I plan on doing more of is writing, but what shall I write? A while ago I turned my hand to a mainstream/literary novel, but it’s been a struggle; is that what I really want to write? I have other ideas for series and sequels in genre fiction, and I think they might be fun to write. I have also been enjoying experiments in poetry (though the drive to create them comes and goes like a tide). So, will I finish the work-in-progress, or just move on to other projects?

I feel that it must be better to recognize these “known unknowns” than to get blindsided by them. I’m sure there are plenty of “unknown unknowns” out there, lying in wait like tigers in the bush. Best to have my head in the game.

I’ll be spending these next 500 days in preparation: downsizing expenses; selling off the unused, unneeded, unnecessary aspects of our life; learning about what needs to be done, and by when. I’ll be listening to my friends who’ve “gone before,” and reading those dry-as-dust articles about asset allocation and required minimum distribution strategies. All exciting stuff, to be sure (not).

Onward.

k

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Understanding My Father

Posted in Culture, Hi Tech, Low Tech, tagged , , , , , , on 20 May 2021| 7 Comments »

My father was a distinctly midcentury man.

He was a man of tract homes and manual transmissions, cigarettes and pipe tobacco, straw hats and huaraches, sand dunes and surf fishing, Frank Sinatra and Mel Tormé, pancakes with his kids on Saturday morning and roasted meats with his dad at the table on Sunday nights.  He was a dry martini/red wine with ice kind of guy: uncomplicated, elemental, rustic, reserved.

And yet, in his final decade, I found him nearly indecipherable. (more…)

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Book in Hand

Posted in Books, Low Tech, tagged , , , , , , on 21 Oct 2020| 6 Comments »

For most of my life, if I was awake, I had a book in my hand.

Riding the bus, walking to school, in the quad between classes, lounging at home, I’d have a book open, thumb in the crease, my nose buried in its leaves. Novels, anthologies, treatises, memoirs, history, science, poetry.

Anything.

Everything.

I read it.

Then, about a dozen years ago, life went off the rails. Book deals dried up. Friends and family began to die (at least ten during this period). We fostered a young woman, giving her a place to live for a year. Work became a stress factory. The economy tanked, causing the Great Recession. Then along came Trump. And then this pandemic.

In response, my reading habits changed, radically. They became constrained, limited to news articles, political analyses, and works of non-fiction. Instead of a dog-eared book, I carried my tablet with its instant-on, 24×7 access to current events and a front-row seat to our increasingly divided society.

Even so, every now and again, I would return to my fiction books, the stacks of TBR novels that inhabit every room in this house. I tried, repeatedly, to read one of them, hungry for that immersive experience, that miraculous wash of words that would sweep away reality and bathe me in the light of a different sun.

But the miracle never came. I didn’t have the patience, lacked the power to focus., and was unable to drive away the here-and-now with worlds of what-if. Book after book I picked up, opened, began, and abandoned within a few days, the only evidence of my attempt, a bookmark left somewhere in the first thirty pages.

With all this as preamble, one might wonder why, during my recent time off, I decided yet again to pick up a novel and give it a try. I mean, there I was in the last month of the most turbulent election cycle of my sixty-plus years, with a pandemic raging beyond my door, a daily gush of political scandals and turmoil filling the airwaves, and everywhere people shouting and crying and grieving and protesting. Was it hope? Obstinacy? Desperation? Whatever compelled me, it was in this moment, amid this maelstrom of chaos, that I chose to try again, and opened up a 150-year-old book.

And I read it. Cover to cover, in record time.

And then . . . I picked up another book, and read it, too.

And now, here I am, wondering what to read next.

. . .

Do yourself a favor.

Turn off the television. Put down the phone. Leave the tablet in the other room.

Pick up a book. A real book. The one you’ve been meaning to read for so long.

Take a seat near the window, where the natural light will be over your shoulder. Settle in, book in hand.

Open it up. Stick your nose in it. Smell it. Feel the pebbled surface of the printed page, the tension of the spine.

Chapter One.

Read. 

I tell you, it’s like coming home.

k

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Looking Back, Looking Forward

Posted in Creativity, Culture, tagged , , on 04 Oct 2018| 1 Comment »

Some weeks are so disjointed, so fractious, that I find it difficult to settle on a topic for my regular post.

This has been one of those weeks.

So far today I’ve written about 6,000 words and deleted about 5,950. I’ve pinballed between topics—the debacle of our political system, my 27th anniversary working in the same shop, the evolution of a short story that’s been simmering in my head, the upcoming birthday milestone that I’ll hit in December, the character of this year’s autumn display, a recipe for acorn squash soup that’s really good (and easy)—without being able to settle on one of them.

At such times, my mind can’t hold onto anything, not long enough, anyway. My attention, buffeted by gale-force winds, gets blown off course, lost at sea. Between radical changes at work, drama in the political sphere, and the very real possibility of life- and lifestyle-altering projects currently in the offing here at home, I simply cannot concentrate.

However, I’ve decided that this is okay.

Not every week is a winner.

Sometimes just making it through to the end is the best we can do.

Here’s hoping for better.

k

 

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A Change in Heart

Posted in Culture, tagged , , , , , , on 22 Sep 2016| 1 Comment »

Simple LivingMy world has become meaner, of late, and I’m guessing yours has, too.

Mean, in the sense of “harsh, spiteful, and cruel,” but also in the sense of “crude, lowly, or ignoble.”

Work, politics, society, and even some relationships have taken on a more callous, retributive aspect. People don’t want to listen — They don’t even want to care. — and it feels like the whole social contract has begun to unravel.

My world has indeed become more mean.

In response, I find that I have becoming meaner, as well. Patience has vanished. Reactions have intensified. Empathy has hit rock bottom.

And I hate it.

So I’m doing something about it.

I’m changing the only thing I can.

Me. (more…)

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A Man of Meh-ny Talents

Posted in Culture, tagged , , , , on 07 Apr 2016| Leave a Comment »

SFC's Little Men by Warren GoodrichI’ve always taken pride in being a generalist. Robert Heinlein, in one of the few quotes of his that I like, said “Specialization is for insects,” and for myself, this feels like truth. For me, it fits.

While I am thoroughly capable of obsessing about…well, about pretty much anything…I am not capable of concentrating on one topic, to the exclusion of all others, for the years it would take to become an expert. My freewheeling curiosity is impossible to constrain lest it becomes bored, not through having learned all there is on a topic (far from it), but because my mind tends to wander as I wonder, leading me astray from the path on which I began.

As a result, my history is littered with cobwebbed interests and skills, all of which were at one time a grand passion but which now have been shunted to the side by the necessities of surviving in our rapid-fire and increasingly frenetic world. So, while I can play a concerto, compose a sonnet, cure a pork belly, repair a pocket watch, restore a fountain pen, landscape a garden, tune a car (or a piano, for that matter), cook a goose, shoot an arrow, renovate a kitchen, arrange flowers, write a novel, and make beer, I am at best (by my standards) a journeyman in these subjects, and far from expert.

Unfortunately, generalization is not a valuable commodity in today’s world. Where once being a “Renaissance man” was a thing to be admired, now it is an anomaly, a throwback to an earlier time, anachronistic and useless outside of dinner parties and a guest spot on QI.

Normally, none of this bothers me, but this past year has been a tough go, fraught with missteps and failures, chock-a-block with mediocre results born of my mediocre talents. In many cases, were I to do as my grammar school teachers instructed and simply “apply myself,” I might be able to acquire the expertise needed to achieve my desired goals, be they in the kitchen, in the garden, or in the writing studio.

This isn’t a pity party, though. Nope. Check your sympathy at the door. I don’t need it. Thanks, but no thanks.

I don’t need sympathy because, when I begin to doubt myself like this, it’s because I’m judging myself by yardsticks of others instead of by my own, and that’s a sure sign I need to step back and reevaluate.

I’m a generalist, and I prefer it that way. I just need to come to terms with the ramifications, and remind myself of the advantages that decision brings.

This above all: to thine own self be true…

k

Typewriter

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